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  • The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England
  • Erika Rappaport
The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. By John Styles (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. xi plus 432 pp. $50.00).

In 1760 a London horse breaker was accused of having stolen a Holland shirt. In his defense he insisted that he had legitimately acquired the item in question and that indeed it was a rather old shirt that he had bought second hand. In an effort to establish ownership and a sense of sartorial intimacy, the accused even asserted "That the shirt has been washed about 40 times" (p. 79). In 1739 William Hutton, an apprentice to a stocking-frame knitter near Nottingham, recalled how when he was sixteen, he remembered having the wish, if not the power to buy a new coat. He insisted that such desires were quite legitimate since dress was a "passport to the heart, a key to unlock the passions . . . Youth [End Page 1083] is the time to dress; the time in which it is not only excusable, but laudable (p. 58)." These stories reveal the style, method, and insights of John Styles' compelling study of clothing and the material culture of England's plebian men and women in the eighteenth century. Styles questions some of E.P. Thompson's more pessimistic conclusions, but there have been few books since The Making of the English Working Class that have presented such a compassionate and detailed picture of England's poor. The Dress of the People is a masterful study in which a commitment to the practices of social history pushes the study of consumer culture in new directions.

John Styles focuses on consumers, their customs, and their costumes instead of the marketplace and supply-driven understandings of plebian fashion. Some, like William Hutton, articulated rather sophisticated ideas about clothes, but others Styles readily admits were indifferent or even hostile to sartorial finery. Styles' main argument is that clothes were extremely important to women and men who went to great efforts to dress themselves as neatly and nicely as they could. When they purchased new linens and cottons, they were not solely aping their social betters or blindly following the dictates of fashion, rather a variety of meanings informed this activity. Economics, customary practice, religious prescriptions, popular notions of health, cleanliness, and the body, ideas about youth, gender and sexual attractiveness as well as the stage in the life cycle dictated choices and shaped meanings. Indeed, popular custom did not disappear with an ever expanding market economy. At times, plebian custom resisted new patterns of consumption, but it could also provide "legitimate excuses to participate in attractive forms of commercialized consumption (p. 324)."

This is a big book, which uses very original sources to examine what people wore, how much things cost, how often people washed, changed and mended their clothes, how and where they purchased their possessions, what the rich thought about poor people's clothes, and what the poor themselves thought about their things. Though the poor bought a surprising amount of clothes in shops, clothes were not always commodities and people were not always consumers since garments could also be gifts, prizes, and payment. They could be bought second-hand and made up partially or fully at home. Many stole the things they wanted while others became "involuntary consumers" who were encouraged to wear things not of their choosing. Some, such as the parish poor, were dressed by charity, while others such as male servants were required to wear extremely fancy livery that demonstrated the status and position of their employers.

Styles has scoured local archives to find such things as a scrap book of the fabric a young woman used for her dresses, an inventory of clothes lost by several families in a fire in Suffolk in 1789, the record of things stolen in trials that went to the Old Bailey between the 1670s and 1830s (which were available online) and the advertisements for fugitives in provincial newspapers (which describe notable and recognizable clothing items), household account books and retailer's records. Styles also used the largest surviving example...

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