This inventive and lucid book sheds new light on topics as diverse as crime, authority, and retailing in eighteenth-century Britain, and makes a major contribution to broader debates around consumerism, popular culture, and material life. The material lives of ordinary English men and women were transformed in the years following the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Tea and sugar, the fruits of British mercantile and colonial expansion, altered their diets. Pendulum clocks and Staffordshire pottery, the products of British manufacturing ingenuity, enriched their homes. But it was in their clothing that ordinary people enjoyed the greatest change in their material lives. This book retrieves the unknown story of ordinary consumers in eighteenth-century England and provides a wealth of information about what they wore. John Styles reveals that ownership of new fabrics and new fashions was not confined to the rich but extended far down the social scale to the small farmers, day laborers, and petty tradespeople who formed a majority of the population. The author focuses on the clothes ordinary people wore, the ways they acquired them, and the meanings they attached to them, shedding new light on all types of attire and the occasions on which they were worn.

In this beautiful book, Aileen Ribeiro surveys the clothing worn by the middle and upper classes throughout Europe in the eighteenth century and discusses what this meant in terms of social definition and identity. Ribeiro, one of the world's premier historians of dress, also looks at such subjects as developments in retailing and distribution, etiquette, the rise of the dress designer and couturier, the evolution of ready-made clothes, fancy dress and the masquerade.

The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

A pioneering study of the importance of dress to the collective and individual identities of the nineteenth-century English poor.

This book concerns itself with dress in the novels of Samuel Richardson, and how attire confirms, contributes to, or challenges the characters' fashioning of self and the self as others (characters or readers) perceive it.

Throughout the collection, there is an emphasis on the ways in which clothing could function to appropriate, explore, subvert, and assert alternative identities and possibilities."--BOOK JACKET.

Relatively few garments survive from before the eighteenth century, and the history of costume in the preceding centuries must therefore rely to a great extent on literary and visual evidence. This book, the first of its kind, examines Stuart England through the mirror of dress. It argues that both artistic and literary sources can be read and decoded for important information on dress and the way it was perceived in a period of immense political, social, and cultural change. Focusing on the rich visual culture of the seventeenth century, including portraits, engravings, fashion plates, and sculpture, and on literary sources--poetry, drama, essays, sermons--the distinguished historian of dress Aileen Ribeiro creates a fascinating account of Stuart dress and how it both reflected and influenced society. Supported by a wealth of illustrative images, she explores such varied themes as court costumes, the masque, the ways in which political and religious ideologies could be expressed in dress, and the importance of London as a fashion center. This beautiful book is an indispensable and authoritative account of what people wore and how it related to Stuart England’s cultural climate.