Fashioning the Bourgeoisie
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A01=Philippe Perrot
America Alone
Asceticism
Author_Philippe Perrot
Automaton
Ballooning (spider)
Bodice
Bourgeoisie
Bureaucrat
Cagot
Career
Category=JBCC3
Category=KCZ
Category=NHD
Causal body
Cleanliness
Clothing
Constitution
Convention (norm)
Corset
Crinoline
Critique
Denis Diderot
Domestic worker
Economic discrimination
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Etiquette
Festoon
Fixed price
Gemstone
George Dangerfield
Gown
Greek dress
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Laborer
Les Femmes
Marc Bloch
Missionary (LDS Church)
Modesty
Motion of no confidence
Napkin
Nouveau riche
Observation
Obsolescence
Oligopoly
Oliver Cromwell
Pamphlet
Patchwork
Pea coat
Phidias
Physician
Pierre Bourdieu
Prosecutor
Psychology
Renting
Return on investment
Ridicule
Royan
Samkhya
Scarf
Shoemaking
Sobriety
Social distance
Social group
Statute
Sumptuary law
The Summer Man
Torso
Traditional society
Unconsciousness
Utopia
Virginia Woolf
Voting
Waist
Wardrobe (government)
Work ethic
Product details
- ISBN 9780691000817
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 29 Dec 1996
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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When department stores like Le Bon Marche first opened their doors in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, shoppers were offered more than racks of ready-made frock coats and crinolines. They were given the chance to acquire a lifestyle as well--that of the bourgeoisie. Wearing proper clothing encouraged proper behavior, went the prevailing belief. Available now for the first time in English, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie was one of the first extensive studies to explain a culture's sociology through the seemingly simple issue of the choice of clothing. Philippe Perrot shows, through a delightful tour of the rise of the ready-made fashion industry in France, how clothing can not only reflect but also inculcate beliefs, values, and aspirations. By the middle of the century, men were prompted to disdain the decadent and gaudy colors of the pre-Revolutionary period and wear unrelievedly black frock coats suitable to the manly and serious world of commerce. Their wives and daughters, on the other hand, adorned themselves in bright colors and often uncomfortable and impractical laces and petticoats, to signal the status of their family.
The consumer pastime of shopping was born, as women spent their spare hours keeping up their middle-class appearance, or creating one by judicious purchases. As Paris became the fashion capital and bourgeois modes of dress and their inherent attitudes became the ruling lifestyle of Western Europe and America, clothing and its "civilizing" tendencies were imported to non-Western colonies as well. In the face of what Perrot calls this "leveling process," the upper classes tried to maintain their stature and right to elegance by supporting what became the high fashion industry. Richly detailed, entertaining, and provocative, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie reveals to us the sources of many of our contemporary rules of fashion and etiquette.
Philippe Perrot is Chargè de Recherches at the Centre d'Etudes Transdisciplinaires de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Richard Bienvenu is Professor of History at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
