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 life-style 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 life-style 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 fashionindustry. Richly detailed,
entertaining, and provocative, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie reveals to us
the sources of many of our contemporary rules of fashion and etiquette.
