Dressing à la Turque: Ottoman Influence on French Fashion, 1670-1800
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About this ebook
Exploring the significant influences of Turkish dress on French fashion
While French fashion has historically set the bar across the Western world, the cultural influences that inspired it are often obscured. Dressing à la Turque examines the theatrical depictions of Ottoman costumes, or Turkish dress, and demonstrates the French fascination for this foreign culture and its clothing. The impact, however, went far beyond costumes worn for art and theater, as Ottoman-inspired fashions became the most prominent and popular themes in French women’s fashion throughout the 18th century.
The newly invented fashion press used Ottoman-inspired styles to reconcile fashion consumption with Enlightenment dress reforms. At the same time, Turkish-inspired fashions were increasingly associated with long-criticized ideas about luxury, stereotypes about the connection between a woman’s interest in fashion and “lascivious” behavior, and French perceptions of the Ottoman Empire. This backlash is epitomized by the public criticism of Queen Marie-Antoinette, who popularized Turkish-inspired fashion, embraced a lifestyle of excess, and is still remembered for her singular sense of style.
Kendra Van Cleave includes numerous detailed images and dress patterns, enhancing her rich discussion of French styles during this important era.Related to Dressing à la Turque
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Dressing à la Turque - Kendra Van Cleave
Dressing à la Turque
COSTUME SOCIETY OF AMERICA
BOOK SERIES
EDITOR
Jennifer Mower
EDITORIAL BOARD
Linda Baumgarten
Jean L. Druesedow
Rebecca Jumper-Matheson
Darnell-Jamal Lisby
Jean L. Parsons
Sarah J. Rogers
Arti Sandhu
Casey Stannard
The Costume Society of America book series includes works on all subjects related to the history and future of fashion, dress, costume, appearance and adornment, including historical research, current issues, curatorial topics, contemporary design and construction practices, and conservation techniques. These books range from scholarly to more general interest and vary widely in format as well, from primarily textual to heavily illustrated. The series embraces a variety of specialties, including anthropology and cross-cultural studies, contemporary fashion issues, textiles, museums and exhibits, research methods, performance, and craft or fashion design.
Dressing à la
Turque
Ottoman Influence on French
Fashion, 1670–1800
KENDRA VAN CLEAVE
The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
© 2023 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-60635-459-9
Published in the United States of America
Portions of this book were previously published as:
Van Cleave, Kendra. The Lévite Dress: Untangling the Cultural Influences of Eighteenth-Century French Fashion.
The Social Fabric: Deep Local to Pan Global; Proceedings of the Textile Society of America 16th Biennial Symposium, January 1, 2018. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/1119.
Van Cleave, Kendra. Contextualizing Wertmüller’s 1785 Portrait of Marie-Antoinette through Dress.
Costume 54, no. 1 (2020): 56–80.
Van Cleave, Kendra. ‘The Desire to Banish Any Constraint in Clothing’: Turquerie and Enlightenment Thought in the French Fashion Press, 1768–1790.
French Historical Studies 43, no. 2 (April 1, 2020): 197–221.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
27 26 25 24 23 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Clothing Perspectives, East and West
2 Western and Eastern Approaches to Dress
3 Defining Ottoman Influence, 1760–90
4 Fashion and National Identity
5 Turquerie, Enlightenment Thought, and the French Fashion Press
6 Marie-Antoinette à la Turque
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Other Ottoman-Influenced Styles, 1775–92
Appendix 2: Extant Ottoman-Inspired Garments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks go to my research/writing group for their support and encouragement, particularly Brenna Barks, Trystan L. Bass, J. Leia Lima Baum, Dr. Carolyn Dowdell, and Lisa VandenBerghe for their feedback on drafts, and Sabrina Mark for proofreading patterns.
Mela Hoyt-Heydon’s support was instrumental to receiving research funding.
Several colleagues shared their research about certain extant garments with me for which I am deeply grateful, including Dr. Serena Dyer, Dr. Carolyn Dowdell, and Lisa VandenBerghe.
Particular thanks go to Brooke Welborn, whose research intersected with my own and who joined me in writing a journal article that became the first output for our ideas.
Many museums, libraries, and archives provided research assistance and critical sources, including the Archives départementales des Yvelines, Archives nationales—site Paris, Bibliothèque du Musée des Arts décoratifs, Bibliothèque nationale de France—sites François Mitterrand and Richelieu, Bunka Gakuen University Library, and Victoria & Albert Museum. The interlibrary loan staff of the
J. Paul Leonard Library, San Francisco State University, helped me obtain numerous sources. I am particularly thankful to the museum professionals who assisted me with their collections, including Neal Hurst at Colonial Williamsburg; Dr. Johannes Pietsch of the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum; David E. Ned Lazaro at Historic Deerfield Museum; Shelley Tobin at Killerton (National Trust); Anne de Thoisy-Dallem and Marie Olivier at the Musée de la Toile de Jouy; Karine Rodriguez at the Musée d’Histoire de Marseille; Chiara Squarcina and Luigi Zanini at the Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo; Dr. Marianne Larsson at the Nordiska Museet; and Pascale Gorguet-Ballesteros and Sylvie Brun at the Palais Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris.
I was honored to receive funding to support this research from several sources, including research travel grants from the Costume Society of America, Design History Society, San Francisco State University, and Society of Antiquaries London. San Francisco State University provided a sabbatical leave. The Costume Society of America granted funds for image licensing.
Several chapters were revised from published journal articles and symposium proceedings, and I am grateful to the editors of the journals Costume and French Historical Studies, as well as the Textile Society of American Symposium Proceedings, for permission to republish.
I would like to thank illustrator Michael Fleming for his illustrations and graphics (the map, charts, and technical drawings).
My family supported me emotionally and logistically over the many years I spent researching and writing this book, especially Michael and Laraine. I couldn’t have done it without you.
INTRODUCTION
No one can deny that our French Ladies make the Ladies of almost all other Kingdoms adopt their fashions; however, we must agree that these [fashions] are almost always exchanges. Have they [French women] not borrowed, in less than two years, Polish, English, Turkish, Chinese [dress]? Today they borrow the Spanish [dress]. It is true that they improve these styles; & even, strictly speaking, they do not borrow anything but the names, & they give things [in return]. When they copy, they correct, they embellish. When they imitate, they create. Of a too inventive imagination, too helpful to slavishly follow their models, they seize it, they shape it. They become, in a word, the masters of their authors. This talent shines in today’s Spanish hats & bonnets, as it shone in robes à la Polonoise, in English hats, in Turkish bonnets, & in the poufs à la Chinoise.
—Magasin des modes
French dominance in the fashion world is rarely questioned, particularly in the early modern period. From the seventeenth century, cutting-edge clothing designs originated at the court of Louis XIV (1638–1715), then filtered out across Europe. However, those French styles did not exist in a national vacuum. When the Magasin des modes (Magazine of fashion) proclaimed that Frenchwomen’s particular genius was taking the fashions of other countries, improving and embellishing them, then exporting them back to their native lands, it was observing the exoticism that had underscored French fashion for the past hundred years or more. While French style did indeed set the bar across Europe, what is too frequently obscured is the extent to which it was based in small or large part on dress from the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia—principally the Ottoman Empire.
From the late seventeenth century, French culture became increasingly obsessed with all things oriental,
as objects and ideas that were associated with the East came to represent luxury, comfort, and a worldly sense of style. Advances in communication and transportation meant that Middle Eastern, North African, and Asian things—material goods like textiles and coffee, but also concepts like stories, fashions, and home decor—became wildly popular across France. These Eastern things were embraced across class and geography: as imports grew and locally made copies abounded, they became part of the daily lives of not just the elites but also the bourgeois and working classes, including those living in the provinces. By the eighteenth century, Eastern commodities, designs, and references were fundamental to everyday life in France, where they were adapted and given new cultural associations, then exported to other Western European countries.
This obsession was focused on the Ottoman Empire, due in large part to its geographic proximity and comparatively open trading and diplomatic policies. Regions like India, China, Japan, and the Americas fascinated the French, but Ottoman culture was most accessible and thus became the model for all things exotic. Furthermore, although goods from farther east could move by sea, many still arrived overland through the Ottoman Empire and in so doing acquired Turkish connotations. Over time, what were called oriental
references were integrated into French culture through architecture, decorative arts, fashion, food, literature, painting, and theater. In dress, beginning with the seventeenth-century trend for lounging clothing worn at home, which transformed into dress suitable for public wear (what we might today call street wear
), fashionable female dress was based in part on Turkish approaches to garment cut and design (Ottoman clothing affected men’s dress as well, but this is harder to document in this period).¹ French women began wearing Westernized versions of Middle Eastern caftans for both informal and formal wear, upending at least two centuries of an approach to dress founded on structured garments and complex pattern shapes.
This is not to say French women abandoned all Western dress precepts in the early modern period. As Eastern-inspired dressing gowns were turned into fashionable garments, their cuts and fits were refined and Westernized (and they received new, specialized names, some pointing to their foreign origins, others demonstrating just how profoundly they were considered French). Furthermore, despite their relaxed impression—what was called négligé or deshabillé, meaning comfortable, informal dress—any ensemble worn outside the home was done so over boned stays and, for most of the period, hoops or pads, creating an artificial understructure that reshaped the body’s contours and created the controlled body deemed essential to Western ideas of female self-presentation. Moreover, numerous themes and artistic movements influenced dress in this era, including Rococo, chinoiserie, paysannerie, Anglomania, the troubadour style, and neoclassicism, as well as political events and themes such as ambassadorial visits, internal French politics, and the American and French revolutions.² French dress was a cross-cultural mélange, and the desire was to embrace and mix rather than separate and demarcate. Nonetheless, when it came to women’s fashion, Ottoman influences were the strongest motif from about 1670 through 1780, and these continued to be significant in subsequent decades.
Thus, from the late seventeenth century through the mid-1780s, most garments worn by middling and upper-class French women were either based on, or incorporated significant influences from, the dress of the Ottoman Empire or areas under its cultural influence. Scholars have documented this phenomenon through the mid-eighteenth century, but the impact that Ottoman dress continued to have on French women’s fashion in later decades has thus far been comparatively less explored. Certainly, research demonstrates the massive popularity of faux-Turkish costumes in portraiture and masquerade, as well as clothing worn by Western travelers to the Ottoman Empire. However, from the 1760s through the mid-1780s, Turkish dress continued to be the dominant influence in French fashion, which has thus far been underestimated. This is partly due to this period’s proliferation of styles, which has complicated historians’ ability to untangle their specifics. Nonetheless, in an era when French fashion was obsessed with (inter)national signage, popular modes at the end of the century continued to incorporate Ottoman elements, an understanding of which is necessary to fully comprehend French culture. As Barbara Lasic declares, French fashions in the early modern period cannot be understood outside of the global commercial networks of exchanges between Europe and the rest of the world.
³
In this book, I argue that Turkish dress had decided impacts on French women’s fashion, far beyond costume,
in the eighteenth century’s last decades, and this trend was an important precursor to the English and neoclassical trends. This fascination with the Ottoman Empire manifested in what scholars call "turquerie," Turkish-focused Orientalism, as information about the Empire’s dress was disseminated through ambassadorial visits, travel writings, art, masquerades, and theater, reaching large numbers of French people across class and geography. The Turkish-inspired fashions that resulted in the late eighteenth century have been underestimated in terms of their popularity and cultural impact. These originated in the late seventeenth-century enthusiasm for Eastern dressing gowns, which were introduced for private lounging wear but quickly became fashionable everyday dress and formed the basis for the leading modes of the early and mid-eighteenth century. Fashion publications, artworks, extant garments, and published and personal writings prove that Ottoman-inspired fashions, particularly the robes à la polonaise (Polish-style dress), circassienne (Circassian), turque (Turkish), and lévite (Levite), were immensely popular in the 1760s through the 1780s, differed substantially from other styles, and demonstrate real connections to Ottoman dress. Style mixing and naming practices reveal the fluidity of national and cultural identity, and a talent for adapting and blending these was considered fundamental to the French national character. These Turkish-inspired styles had a relationship with Enlightenment fashion ideas that in some ways mimicked, and in others diverged from, rhetoric around English and neoclassical themes; all three should be understood as an interrelated continuum. Finally, Queen Marie-Antoinette’s wardrobe further demonstrates the complicated cultural ideas associated with these fashions, which were connected to long-criticized ideas about luxury and female sexuality. As the century ended, English, patriotic, and neoclassical themes predominated in French fashion. Nonetheless, styles with Turkish names and aesthetics continued to proliferate. The impact of Ottoman clothing on French women’s dress in the late eighteenth century is greater and farther reaching than most scholars have concluded, demonstrating that this fundamental aspect of daily life served as a site of important dialogue about, and with, Eastern perspectives.
FASHION AND IDENTITY
In this work, fashion and dress refer to the clothes, accessories, and other elements of self-presentation and self-decoration such as hairstyles or cosmetics worn by individuals, as well as the changing style cycle communally adopted, adapted, and abandoned. As Daniel Roche explains, Fashion exists at the intersection of the fact of dressing, which an individual can launch and generalise within the clothing system where it becomes common property, and the fact of clothing generalised in a manner of dressing and reproduced on the collective scale.
⁴ Costume refers to the garments and other elements of self-presentation/self-decoration used to resemble someone or something else, particularly for art, masquerade, theater, or entertainment. Scholars are proving both are an excellent lens through which to study societies and cultures. First, fashion is critical to an individual’s self-presentation and social definition: whether consciously or subconsciously, individuals and groups use dress to construct, communicate, and negotiate social and cultural identity. Second, dress is a global trade commodity, and a prime example of how things
facilitate cross-cultural interchange and adaptation, a process that began long before the modern era.
The garments we wear—their materials, cut, construction, decoration, and wearing modes—allow the sending and receiving of nonverbal messages creating, to varying degrees, instantaneous understandings of ourselves and others as individuals and members of groups.⁵ At a glance, dress communicates basic identity categories, whether those are age, class, gender, ethnicity, cultural or national background, occupation, and more.⁶ These ideas are well encapsulated by Terence Turner’s term social skin, which he uses to indicate how the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well . . . Dress and bodily adornment constitute one such cultural medium, perhaps the one most specialised in the shaping and communication of personal and social identity.
⁷ Joanne Eicher and Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins define the term dress not only as an assemblage of body modifications and/or supplements displayed by a person
but also stress that this is in communicating with other human beings.
⁸
Dress not only reflects identity, but also facilitates conscious and subconscious choices about self-presentation and self-fashioning. Dress constructs collective identity; according to Patrizia Calefato, it creates social imagery,
allowing a community to coalesce through a series of small, yet significant bonds.
⁹ Diana Crane maintains it is one of the most visible markers of social status and gender. . . . Clothing is an indication of how people in different eras have perceived their positions in social structures and negotiated status boundaries.
¹⁰ Individuals can choose among different garments and styles to both identify with and separate from larger communities, using what Adam Geczy terms clothing’s lived, performative intent . . . in asserting personality and identity.
¹¹
Geczy argues that as the concept of fashion
as a changing cycle arose in seventeenth-century France, it became fundamentally linked with perception and role-play—the understanding and conscious manipulation of identities—within that culture, and this idea holds true in the subsequent century.¹² Of course, strong social and cultural forces shape the range of identity statements available as well as their reception.¹³ Susan B. Kaiser explains fashion is a social process of negotiation and navigation
that involves becoming collectively with others.
¹⁴ These important functions are often disregarded given fashion’s associations with surface, which can be interpreted as insubstantial or unimportant. Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick argue dress is a "deep surface, a system of signs that fundamentally relies on superficial modes of signification for the purposes of expressing the underlying beliefs of a given culture and the character of the subjects fostered therein."¹⁵ In addition, the long-standing gendering of fashion as feminine means it has frequently been disregarded as unworthy of deeper reflection due to the devaluing of women’s lives and interests.¹⁶
Dress is illuminating in cross-cultural studies because for centuries, textiles and garments have traveled between regions, countries, and continents, both as individual consumer goods and as ideas and information. Geczy contends that the signs of nation, identity and novelty . . . are nowhere more evident
than in fashion and dress.¹⁷ Historically, clothing may have been usually built locally, but textiles, dyes, and other materials were often imported from around the world.¹⁸ Furthermore, stories, images, garments, and other representations of dress have long served as ambassadors between cultures and nations. As fashion goods travel, they bring not only their material self and commercial value but also exotic associations.¹⁹ Alexander Bevilacqua and Helen Pfeifer argue, Goods, practices and ideas were inextricably linked.
²⁰ These are adopted, adapted, and recontextualized as they travel, speaking equally about the cultures into which they are incorporated as those from which they originated and creating a negotiable space.
Fashion’s cross-cultural references are complex. Fred Davis cautions that signifiers may be similar across a given culture, but their meaning can differ depending on the audience, arguing dress allows for registering the culturally anchored ambivalences that resonate within and among identities.
²¹ Several scholarly methodologies are employed in this book to parse these ambivalences. Consumption studies focuses on how the act of consuming goods, ideas, stories, allusions, and aesthetics is key to identity formation.²² In thing theory,
a strand of material culture studies, scholars argue that artifacts can be understood only through the world view of the cultures that encountered (made, used, traded, discussed, imagined) them, and multiple readings of these meanings are valid.²³ In dress history, the analysis of extant garments is increasingly deemed important.²⁴
Edward Said’s seminal book, Orientalism, lays the groundwork for understanding how the Western world created a fictional Orient
as Europe’s fundamental Other.
Said articulates how the idea of an imagined Orient intensified a sense of self for the West by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away.
²⁵ Looking specifically at the eighteenth century, scholars are building on, countering, and adding nuance to Said’s arguments, demonstrating how foreign things
played consequential roles in identity formation. For example, Julia Landweber establishes that French people used Ottoman masquerade costumes to experiment with personal and national identities without political or psychological risk, so much so that Turkish goods and ideas became an important tool in shaping individual identities in France and perhaps even in crafting a general vision of the French national character.
²⁶ Meanwhile, Nebahat Avcıoğlu’s study of architecture in this period demonstrates how Ottoman references helped to define and mark Otherness.
²⁷
Geczy identifies three core processes by which Orientalism enters fashion: assimilation, improvement, adoption and influence,
which generally occurs unconsciously; masquerade, repatriation or reidentification,
where wearing the Other’s costume affords temporary release from social restrictions,
and inflection, inspiration, tokenism and galvanization,
whereby Orientalism becomes a political tool for separating from the norm.²⁸ All three processes were at work in late eighteenth-century French fashion: conscious masquerade (Turkish costume worn for a masquerade, portrait, or on stage) combined with tokenism (adopting a style or element and calling it Turkish) led to conscious and unconscious assimilation and influence.²⁹ Fashion thus provides a lens through which to study this period’s fascination with the Ottoman Empire specifically, and exoticism more generally, revealing strong themes of preoccupation with and ambivalence about national and cultural identity, and demonstrating when and how cultural appropriation and amalgamation became central to eighteenth-century French culture.
GEOGRAPHIC TERMINOLOGY
Geographic nomenclature is perhaps problematic in any cross-cultural study. On the one hand, countries such as France and the Ottoman Empire had their political boundaries and can be appropriately named as such. Similarly, land masses such as Anatolia—the peninsula extending into the Black and Mediterranean seas, located within the modern country of Turkey—as well as the Asian continent are relatively clearly defined, although the boundary between Asia and Europe is debatable. However, geographic terms like East or Middle East introduce an inherently Eurocentric perspective. East implies it is not the central reference point, thus creating an Orientalist distinction between Us (Europe) and Other.³⁰ Certainly Orient and Oriental are passé for modern scholarship but replacing them with Middle East or Near East still implies Europe’s centrality.³¹ Furthermore, these terms are ambiguous about which countries and regions are included. Asia and its subdivisions could be more appropriate, but these do not correspond to the entire Ottoman Empire, much of which existed on the continents of Europe and Africa.
On the other hand, this book considers how French people understood the Ottomans specifically and, more broadly, areas commonly referred to today as the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, as well as Asia. Furthermore, countries and regions including most of the Ottoman Empire, as well as Hungary, Poland, Russia, China, India, and Japan, were indeed located east of France, and, to an eighteenth-century French perspective, were culturally similar in significant ways. Thus, while acknowledging the inherent Eurocentric bias of these words, I will use the terms East, Middle East, and Eastern Europe to name geographic areas in groupings that align with the eighteenth-century French world view and are understandable for modern readers. East refers to a loose and shifting definition of countries and regions to France’s east that were considered non-European, including the Ottoman Empire, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and the entire Asian continent. Middle East denotes the Ottoman Empire as well as Persia; this omits specifying North Africa for brevity’s sake. Finally, Eastern Europe refers to Hungary, Poland, western Russia, and the Balkans area of southeastern Europe (see list below). I hope that by investigating cross-cultural interchanges, historical understandings of geography can be better understood in all their complexity.
Fig. 1. The Ottoman Empire was primarily to the east of France, and included territories in Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa. (Illustration by Michael Fleming.)
It is also important to note eighteenth-century French perspectives on geography and national origin within the Ottoman Empire specifically. The political entity that was the Ottoman Empire in this era included not just modern Turkey but also all or parts of the following modern-day countries (Fig. 1):
Eastern Mediterranean:
• Jordan
• Lebanon
• Iraq
• Israel
• Palestine
• Saudi Arabia
• Syria
• Yemen
Northern Africa:
• Algeria
• Egypt
• Libya
• Tunisia
Southeastern Europe:
• Albania
• Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Bulgaria
• Cyprus
• Greece
• Moldova
• Montenegro
• Romania
• Russia and Ukraine (specifically the Crimean region)
• Serbia
However, eighteenth-century French people frequently included independent countries and regions that were under some degree of Ottoman influence in their ideas of the Empire, particularly Hungary, Poland, and western Russia. Furthermore, the terms Ottoman and Turkey or Turkish were used interchangeably, while a Turk was any Ottoman or Muslim living within or without the Empire.³² Thus, any usage of Ottoman or Turkish in this book should be understood to be a flexible definition. Finally, the eastern Mediterranean region was often called Levant, a term dating back to sixteenth-century France that derives from the French word for rising, as in lying in the direction of the rising sun.³³
FASHION IN FRENCH CULTURE
From the late seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, France was the acknowledged fashion leader of Western Europe.³⁴ During the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715), French society centered on the court of Versailles and the urban center of Paris. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the king’s finance minister, encouraged luxury manufacturing and purchasing, while Louis played an important role as style-setter.³⁵ In an era of conspicuous consumption, as Aileen Ribeiro writes, a sense of the subtleties and nuances of existence [were] expressed in the right choice of dress.
³⁶ Luxury goods, including fashion, were markers of elite status and critical to expressing taste and wealth.³⁷
However, the exponential growth of consumption in this period meant that by the early eighteenth century, a substantial bourgeois class had ready money and thus access to consumer goods.³⁸ Furthermore, after Louis XIV’s death in 1715, sumptuary law relaxation encouraged access to fashionable dress for rapidly growing numbers of people across social classes, while technology and transportation advances were making these goods more affordable.³⁹ Over the course of the eighteenth century, production and consumption grew astronomically, meaning exponentially more people from an ever-widening class spectrum could purchase an increasing number of products with significantly more choice.⁴⁰
These shifts affected dress: rising numbers of middle- and working-class people participated in a growing fashion system, expanding not only the number of items purchased but also the amount of consideration for personal preference in clothing selection.⁴¹ The size and value of wardrobes grew exponentially among the bourgeois and working classes, and even in rural communities, consumers sought innovation.⁴² Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell argues that between more effective means of spreading fashion information, a flourishing market in secondhand clothes, and advances in manufacturing and trade that lowered clothing’s cost, Fashion was available to all and desired by all.
⁴³
Significantly, fashion—goods as well as information about new and changing styles—was a topic of growing social interest. For one thing, the style leaders were changing. In the seventeenth century, fashion had been the elite’s realm, and those outside who could participate did so mostly through imitation. However, in the eighteenth century, a new fashion culture focused on Paris developed in which marchandes de modes (female merchants who were primarily responsible for designing, trimming, and accessorizing ensembles), actresses, courtesans, and those who had the funds to be au courant joined the royalty and aristocracy in defining what was fashionable.⁴⁴
Another important development in this era was the gendering of fashion production and consumption. Parisian seamstresses gained independent guild status in 1675 with the right to make most of women’s and children’s wardrobes; previously, dressmaking had been the province of male tailors, at least officially.⁴⁵ Clare Haru Crowston demonstrates how increasing numbers of women were employed in the dress trades at cheap rates, while women’s fashion consumption grew; both trends meant dress became increasingly feminized in a way that overshadowed class distinctions.⁴⁶ Meanwhile, Jennifer Jones argues that as fashion became a female occupation and therefore a female concern, it was trivialized in a way that obscured its meanings.⁴⁷
In this period, French people were increasingly conscious that dress contributed to the construction of social identities.⁴⁸ Enlightenment philosophes debated and deconstructed connections between appearance and identity, arguing over which garments and styles were most physically and morally beneficial and would therefore contribute to an ideal society. By the 1770s, these concepts had achieved widespread popularity across French society, leading to a growing desire for naturalism and egalitarianism in appearance that had real effects on fashion.⁴⁹ Meanwhile, the rate of fashion change—new styles introduced, old styles abandoned—exponentially increased in the century’s last decades, something both obvious to contemporaries and a matter of concern.⁵⁰ Chrisman-Campbell argues this quickening pace was caused by innovations resulting from the relaxation of the guild system; manufacturing, transportation, and communication advances; and, most importantly for this study, the development of fashion magazines.⁵¹
THE FRENCH FASHION PRESS
French print culture expanded dramatically in the eighteenth century.⁵² Before the mid-1770s, people tended to learn about fashion trends from shops, traveling merchants, tailors and seamstresses, and social acquaintances.⁵³ Annual almanacs illustrated with fashion plates reached a large audience, but quickly went out of date.⁵⁴ Numerous short-lived attempts at fashion periodicals dated back to the seventeenth century and included Le Courrier français (The French courier, 1649), Le Muse historique (The historical muse, 1658–59), and Le Cabinet des nouvellistes (The office of novelists, 1728). The leader in these efforts was the Mercure de France (Mercury of France, 1672–1791), which through 1731 published intermittent articles on Parisian elite dress, as well as entirely fashion-focused, semiannual issues called Extraordinaire.⁵⁵ Almost three decades later, the short-lived Feuille nécessaire (Necessary sheet, 1759) and L’Avant-coureur (The forerunner, 1760–69) revived these attempts.
However, it was not until the late 1770s that the fashion press really established itself (due, in large part, to tax reforms) enough to have a major impact on French society.⁵⁶ The Courrier de la mode ou le Journal du goût, Ouvrage périodique, contenant le détail de toutes les nouveautés du mois (Courier of fashion or the journal of taste, periodical work, containing the details of all the novelties of the month, 1768–70) was the first magazine to focus solely on fashion, but it lasted only two years. The Monument du costume, a series of twelve fashion prints accompanied by short narratives, was an important source of fashion information when it was published in 1776, with another series published in 1783.⁵⁷ However, it was more focused on social mores than the newest trends. With the publication of the Gallerie des modes et costumes français, dessinés d’après nature, Gravés par les plus Célèbres Artistes en ce genre, et colorés avec le plus grand soin par Madame Le Beau (Gallery of French fashions and costumes, drawn from nature, engraved by the most famous artists of this genre, and colored with the greatest care by Madame Le Beau), regular fashion updates reached a small but influential audience.⁵⁸ The Gallerie was not technically a magazine but rather a series of fashion plates accompanied by detailed descriptions released irregularly but frequently as cahiers (notebooks) from 1778 until 1787.⁵⁹ Finally, beginning with the semimonthly Cabinet des modes, ou les Modes nouvelles, décrites d’une manière claire & précise, & représentées par des planches en tailledouce, enluminées (Office of fashion, or new fashions, described in a clear & precise manner, & represented by intaglio plates, illuminated, 1785–86), fashion magazines as we would understand them today—fashion plates with detailed descriptions, as well as texts reporting what was in style and out—began publication.⁶⁰ The Cabinet was followed by the Magasin des modes nouvelles, françaises et anglaises, décrites d’une manière claire & précise, & représentées par des planches en taille-douce, enluminées (Shop of new fashions, French and English, described in a clear & precise manner, & represented by intaglio plates, illuminated, 1787–89), then the Journal de la mode et du goût, ou Amusemens du salon et de la toilette (Journal of fashion and taste, or amusements of the salon and the dressing process, 1790–93).⁶¹ The Revolution interrupted fashion publishing for several years, but the industry resumed with the Journal des dames et des modes (Journal of women and fashion, 1797–1839), Tableau général du goût, des modes et costumes de Paris, par une société d’artistes et gens de lettres (General table of taste, fashions and costumes of Paris, by a society of artists and men of letters, 1797–99), and L’Arlequin, ou Tableau des modes et des goûts (The harlequin, or table of fashions and tastes, 1798–99).⁶²
The fashion press had several important effects on French culture. For one, it promoted the idea that styles were continuously changing, inventing new details, terminology, and other reasons for women to update their wardrobes.⁶³ As fashion was considered to be an important record of contemporary tastes, editors attempted to capture what was actually being worn in Paris and spread that information to readers in the provinces and other countries.⁶⁴ In fact, Caroline Rimbault’s study found that bourgeois and provincial women were more likely to subscribe to these kind of exclusively female publications than Parisian noblewomen, who tended to join their spouses in subscribing to costly