Timothy Campbell. Historical Style

Timothy Campbell’s Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830, appeared in my mailbox along with a handful of catalogs selling men’s clothing. Each in its own way addresses the intersection between fashion and history. Campbell’s astute and challenging book demonstrates the role that the emergence of a fashion system in the eighteenth century played in stimulating British historical thinking. Fashion and history are both about change over time. But fashion has long been history’s evil twin: fashion (so goes the argument) is about “irresistible and ever-changing compulsions of the eye” (113), fickle ephemera that change arbitrarily and in quick succession. Fashion has change but no history, if history is defined as “the ordinary processes of cause and effect or development that mark the progress of peoples through time” (25). Yet Campbell’s Historical Style delineates the ways in which the periodical nature of fashion change allowed writers, artists, illustrators, novelists, and indeed historians to document successive periods in British history. The commercial periodical press emerged alongside a rising fashion system, promoting, documenting, and giving dates to changes in style. As Campbell demonstrates, artists like Benjamin Nash transformed historical portraiture by painting people in their own period dress rather than in some allegedly timeless neoclassical garb. Writers of historical fiction such as Sir Walter Scott used clothing change to help illustrate and even define different periods in British history. (“It was at this time in England the reign of high heads,” Campbell, on page 200, quotes novelist Maria Edgeworth.) Even critics of conspicuous consumption such as William Godwin used fashion to mark historical change. “The fashion system,” Campbell illustrates, “... lay peculiarly close to the modern British novel’s earliest visions of historical experience” (162). In David Hume’s influential History of England (1754–1762) and Allan Ramsay’s Dialogue on Taste (1762), novelty-driven fashion “supplied indispensable resources to historical perception and to the recovery of historical contingency that more obviously causal change, or the real political economy of nations, did not as readily provide” (Campbell, 142). Fashion change, in sum, was not the evil twin of historical thinking in the eighteenth century, but its vanity mirror: fashion helped contemporary Britons see themselves in historical perspective.

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Art history · Clothing · Ephemera · Literature · Mode (computer interface) · Period (music) · Politics · Reign · Style (visual arts) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law