Fashion in History: A Global Look

Tutor: Giorgio Riello

Week 8

Tuesday 24 Novembre 2009

THE MAKING OF THE FASHIONABLE CONSUMER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

From previous lectures

Two points have to be underlined:

• The city had been a place of fashion since the middle ages but its role became more prominent

• Court and city should not be seen necessarily as opposites.

1. The Eighteenth-Century Consumer Revolution

- Political Change: The French Revolution

- Economic Change: The Industrial Revolution

- Socio-cultural Change: The Consumer

Revolution

Consumption at all levels of society increased substantially in west Europe in the eighteenth century.

The favourite area of study has been England, although other areas of Europe such as France, Spain and the Netherlands, experienced similar dynamics of change.

N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. Plumb, The birth of a consumer society: the commercialisation of eighteenth century Britain (London, 1982).

1. The Eighteenth-Century Consumer Revolution

1. The Eighteenth-Century Consumer Revolution

The pervasiveness of consumption across the social ladder: the majority of people started consuming not just ‘necessities’ but also small luxuries, ‘niceties’,

J. Thirsk , Economic Policy and Projects. The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England(Oxford: Clarendon 1978).

Fashion is central in McKendrick’s idea of a consumer revolution.

According to McKendrick, fashion was generated by the aesthetic choice and taste of the elite and

‘filtered’ down (trickle down) the social hierarchy

through a process of aping.

1. The Eighteenth-Century Consumer Revolution

Fashionable Elite

Imitators

Thorstein Veblen,The Theory of the Leisured Class (1899).

The emergence of modern consumption

Emulation/social (McKendrick)

Desires/individual wants (Lorna Weatherill)

1. The Eighteenth-Century Consumer Revolution

Beauty and Fashion. Mezzotint. c. 1790.

The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University,

797.1.24.1

2. The Consumer Experience

- The Elite: aristocracy and beau monde

- Rising middle class (‘middling classes’)

- The working class (‘plebeian classes’) and the poor

2. The Consumer Experience

                      Following the Fashion: St. James's giving... By James Gillray

A Family of Three at Dinner, attr. Richard Collins. Oil on canvas, c. 1727. 64.2 x 76.3 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, P.9&:1-1934

The role of Accessories

- Fine and Leopold

Concept of ‘populuxe’

- Cissie Fairchilds

Textile Samples and Fashion Plates from album of Barbara Johnson (1736-1825). Victoria and Albert Museum, Picture Library EE015561-01.

Barbara Johnson’s album provides a unique testimony of the dress taste of an English women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

The concept of ‘Involuntary Consumers’

John Styles, ‘Custom or Consumption? Plebeian Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 103-18.   HC 500.L8

John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London, 2007).

2. The Consumer Experience

William Beechey, Portrait of Sir Francis Ford’s Children Giving a Coin to a Begger Boy, 1793. Tate Gallery, London

3. The Culture of Fashion: Places and Media of Consumption

William Hogarth, The Rake's Progress: 2. The Rake's Levée 1734. Oil on canvas. Sir John Soane's Museum, London

Late eighteenth-century French fashion plate

‘the assistance of those in the country who, as they have not the opportunities of seeing the originals, may dress by the figure’

‘Habit of a Lady’ in The Ladies Magazine, 1759

4. Shopping in the Eighteenth Century

An eighteenth-century shop front

Apple’s shop in NY

Peddlers or Itinerant traders L. Fontaine, History of peddlers in Europe (Cambridge, 1996).

Covent Garden was built in London in the 1640s as a market with shops under the portico

Gersaint’s Shop Sign, by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Oil on CanvasSchloss Charlottenburg, Berlin-Brandenburg

Claire Walsh, ‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design History, 8/3 (1995), pp. 157-176. 

 

“the fine shops, which jut out at both sides of the front doors like big, broad oriels, having fine large window-panes, behind which wares are displayed, so that shops look far more elegant than those in Paris”

Sophie Von La Roche, Sophie in London (1789) (published 1933).

Messrs Harding Howell and Co (1810)

A shoemaker’s shop, c. 1808

François Boucher, La Marchande de modes, 1746

5. Shopping and Marketing

Going into at least twenty shops, having a thousand things shown to us which we do not wish to buy, in fact turning the whole shop upside down and, in the end, perhaps leaving without purchasing anything. It

is impossible to admire sufficiently the patience of the shopkeepers, who endure this nonsense without even

dreaming of showing annoyance.

J. Schopenhauer, A lady travels in England and Scotland (English ed. 1988 [1803]), p. 151.

5. Shopping and Marketing

Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, ‘Commerce and the Commodity: Graphic Display and Selling New Consumer Goods in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Michael North and David Ormrod (eds.), Art Markets in Europe, 1400-1800 (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 187-200. N 8600.A7

Trade Cards John Johnson collection of trade cards onlinehttp://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/johnson/johnson.htm

Conclusion

What do we mean by an 18th-century ‘consumer revolution’?

- what people bought- how (for instance shops) - how fashion was represented (magazines, plates).