Late Early Moderns or, the Victorians

What are the stakes in using "modern" as a label for either a historical period or for social conditions subtending a state of mind? Historical usage could land more heavily on difference, while social conditions might look for continuities. In attempting to combine both usages in linking up the Early Moderns with the Victorians, I am considering the question of the modern through the lens of fashion. When we look at clothed people from other eras, differences are obvious. We can characterize an era by its fashion look. Those fashion differences indicate what it might feel like to move around as recognizably part of that cultural moment. But the look does not tell us what cultural differences inform it. Some argue that very notion of fashion begins with the early moderns. Such a point of origin begins to uncover social conditions.

Once upon a time in Western history, around the mid-fourteenth century, the concept of fashion shaped a new way of viewing and evaluating human subjects. People's vestments no longer indicated just their rank, which prescribed the color, shape, cut, and cost of what they wore, but rather clothing identified their gender and the extent to which they could be considered "up to date," "in the know"—in other words, "modern." Such a grandiose and contestable statement follows Gilles Lipovetsky's often maddening, always challenging, argument that modernity can be understood as a democratizing movement defined by the rule of fashion.¹ Calling fashion the "empire of the ephemeral," Lipovetsky celebrates the evolution of the modern human subject beginning with a time and a conceptual revolution (he calls it Late Middle Ages) that fits into the rubric of the Early Modern. The fashion change that bears the early modern label signifies enormous cultural upheavals on all levels. Fashion could not exist without technological, psychological, and philosophical conditions that make small but constant changes in fashion looks both technologically possible and socially desirable.

The advent of fashion depends on a concept of the individual who can differentiate himself or herself from a group while remaining part of it. The individual manifests identity in fabric, yet at the same time does not deviate too far from the group, so as not to seem eccentric rather than knowledgeable. Fashion requires a consumer mentality, a system of manufacture and trade that can accommodate frequent change, modes of communication that can broadcast such changes, and a loosening, however slight, of fixed social hierarchies. It usually requires a global rather than a provincial perspective. Fashion thrives in an atmosphere that values newness and emerges from recognition of individuals' right to expression. Further, fashion includes the aesthetic as an essential component of self-presentation. Given fashion as a feature, the modern can be considered as a way of being in the world, a way that registers enormous changes in what passes as reality. In that sense, Early Modern seems useful as a term for a particular moment and does not need tweaking; rather it needs what the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies provides: a venue for its further explorations and diverse definitions. The term itself morphs; working dynamically in disciplines, employing varied themes and variations, and undergoing transformations within the label itself.

At another moment in Western history, the Victorian period, a comparable revolution in fashion and in culture as a whole changed the way civilization looked. As in the Early Modern period, Victorian fashion change signifies class restructuring. People adorned themselves by further narrowing class hierarchies, helped by the sewing machine, a device whereby the respectable classes could copy expensive clothes in the privacy of their rooms. In the early nineteenth century, upper-class men replaced leggings with trousers, a garment originating with farmers. Captains of Industry donned the suits of working men. Somewhat later, Victorian women begin to shed pounds of garments, tight-laced corsets, steel hoops—about ninety pounds of coverings—to exchange it for draped aesthetic garb and even bloomers. Working women needed to fit the walkways. Sensible fashion began to fill the racks of ready-to-wear in the newly expanding department stores. Women's increased mobility...