Abstract

The theme of fashion in clothing is of central importance to the late Romantic author Caroline de la Motte Fouqué. Inspired by the abolition of classspecific dress regulations after the French Revolution, she countered the anthropological and moral discourse on fashion of her time (bourgeois naturalness versus aristocratic artificiality) with an unusual cultural history of fashion. But in her novels and pedagogical writings she also examined changes in fashion as markers of the historical process of bourgeois gender differentiation into a female private sphere and a masculine public sphere. In this article I argue that Fouqué's anachronistic adherence to the aristocratic tradition of public dress for women represents not so much nostalgia for the ancien régime as an innovative form of feminine protest against the gender-specific consequences of this structural transformation.

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