The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (review)

When Britain's Prince William and his wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, visited the United States, the American press leaped to ask, "Are pantyhose back?" First Lady Michele Obama drew criticism for wearing a gown by a British designer to a White House dinner, and the Weatherproof Garment Company launched an impromptu marketing campaign after seeing a photo of President Obama in one of its jackets. Politics and fashion are today deeply intertwined nowadays, but Haulman informs us that fashion and politics were no less braided at the nation's founding; in fact, this symbiosis was integral to the new republic's creation.

Haulman's thoroughgoing look at the place of fashion in public discourse focuses on consumption and display among the urban populations of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. She "considers fashion both as a concept, a shape-shifting vessel of an idea that people fill up with various meanings depending on time, place, and circumstance, and as changing styles of personal adornment, whether la mode or other modes of the day" (3).

The volume is arranged in three parts, which together cover the entire eighteenth century. Part I attends to ways in which clothing shaped and reflected "hierarchies of rank and categories of gender" in the early eighteenth century, and offers examples of how people set, enforced, and violated expectations (7). Hoops and periwigs, in particular, marked moments of crisis in gender relations as fashion became increasingly feminized.

Part II turns to the imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s, when fashion—and the imported goods on which it depended—became a hot-button issue, and mid-century rhetoric around frugality and simplicity became increasingly shrill. As fashion more and more proclaimed political loyalty, hair heaped in the "high roll" and "Macaroni" men (men of high fashion by way of Italy on the Grand Tour) drew especial scorn. In Part III, Haulman turns to Revolutionary Philadelphia, especially the "military mode, where fashion and politics merged most explicitly" (157), and soldiers sought to strike just the right note in appearance, "formidable but not foppish" (161). Americans in the emerging nation struggled to reconcile these and other competing demands—style and substance, luxury and necessity, and emulation and independence.

Finally, as the new polity reached the turn of the century, the "triumph of masculine sartorial simplicity signaled the political emergence of a cross-class coalition of white men, voters and leaders, legitimated through, and yet regardless of fashion." "Formal politics, at least in theory, became a fashion-free realm of power and legitimacy," and the "paradox in which fashion was good for a nation's political economy but bad for society was resolved" (9). Like contemporary calls for energy independence, which seek to disentangle our government and economy from the complications associated with fuel suppliers abroad, these calls for sartorial independence sought to ensure the fledgling nation's survival.

Specialists in the history of fashion and consumption will encounter much that is familiar in this book, as Haulman capably synthesizes the truly impressive amount of scholarship about clothing, consumption, and fashion produced in recent years. Moreover, her own research generates fresh insights, allowing her to posit new trajectories that, among other things, help to explain the "great divergence" of the early nineteenth century, when elite men's fashion retreated into the plain dark suits that still prevail today, while women's fashion continued (and continues) to respond to much broader swings in color and cut.

Though costume historians will question some of the analysis regarding the specifics of construction and materials, Haulman's engaging approach to a broad range of sources, including visual and material culture and some particularly intriguing attention to the grammar of advertisements, makes for fascinating reading. Historians of eighteenth-century culture will find much of value to enrich their own scholarship in history as well as gender studies, and, furthermore, they will gain a heightened awareness of the many ways in which fashion...