Fashion beyond Versailles: Consumption and Design in Seventeenth-Century France by Donna J. Bohanan (review)

In this book, Bohanan builds on an earlier work to examine the consumption habits of a regional elite during the decades before and after 1700.¹ She shows that nobles in the southeastern province of Dauphiné accumulated household furnishings—including furniture, upholstery, lighting fixtures, kitchen equipment, tableware, and even collections of potted orange trees and other exotic plants—that followed recent trends emanating from Paris. From the 1670s onward, readers in the provinces were well informed about the styles embraced by their counterparts in the capital, thanks to the illustrated reports published by Le Mercure galant. Families who owned townhouses as well as country chateaus tended to concentrate their most fashionable possessions in their urban residences, because most of their entertaining took place in town. An up-to-date color scheme, matched sets of furniture upholstered in a single textile, mirrors, and other refined items advertised not only the wealth but also the standing of nobles at the turn of the eighteenth century. The townhouse was the most visible place to display them.

As Bohanan points out, her findings about aristocratic consumption are similar to those of Figeac, who studied noble lifestyles in Guyenne, in the southwest of France.² The pattern of diffusion from the capital to the provinces is clear. It raises the issue of why and how certain items of elite consumption emerged as desirable in the first place.

Bohanan writes, "The larger issue is how people used their goods, why they purchased them, and what goods meant in their social worlds (1)." These questions are hard to answer given the limitations of the notarial inventories that are her principal source. Inventories described items, assigned values to them, and sometimes indicated the rooms in which they were found, but they said nothing about the manner of their use or the reason for their acquisition. Inferring such information often requires situating objects not just in the home but also within the web of technical processes by which they were made or were adapted to make something else. Bohanan sometimes takes this approach in her discussion of color and the reproduction of decorative motifs on furniture (following her 2007 article). Such analysis, however, is thin or absent in other parts of the book. For example, although she lists common items of kitchen equipment, she does not probe this batterie de cuisine for clues about shifts in menus or culinary technique.³

Bohanan argues that provincial nobles bought luxury items with metropolitan provenances because such objects assured their status as members of a national aristocracy. But she also asserts that refined consumption was driven primarily by fashion—that it is to say, by novelty and obsolescence as propelled by markets—rather than the desire to emulate an aristocratic style of life. On balance, she endorses the primacy of fashion over emulation, although it is not clear why she thinks so or why it is helpful to think of fashion and aristocratic emulation as opposing principles in an age when the very idea of nobility was in flux.