Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France by Clare Haru Crowston (review)

This impressive monograph functions on two levels. On the one hand, it is a rich, empirical study of the eighteenth-century rise of aristocratic women’s fashion consciousness as well as the markets, consumers, and household finances connected with it. The Parisian bourgeoisie imitated the ladies at court, who followed the lead of Marie Antoinette, changing styles almost weekly. The queen’s dressmaker, Rose Bertin, ran a boutique in Paris that became the focal point for a whole luxury industry involving merchants, producers, and retailers. Planned obsolescence was born, along with fashion magazines and fashion news. In 1777, the new guild of fashion merchants had 452 members. Crowston studies their account books, finding that their business was entirely dependent on a generous granting of credit; noble ladies did not pay cash. Consequently, collecting payment later was always a problem. At her death, Bertin left 400,000 livres of unpaid accounts owed by 483 clients.

Crowston sees women’s roles as complex and contradictory. The ladies of the court were generating negative public reactions by seeming to personify luxury and extravagance and to dominate men. But they also gained credence (credit), and therefore respect, by being exquisitely dressed. “Fashion and credit constituted overlapping Old Regime economies of regard in which reputation, influence, and authority were constantly shifting values.” But how could the independent business women who ran the fashion industry avoid the strict laws that subordinated wives to their husbands, gave husbands the management of their common funds, and allowed wives to issue credit only under their husband’s signature? Crowston makes a major contribution by exploring the various loopholes that enabled female shopkeepers like Bertin to succeed.

Crowston also attempts to develop a theory of value in which material and nonmaterial factors are both treated equally as causal. She quotes approvingly Gabriel Tarde’s statement that value arose not from labor theory, but “from collective and subjective judgments about the aptitude of objects to be more or less—and by a greater or lesser number of people—believed desired, or enjoyed” (323). Her method is in some ways similar to that of Bourdieu’s delineation of varieties of cultural capital, except that she still chastises him with prioritizing the economic kind.¹ For Crowston, the magic word is credit. It can mean “time allotted for payment,” in the economic sense, and “esteem,” “reputation,” or “influence,” in a cultural sense. She fastens on this dual meaning, to connect economic forces (debt, accounting, and production) and cultural forces (influence, pull, sway, and reputation).

Crowston’s approach highlights interesting connections, but she extends it well beyond its usefulness. The early modern period was certainly an age when a dominant nonmaterial force might be in evidence. But think of the options! French society was obsessed with hierarchical differences that led to pitched battles about precedence and rank. The king and his agents possessed intangible powers of command. Faith in all of its complexity calls for consideration. Should all expressions of power be explained by the credit that they enjoyed? This stimulating book dismantles and reassembles all of the components involved in the new fashion industry.