Montaigne after Theory, Theory after Montaigne

3. Fashion

Fashion John O’Brien It is a general calumny (o courageous and warlike nation) paraded throughout Europe that the picture of a naked man with cloth by his side and scissors in his hand to make a garment after his fashion is the picture of a Frenchman. It seems thereby that all nations by common and malicious agreement wished to accuse or blame him alone for inconstancy, as it were an affliction uniquely affecting this fine and most flourishing kingdom ; drawing from the novelty and variety of his clothes the comparison and consequence of the diversity and changeability of his manners; signifying that as inconstancy is all the more fashioned in that one sees it in manifold positions, so too the Frenchman is all the more inconstant in that he more willingly takes pleasure in wearing new and different clothes, making the inconstancy of his clothes jump across to that of his manners, as if manners and clothes were made of the same material, clothes and manners being cut with the same scissors.1 Michel de Montaigne was not the author of these lines—that pleasure belongs to Pierre de Lancre—but the essayist would have agreed with their 55 3 sentiments without necessarily arguing that they were a calumny. His own forays into fashion are, in critical terms, not the most heavily scrutinized aspect of his work. Two whole chapters, “De l’usage de se vestir” (“Of the custom of wearing clothes”) and “Des loix somptuaires” (“Of sumptuary laws”), and parts of others, notably “De la coustume et de ne changer aisément une loi receüe” (“Of custom, and not easily changing an accepted law”), seem to all intents and purposes to confirm a string of late Renaissance condemnations of the extravagance of the French court and its deplorably self-indulgent attitude towards fashion. These are undemonstrative chapters and go almost unnoticed among the critical attention devoted to the unfolding drama of the self or the development of the essai form.2 For this is a different Montaigne, one who deals in what Terence Cave has recently described as the “quiet materials” of the Essais, everything from sleep to war-horses, from smells to drunkenness.3 More than one reason might persuade us not to pass over such material too lightly. One large reason is the critical attention now being given to Renaissance material culture: Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass took a decisive step forward in that respect with their collection Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (1996), which was followed three years later by Fumerton and Hunt’s Renaissance Culture and the Everyday. Likewise, Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s monograph Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000) is an outstanding example of the material culture angle, and one to which the immediately following pages are indebted. The “quiet materials” of the Essais may turn out to be not so quiet, after all. Jones and Stallybrass give no indication that they read Montaigne’s chapter I, 49, “Des coustumes anciennes” (Of ancient customs), before embarking on their work, but its opening page deftly anticipates their terms of reference: I want to pile up here some ancient fashions that I have in my memory, some like ours, others different, to the end that we may strengthen and enlighten our judgment by reflecting upon this continual variation of human things. (216)4 The chapter begins with a reflection, not about the past, but about the present, and with a concession: the essayist accepts that the French will follow their own customs and practices; he even accepts that distinguished Romans such as Fabricius or Laelius might appear barbaric to his coun56 / john o’brien trymen “since they are neither clothed nor fashioned according to our mode” (215–16).5 This conjunction of clothing, fashioning, and fashion is a crucial feature of Montaigne’s vocabulary here, and will be echoed a little later in the phrase “the present fashion in dress” (216).6 Around this lexical cluster is built a conceptual problematic of which fashion is the focus and the emblem. It is extended to include a point about the blindness of the essayist’s contemporaries in adhering to “the authority of present usage” (216)7 that lives only by rapid change, independent of established custom. The rapidity of fashion is indeed such that once-despised and outdated modes come...