Fashioning the Bourgeoisie

Philippe Perrot’s book Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, examines not just fashion, but the influence fashion had on society as a whole in nineteenth-century France. He claims in the first chapter of this book that there is “nothing more social than clothing”  and continues to explain this statement through specific examples of fashion, propriety, and manufacturing trends. I enjoyed his extensive use of primary sources, including fashion magazines, etiquette and health pamphlets, novels, and letters. Much of his work focuses on the social mechanism that clothing organized throughout history, which relates back to our discussion in class about how we could involve the working class with the exhibit. Along with his discussion of social organization being reflected through clothing, he notes that sumptuary laws and vestimentary ordinances provided an immobility of clothing that reflected the immobility of social classes.
          His discussion of the development of Parisian department stores caused me to wonder about Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, and how similar it was to the examples Perrot mentioned. Again because of our discussion on social classes, I found the details about how department stores catered to men and women of all statuses helpful. Did the owners of our garments and their servants shop at the same department stores? I was intrigued by his comment that because of the pattern of distribution of second-hand garments, Parisian chambermaids were often better dressed than the Bourgeoises.  It would be interesting to study each specific object and attempt to determine if they existed in all social classes in some form within Philadelphia society. For example, was a version of a corset (certainly not one made by hand, like Emma’s), worn on special occasions by working class women? If so, did the style differ significantly?
When Perrot described propriety as a way to determine social classes once fashion caused the hierarchy to blend together, specifically identifying “new money” versus those born into their wealth, I thought immediately of Emma Hendel Spang, the owner of the corset. Her father had been born an indentured servant and made his fortune by opening his own hat making company. I wondered if Emma received similar responses to her lavish wedding.  After reading a newspaper article describing the event, I doubted very much that she was scorned at all for her status. I wondered if the idea of propriety was slightly more severe in Paris than in Victorian Reading, Pennsylvania.
          Perrot’s section concerning corsets was helpful in providing basic information about the garment in general, although he focused largely on the health hazards individuals believed them to cause, even while women still wore them frequently. His explanation of how exactly the corset contorted the body allowed me to imagine it on an actual body, rather than a mannequin. Although Perrot’s work focused on France, rather than the Philadelphia area, his examination of clothing as a social mechanism was helpful when beginning to imagine how to exhibit our garments without excluding a large portion of the population.

Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century [Trans. Richard Bienvenu] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6.

[1] Ibid 48.