Description
Book SynopsisExplains a culture's sociology through the simple issue of the choice of clothing. This book shows, through a tour of the rise of the ready-made fashion industry in France, how clothing can not only reflect but also beliefs, values, and aspirations.
Trade Review"A fascinating and amusing examination of social attitudes."--The Times Literary Supplement "The overall thesis that emerges is both limpid and profound; as far as clothing is concerned, we still belong to the nineteenth century."--Liberation "[Perrot] glides through the dressing rooms and bedrooms of the Second Empire, inspects armoires, haunts the department stores and the fitting rooms of couturiers and tailors, lives with fashionable women and tarts, bankers, and 10-franc-a-month shop assistants."--Le Nouvel observateur "Perrot puts a serious and persuasive case for the importance of clothing to understanding the aesthetic and moral values of the nineteenth-century middle-class... Immensely learned, yet written with great delicacy and lightness of touch, it remains the best account available of the meaning, and eventual triumph, of the bourgeois trouser--that most resilient and universal survival of nineteenth-century Europe's dominance of the globe."--John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph "A fascinating book: not so much a history of clothing, as a history of French society seen through its fashions and its clothes."--Sharif Gemie, Modern & Contemporary France "Fashion history is not about hemlines, it is about the nuts and bolts of living. It is because he accepts this fact that Perrot's examination of a period so germane to our own is valuable."--Colin McDowell, Sunday Times (London)
Table of ContentsList of IllustrationsPrefaceIntroduction3IToward a History of Appearances6IIClothing's Old and New Regimes15IIIThe Vestimentary Landscape of the Nineteenth Century26IVTraditional Trades and the Rise of Ready-Made Clothing36VThe Department Store and the Spread of Bourgeois Clothing58VINew Pretensions, New Distinctions80VIIThe Imperatives of Propriety87VIIIDeviations from the Norm124IXInvisible Clothing143XThe Circulation of Fashions167Conclusion189Notes193Bibliography253Index267
