This remarkable, groundbreaking volume is the result of sustained collaboration between seventeen established scholars and postdoctoral researchers from a variety of disciplines involving fashion and the history of dress. It marks the culmination of a three-year cross-European research project, “Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800,” in which global historians, museum curators, art and design historians, textile conservators, and field archaeologists investigated how fashion ideas were created and disseminated in early modern Europe through diverse mediums (published prints, early newspapers, gazettes, pattern books, and furniture designs) and diverse means (tailors, weavers, merchants, manufacturers, furniture and ceramic designers). Rarely have I read a group of case studies as compellingly presented as these. The excitement and process of discovery jump off the page. Each of the twelve essays is the product of many years of individual research and of thinking in common, whereby theory, method, and material object assemble in a complex design. Meticulously edited by Evelyn Welch, art historian and specialist in Renaissance material culture, with a keen eye for clarity of style and conformity of presentation, the essays impart a large amount of information without overburdening the reader, specialist and nonspecialist alike. Each begins with central research questions and theories that challenge assumptions of previous scholarship and concludes by reiterating questions informed by new evidence. Footnotes are extensive and reflect research conducted in multiple languages and geographic locations.
This is interdisciplinary work at its finest. The authors debate long-held theories about fashion innovation and creativity, and put new ones to the test when uniting archival and historical findings with material objects. The theoretical positions on fashion innovation and dissemination they advance include fashion as a cycle or a process of change rather than a static affirmation of an individual or social identity; fashion as a preprogrammed temporal and seasonal system, or annual fashion cycle, created together by manufacturer, designer, and artisan, and promoted in print periodicals; fashion as the preserve not only of the elite but also, with the use of different and less expensive materials and textiles, of broader sections of the population; fashion as benefiting rather than suffering from economic and political regulations; and fashion as closely connected to a world of print that includes printed textiles, ceramics, painted glass, and inlaid furniture. The overall aim is to produce new directions in research rather than dwell on divisiveness among scholarly methods.
The volume is constructed with a twofold approach. Part 1 focuses on “Innovation” and part 2 on “Reputation and Dissemination.” The first challenges the claim that guilds or restrictive regulatory regimes stagnate innovation and changes in dress design and that consumption depends exclusively on ostentation, elite consumers, and the use of technologically complex materials. The second expands on the first by addressing how certain fashions acquire profitable reputations and expansive networks of dissemination.
Evelyn Welch frames the volume by asking provocative questions in her informative introduction about how fashion, when connected to novelty and innovation, occasions diverse reactions in groups of people and countries, ranging from the desire to imitate by creating barriers or the desire to resist by stimulating the production of local versions. Why, she asks, when thinking ahead to the authors’ essays, did the ruff go in and out of use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Why did men from Spain to Sweden adopt wigs around 1660 and then drop them from use fifty years later? How did manufacturers and merchants encourage and respond to changing demands for new cuts, styles, and colored and printed textiles? And why did certain “fashions fail to achieve a cross-European adoption” (7)?
While part 1 concentrates on fashion as a process involving interrelated mechanisms and agents in its manufacture, dissemination, and trade, part 2 focuses on widening the very notion of what is fashion by examining a large spectrum of objects in movement throughout Europe that achieve reputations and channels of their own dissemination. Authors argue the necessity to explore the relationship between fashion and the mobility of print, particularly in the eighteenth century, by redefining print itself as encompassing printed textiles, ceramics, painted glass, and inlaid furniture for knowledge about fashionable trends. Consumers, they argue, received knowledge about fashion from an interrelated nexus of printed forms, ephemera, and the decorative arts (teapots, handkerchiefs, terra-cotta statuettes, serving trays, among others) that depicted images of fashionable dress, caricatures about fashionable excess, and accessories translated from one medium into the other.
The essays in part 2 investigate the important roles and activities of shopkeepers, the periodical press, designers, retailers, textile merchants, tailors, and manufacturers in France, Denmark, Sweden, and colonial Greenland in the creation, marketing, and selling of innovative fashions to an ever-expanding geographic network of clients and suppliers. Fashion agents’ innovative creations were uninhibited by regulations of production and were disseminated to all social registers. All the essays challenge the notion that fashion is associated with a rapidly changing elite culture that slowly trickled down the social scale. The rapid movement of fashionable goods—now conceived as more than clothes—between different social groups, periods, and geographic settings facilitates how both genders understand and translate fashion.
Nine objects are interspersed throughout the volume in sections called “Object in Focus.” The objects (an eighteenth-century robe à l’anglaise retroussée, a mouche or beauty patch, an eighteenth-century English campaign wig, a miniature suit, a fan, a knitted sugar-loaf hat, a cinnamon case, and a man’s banyan) are exquisitely photographed, and are described in succinct, well-presented paragraphs based on close and specialized observation. Originating from a huge geographic region—Greenland, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Britain, Italy, and France—they reveal lines of communication and dissemination bridging Southern and Northern Europe, and provide fascinating material support for each author’s research findings.
This is a beautiful book, illustrated with numerous well-chosen color images not widely known or previously published. A related website accompanies the volume with further images (www.fashioningtheearlymodern.ac.uk), and a list of resources and bibliography add to what is already an immensely useful bibliography on early modern textiles and dress. An invaluable resource for anyone interested in the changing landscape of fashion and material studies in Europe from 1500–1800, this volume synthesizes the many scholarly advances in fashion and textile history and material culture of the past decade and proposes fascinating new materials and theoretical approaches that will lead the way for future studies.
