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  • Sexing ‘La Mode’: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France
  • David McCallam
Sexing ‘La Mode’: Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France. By Jennifer M. Jones . Oxford, Berg, 2004. xviii + 244 pp. Hb £50.00. Pb £15.99.

This well-researched and articulate study concerns the interplay of four 'F's: fashion, femininity, Frenchness and frivolity. Divided into two parts along the classic lines of la cour vs la ville, Jennifer Jones's investigation essentially reveals the ways in which 'gender increasingly shaped patterns of clothing consumption' (p. 74) from the late [End Page 513] seventeenth to the late eighteenth century in France. To this end, it contrasts effectively a court culture of fashion dominated by the person of Louis XIV and his twin ideologies of mercantilism and absolutism with both the democratization and the feminization of fashion under Louis's successors in the eighteenth century. Jones demonstrates how fashion slips from the grasp of both the king and Court as his subjects become increasingly individualist consumers of fashion by a close reading of Donneau de Visé's pioneering Mercure gallant and Louis XIV's sister-in-law Elisabeth Charlotte of Bavaria's extended correspondence. As Paris overtakes Versailles as the capital of fashion in the early eighteenth century, the focus of Jones's study shifts to the sociology of fashion production among the rival male and female corporations of the day, while its consumption becomes increasingly dominated by the marchandes de modes and their ever more sophisticated boutiques. It finishes with an interesting and detailed consideration of the role of the fashion press of the late eighteenth century in France, one which stands in counterpoint to the earlier discussion of the Mercure gallant. The broad conclusion reached by the study is that the one-sex model of fashion prevalent among the court aristocracy of the seventeenth century, threatened above all by transgressions of rank and privilege, is superseded by a two-sex model of fashion in the eighteenth century, more democratized in its practices and threatened more by transgressions of gender than of social hierarchy. Yet it is perhaps unfair to reduce such a wide-ranging work to this conclusion, since in her varied explorations of the ways in which fashion comes to materialize feminine and masculine desire as practices of production and consumption of clothing, Jones draws on a fascinating array of archival, primary and secondary sources as well as a number of useful illustrations. While the impression remains that the marchandes de modes are the unofficial heroines of the study, there are also nice insights into the royal economy of the gift under the Sun King and a healthy revalorization of women's lot in the Revolution. Its few flaws include: quotations given exclusively in English translation, all the more awkward as much of the original vocabulary is specialized in character; typos occurring all too frequently, especially in its French quotations and footnotes; one might quibble with its use of the potentially anachronistic term 'class'; and, finally, the last chapter on 'Selling La Mode', while excellent on how the fashion press constructs its object, fails signally to define either its readership or circulation. However, all in all, these are minor faults in a thoroughly researched, intriguing and intelligent exercise in cultural history.

David McCallam
University of Sheffield
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