Sexing La Mode

There has been a decent amount of good work in recent years on commercial culture and gender in late eighteenth-century France. Jennifer Jones's Sexing La Mode adds to that literature in two significant ways. First, Jones provides a particularly thorough and insightful coverage of the vestimentary culture of Louis XIV's court, stressing the relevance of fashion debates and indeed personal consumption to both elite men and women in the Grand Siècle. This makes the contrast with the eighteenth century all the more striking and sets into stark relief the historical myopia of much late eighteenth-century comment which sought to locate a female propensity for vestimentary consumption in women's natures. Second, Jones complicates our understanding of late eighteenth-century debates in interesting ways. Self-proclaimedly equipped with an early twenty-first-century viewpoint, she is less willing—unlike some of her predecessors in the field—to ascribe women's interest in fashion to a patriarchal plot designed to remove women from the public sphere. She realises that such social control mechanisms are never easy to impose—all the more in that interest in fashion, shopping and commercial culture seem to be presently inscribing themselves as integral parts of the ways in which we think about modernity. Indeed, Jones even evokes pangs of pity and regret for dowdy late eighteenth-century males well on the way down the line of the ‘great masculine renunciation’ which would tuck them up neatly into three-piece suits by c.1850. Jones thus offers a more positive reading of the fashion debates than many of her predecessors. In particular she suggests that even before 1789, these debates were becoming less strident. Women seemed to be walking without constraint into a focus on fashion which foregrounded ‘taste’ and which tied up with their own conception of female identity (and especially French female identity). Jones examines the production of fashionable commodities, and confirms what other authors have highlighted as regards the growing feminisation of the rag trade over the last century of the Ancien Regime. Unlike Clare Crowston's work on the guilds, however, this is a work immersed not in archives but very much in printed sources—newspapers and journals, social commentaries, advertisements, and the like, with a little private correspondence on top. There is so much floating irony embedded in such sources that it is not always possible to get a good steer on how exactly they shed light on what women really wanted. In addition, some of the positive takes on women and commercial culture come from the trade press and its offshoots—a point which Jones may underestimate. Overall, there is a tendency for her to describe rather than analyse the changes she is mapping—though that alone is still very helpful. She does not do as much as she could with one explanatory framework by which she is clearly tempted, namely, Tom Laqueur's thesis of the shift from a one-sex to a two-sex body. Jones evokes the theory and sets changes in fashion in parallel to the Laqueur hypothesis. But she offers little more than that. She cites approvingly Anne Hollander's dictum that depictions of the nude in the West follow the current stylistic conventions of the clothed body. But she is unwilling to turn this round, and to explore the presence of the body in changing fashion conventions. For a book which offers such rich and interesting ruminations on the question of what (modern) women want, the female body, sexed or unsexed, is surprisingly absent

Aesthetics · Art · Consumption (sociology · Elite · Literature · Modernity · Pity · Political science · Politics · Renunciation · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · Gender Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy

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