Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (review)

L'Esprit Créateur Philippe Perrot. Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Richard Bienvenu. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994. Pp. xiii + 273. $35.00. Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, originally published in French in 1981 under the more provocative title Les Dessus et les Dessous de la bourgeoisie: Une histoire du vêtement au XIXe siècle, is introduced by the translator Richard Bienvenu as a book one can delve into without fear of relinquishing a commitment to serious history. This assumption that the topic of fashion requires academic justification confirms, even as it disavows, familiar stereotypes of fashion as frivolous and intellectually trivial. But does fashion need such an apology in the 1990s? In the light of recent scholarship bringing critical discourses to bear on fashion history—as in John Harvey's Men in Black (1995) or Valerie Steele's Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power (1996)—one might now be inclined to edit the book's posture of academic defensiveness, as evinced in the opening sentence: "Nothing appears less serious than a pair of underpants or more laughable than a necktie or sock." As a flagship book for the kind of interdisciplinary work on seemingly "minor" subjects that is now a staple in cultural studies, literary theory, and visual culture, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie should be appreciated for its prescient insistence on the links between New Historical notions of "self-fashioning" and the fashion industry itself, broadly defined to encompass social doxa, subcultural identifications, and modes of production. Drawing on Barthes's semiotic "fashion system," on Annales school methodologies (Ferdinand Braudel's longue durée is tweaked to produce the more fashion-appropriate periodization category of courte durée), and on a distinguished sociological tradition (from Thorstein Veblen and Werner Sombart to Pierre Bourdieu), Perrot concocts a new genre of fashion historiography that sets itself apart from minutiae-strewn costume history and gossipdriven monographs of signature designers. In advancing the central thesis that the global marketing of French fashion did as much or more than Enlightenment principles to consolidate bourgeois class formations in the second half of the nineteenth century, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie conceives fashion as a force of modernity operating with virtual agency to liberate an emergent class from the frippery-laden strictures of the ancien régime. The attrition of sumptuary laws and atavistic guild practices by the time of Louis XIVs reign contributed to an explosion in the commercialization of French couture which not even sober, revolutionary dress codes could contain . Gone was the "dresser," a kind of aristocratic pet treated as invisible by ladies of rank. The cast of characters who came to dominate the world of clothing manufacture and distribution ranged from the "wardrobe dealer" ("harpies in the hierarchy of used clothes"), to the sweat shop worker, to the tsars of the grands magasins catering to the clientele of urbanized flâneuses that Zola would commemorate in his best-selling novel Au bonheur des dames. Though Perrot treats cursorily what J. C Flügel called the Great Masculine Renunciation (an expression referring to the blackening of masculine attire in accordance with a norm of clerical asceticism), he places great emphasis on the emergence of the bourgeois uniform. The "trend toward uniformity" and mass culture is interpreted as the symptom of the standardization of labor and professional class hierarchy. As the bourgeoisie grew in size, creating a large, indistinguishable middle swath, the need for social triage became imperative. If the fashion industry had contributed to the blurring of class lines with a cottage industry of knock-offs designed to abet upward mobility, it responded to the anxieties provoked by democratization with a proliferation of sartorial distinctions. The smallest details and deviations of dress came to operate as supreme indices of good or bad taste. As 110 SPRING 1997 Book Reviews simplicity became the vestimentary code of class confidence, ornament, stigmatized as nouveau riche, moved closer to being classified as a crime. Fashioning the Bourgeoisie may be read as a chart recording the mutations of the fashion victim. Body morphologies, particularly feminine ones, were molded to satisfy whimsically fluctuating dictates of erotic attraction and propriety...