The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

SIX: Fashion and Nation

6 Fashion and Nation I n the 1780s, Americans faced dilemmas both sartorial and political. Having won independence from Great Britain in a contest that not only pitted an imperial power against a nascent republic but also set ways of signifying power, legitimacy, and authority against one another, inhabitants of the United States faced the vexing question of how the new nation would appear in the eyes of the world and to itself. Fashion in dress focused the tension of being freed from political dependence on Britain while still economically tethered through commerce, exposing the de facto colonial position of the republican polity.1 Observing that independence had not resulted in a clean break, some argued that political transformation should signal a change in culture, and that an independency of dress was a place to start. Yet independence had been won through the assistance of the acknowledged masters of modes, the French, whose ministers arrived in the United States with all the pomp and circumstance befitting an ancien régime, inspiring a seriesofballsandfetesinwhichdisplaysoffashionabilitywereparamount.2 Such was the power of visual and material signifiers of identity, whether national or individual. In fact, the personal and the political sometimes found themselves at odds. The cultural politics of fashion, through which people created but also challenged hierarchies of gender, status, and empire, acquired a national cast in the 1780s. The issues that sartorial practices had long expressed and highlighted became American republican problems of social order, gendered power, and political economy. In the early years of the republic , Americans balanced traditional expressions of position and authority against new, nationalist prescriptions and proscriptions and attempted to reconcile them by appearing at once appropriately republican and legitimately powerful to various audiences—local, national, and international.3 It was a tall order, one that Americans seemed unable to fulfill, always erring on one side or the other of the parochial/cosmopolitan divide, according to foreign observers. 182 fashion and nation Expressly linking the personal and the political, anxious proscriptions in newspapers and magazines insisted that too many Americans remained slavishly loyal to la mode at the literal expense of their pocketbooks, their reputations, and their country. Increasing understatement in men’s fashionable dress may have served the needs of both social distinction and republican simplicity, but this did not mean that the look was not imported both in form and in fabric—it was. Moreover, Anglo-American women of various ranks remained the chief arbiters of refinement in dress, which remained necessary to ensure success in courtship and social life; thus men of the republic were dependent not only on “feminized” fashion but on the “fair sex,” many of whom, despite attempts to discipline them into artless simplicity, followed fashion’s dictates and their own desires. Alongside fashion’s continued power to perform social distinction emerged a line of argument that asserted fashion’s threat to the national political economy, one that served as a way both to mobilize particular political agendas and to disdain the appearances of haughty women, aspiring men, and the realm of fashion they inhabited. Once threats to proper social order and gender relations, men and women of fashion now jeopardized the very health of the nation, writers claimed. Yet the behavior of elite Americans demonstrates that such messages were intended chiefly for others, although they possessed their own, in-group concerns about the relationship between fashion and propriety. Part of the problem of republican governance lay in the conflation of feminine social influence and masculine economic and political power that adherence to fashion had represented throughout much of the eighteenth century. In the new political order, one that empowered and rested on a disembodied “people,” social and political realms, or the embodied personal and the (theoretically) disembodied political, would need to be broken apart, at least in theory, and fashion was the wedge that would do it. “For the Good of My Country”: Ambivalence and Necessity among Elite Men For nine months stretching from November of 1783 to June of the following year, Annapolis served as the temporary capital of the United States. Here Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris and George Washington dutifully resigned his commission. To mark the latter occasion, Congress arranged for an “elegant public dinner,” in the words of Rhode Island representative David Howell, followed by a ball held at the Maryland statehouse attended fashion and nation 183 by some two hundred...