Review

Reviewed Work(s):
The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the "ancien régime."
by Daniel Roche and Jean Birrell
Review by: Jennifer M. Jones
Source: The William and Mary Quarterly , Jan., 1996, Vol. 53, No. 1, Material Culture in
Early America (Jan., 1996), pp. 188-190
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

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i88 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

phy-here adroitly updated by Nina E. Lerman-but also one of Hindle's

essential arguments, that technology "belongs very close to the center . . . of
the American experience" (p. 67). One way to make that claim stick is to
define technology so broadly that it includes practically any sort of human
thought or action. But the history of everything, as Leo Marx observed in
another context, is no longer the history of technology, a point Robert C.
Post, the long-time editor of Technology and Culture, reiterates in his wise
essay. So,'besides McGaw's large claim, the boundaries of the history of tech-
nology remain under debate. But even if Hindle and McGaw are right, maybe
no one should expect the proof from a single book, however provocative.

Georgia Institute of Technology BRUCE SINCLAIR

The Culture of clothing: dress and fashion in the "ancien reg

ROCHE. Translated by JEAN BIRRELL. Past and Present Publications. (New
York: Cambridge University Press, I994 [originally published as La Culture
des apparences, i989]. Pp. Xii, 537. $74.95.)

In our postmodern culture, riveted as we are by the interplay among per-

sonal style, identity, and representation, the meanings of clothing and fash-
ion are topics ripe for speculation from a variety of perspectives ranging
from art, history, and anthropology to political theory and psychoanalysis.
The past five years have witnessed a flowering of scholarship on fashion,
from Shari Benstock's and Suzanne Ferriss's edited feminist collection, On
Fashion (New Brunswick, N. J., 1994), to Anne Hollander's suggestive Sex
and Suits (New York, 1994), to Gilles Lipovetsky's controversial Empire of
Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton, I994). Although all of these
works have enlivened the previously moribund field of fashion history, none
can compare with Daniel Roche's The Culture of clothing for rigorous histori-
cal enquiry into the meaning of clothing and the workings of fashion.
Transcending fashion history as narrowly defined by costume historians
and economic historians or as anecdotally invoked by cultural historians,
Roche fuses two important historiographic traditions: Anglo-American stud-
ies of consumer culture and the French history of mentalite. Combining a
breadth reminiscent of Fernand Braudel with an attentiveness to the semi-
otics of culture in the tradition of Roland Barthes, Roche's work provides a
scintillating blend of quantitative, social, and cultural history as he interro-
gates both material culture and representation to create what he calls a
"global history'-across time, place, and class-of the meaning of clothing
in early modern France.
Roche's central narrative focuses on the eighteenth-century consumer rev-
olution that was attended by a slow and unsteady movement from a sartorial
ancien regime to a new "culture of appearances." Analyzing over a thousand
inventories taken after decease, Roche finds a striking change in Parisian
wardrobes between the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XVI. The amount and

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 REVIEWS OF BOOKS i89

value of clothing an individual possessed increased dramatically for all classes;

at the same time, women's consumption of clothing began to surpass men's,
and the difference between the value of the wardrobes of the rich and the
poor increased significantly. Although it is difficult to assess the wardrobes of
the poor or destitute, for whom notaries did not draw up inventories, the pic-
ture emerging from Roche's work suggests a revolution in clothing consump-
tion that included shop girls sporting fresh linen and common soldiers
equipped with modern uniforms, as well as fashionable aristocrats.
In addition to consumption, Roche looks broadly at the Parisian clothing
economy, from dyers and textile manufacturers to the guilds of male tailors
and female dressmakers. This survey of production reveals two different but
linked economies: one, a modern economy driven by profits that mass pro-
duced goods such as cotton textiles; the other, a more traditional economy
based on guilds, privilege, and artisanal production. In addition, Roche
examines distribution; from elite dress merchants to dealers in secondhand
clothes, Roche suggests the ways in which middlemen and women con-
tributed to the clothing revolution.
Although chapters on the underground economy for stolen clothes and
the growing importance of hygiene and cleanliness significantly broaden our
understanding of the workings of the Parisian clothing economy, this section
of the book is less innovative than Roche's path-breaking use of inventories
after decease to explore changing practices of consumption. As Roche con-
cedes, "it is no easy task to study the economic and social processes which
made Paris both the most famous centre of clothes manufacture in Europe
and the place where the empire of distribution simultaneously shaped both a
particular form of commercial capitalism and new aspects of the urban social
personality. The 'Mecca of Fashion' has no proper archives" (p. 268). While
this evaluation is doubtless correct, one is left with the sense that consumer
demand is ultimately more central to Roche's argument than are transforma-
tions in production. As Roche admits, the consumer revolution was well
underway by the late eighteenth century, but major technical and economic
changes in production would not reach their apogee until the second half of
the nineteenth.
In stressing the importance of urban culture and the material practices of
consumption and distribution, Roche calls into question two of the most
important arguments that historians have advanced concerning the spread of
fashionability in the eighteenth century. Although, as has been traditionally
argued, both the bourgeoisie and the absolutist court undoubtedly took part
in the making of the modern culture of fashion, the "major social caesura"
that Roche narrates is a more all-encompassing historical explanation than "a
drama of the bourgeois body" (pp. 509-10) or the civilizing process of the
court. What we need, according to Roche, is "to adopt a more ambitious
approach in order to be able to draw together all the elements of this
profound history of sensibility" (p. 43).
Throughout the eighteenth century, until the formal rupture when revolu-
tionaries proclaimed that "everyone is free to wear whatever garment or

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I90 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

whatever outfit of their sex they please," French society was torn between
two attitudes toward fashion. These attitudes corresponded to an older hier-
archical vision of society based on the family, the guild, and the state on one
side and a new egalitarian and individualistic vision characteristic of modern
urban culture on the other. According to the traditional view, clothing
should firmly mark one's class and public station; the new view proclaimed
each individual's right to dress as he or she pleased to fulfill personal desire.
The tensions within the culture of clothing fundamentally sprang from a
series of contradictions: class privilege and egalitarian virtue, uniformity and
distinction, prohibition and permission, fixed costume and capricious fash-
ion. In addition to its sheer range, from consumption to production, from
shop girls to aristocrats, from religious tracts to treatises on luxury, Roche's
study is most valuable for its ability to make sense of the dissonance and
ambivalence in an early modern culture of clothing that combined a variety
of different models of human comportment and different rhythms of tempo-
ral change, a culture in which "the dress of holistic societies confronts that of
the egalitarian worlds of the future" (p. 43).
The rich specificity of Roche's account of the birth of the modern culture
of appearances in eighteenth-century France, his skillful interrogation of both
fictional and material artifacts, and his broad methodological suggestions for
studying clothing make this book essential reading not only for Europeanists
but for any scholar concerned with material culture, the history of fashion, or
transformations in sensibility ushered in by modern urban culture.

Rutgers University JENNIFER M. JONES

Public Archaeology in Annapolis: A Critical Approach to History in Maryland's

Ancient City. By PARKER B. POTTER, JR. (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1994. Pp. X, 260. $45.00 cloth; $I9.95 paper.)

Urban archaeology projects typically evolve to comply with governmental

mandates on cities and rarely come into being with an explicit theoretical
orientation in place. Parker B. Potter, Jr.'s book deals with the most notable
American exception to this rule, the Archaeology in Annapolis project that
Mark Leone created in i98i. The Annapolis project is not compliance driven
but is in fact a large-scale experiment in the application of critical theory to
American historical archaeology. Of particular value in this book are the
early chapters about critical theory in archaeology. The presentation is clear
and surprisingly readable, leaving the reader in no doubt about the author's
idea of the proper way to practice archaeology. Next there is a discussion of
the city of Annapolis, past and present, with an emphasis on what Potter sees
as the city's identity problem. This part of the book is lengthy but, helps the
reader to understand the whole Archaeology in Annapolis project and how it
meshes with the Annapolis community and present and past historic preser-
vation efforts.

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