The Culture of Clothing Dress and Fashion in the Ancien R}}gime [Paperback]

This book is easily the most thorough and wide-ranging study of clothing and its social meaning that has been written to date.This book is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In it Roche discusses general approaches to the history of dress, locates the subject within current French historiography and uses a large sample of inventories to explore the dfferences between the various social classes in the amount they spent on clothes and the kind of clothes they wore. At the outset Damiel Roche makes it known that he seeks to retrieve the hitory of clothes from the highly specialist world of folk museums and historians of costume. This stimulating work is the proof of his success. Alan Forrest, Times Literary SupplementThis book is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In it Roche discusses general approaches to the history of dress, locates the subject within current French historiography and uses a large sample of inventories to explore the dfferences between the various social classes in the amount they spent on clothes and the kind of clothes they wore. At the outset Damiel Roche makes it known that he seeks to retrieve the hitory of clothes from the highly specialist world of folk museums and historians of costume. This stimulating work is the proof of his success. Alan Forrest, Times Literary SupplementThis book is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In it Roche discusses general approaches to the history of dress, locates the subject within current French historiography and uses a large sample of inventories to explore the differences between the various social classes in the amount they spent on clothes and the kind of clothes they wore.List of plates; List of tables; Part I. History of Clothing: 1. Clothing or costume? 2. The Quicherat effect and after; 3. History, fashion and clothing systems from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries; Part II. Tls