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John Styles |
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books: the dress of the people |
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Why study the
dress of the people? Material
things transformed the lives of ordinary English men and women between the
restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the Great Reform Act of 1832. Tea and
sugar, the fruits of British mercantile and colonial expansion, transformed
their diets. Pendulum clocks and Staffordshire pottery, the products of
British manufacturing ingenuity, enriched their homes. But it was in their
clothes that ordinary people enjoyed the greatest transformation in their
material lives. In calico gowns and muslin neckerchiefs, in wigs and
silver-plated shoe buckles they flaunted the fruits of the nationÕs
commercial prosperity. The Dress of the People retrieves the unknown story of ordinary
consumers in eighteenth-century England. It tells us what they wore, how they
acquired it and what they and their social superiors thought about it. Ownership of
new fabrics and new fashions was not confined to the rich. It extended far
down the social scale to the small farmers, day labourers, and petty
tradespeople who formed a majority of the population. The Dress of the People uses
unfamiliar kinds of evidence – from descriptions of stolen clothes in
the records of criminal trials to small pieces of fabric left at the London
Foundling Hospital by impoverished mothers who abandoned their babies –
to show that humble men and women could be beneficiaries of the new
commercial society arising in eighteenth-century England. They were not just
its victims. Their everyday fashion was rooted in a world of popular custom,
of fairs and holidays, of parish feasts and harvest homes. Popular custom,
often portrayed as a conservative force hostile to commercial innovation,
emerges as the midwife of popular consumerism. |
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Over-dressed
servants. Not everyone approved of well-dressed plebeians. In
the eyes of the eighteenth-century Žlite, no group of working people was more
guilty of sartorial extravagance than domestic servants. Snobbish complaints against
servants were endlessly rehearsed in pamphlets, magazines, novels, plays and
caricatures. ÔIt is a hard Matter to know the Mistress from the
Maid by their Dress, nay very often the Maid shall be the finer of the two,Õ
moaned Daniel Defoe in 1725. Sixty years later the same complaints were still
being repeated, ÔThe very servant not only apes but rivals her mistress in
every species of whim and extravaganceÕ insisted The European Magazine in 1784. |
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John Collet, ÔThe JEALOUS MAIDS,Õ 1772 |
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Silver-cased London-made watch, 1763 |
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A working man with aspirations: William Hutton of
Nottingham, stocking weaver. For many working people in the eighteenth century, fashionable
clothing was the summit of their material aspirations. Often they chalked out
their lives in clothes. When they recorded their life stories, garments
appear again and again as markers of maturity and achievement, or of struggle
and failure. In the rags to riches autobiography of William Hutton –
later in life a successful Birmingham bookseller, but born the son of a poor
woolcomber – the failures and successes of early adulthood are measured
by his struggle to accumulate a genteel wardrobe. Hutton was born at Derby in 1723. At the age of
seven he was apprenticed in a Derby silk mill and seven years later he began
a second apprenticeship with a stocking-frame knitter at nearby Nottingham,
where he was obliged to pay for his own clothes. In 1739, the year of his
sixteenth birthday, he remembered that Ôclothes came as sluggishly as food. I
was arriving at that age when the two sexes begin to look at each other,
consequently wish to please; and a powerful mode to win is that of dress.
This is a passport to the heart, a key to unlock the passions, and guide them
in our favour. My resources were cut off; my sun was eclipsed. Youth is the
time to dress; the time in which it is not only excusable, but laudable. I
envied every new coat: I had the wish to earn one, but not the power.Õ Two years
later, in 1741, he decided he detested working at the knitting frame. ÔI made
shift, however, with a little over-work, and a little credit, to raise a
genteel suit of clothes, fully adequate to the sphere in which I moved. The
girls eyed me with some attention; nay, I eyed myself as much as any of
them.' Shortly after, he quarreled with his employer and ran away, carrying
his best clothes – his new suit, a wig, stockings and a hat –
carefully organised in two bags. He reached Lichfield, over 30 miles from
Nottingham, but there his bags were stolen. Soon destitution forced him back
to his apprenticeship. The episode Ôruined me in point of dress, for I was
not able to reassume my former appearance for five years.' Nevertheless, two
years later he 'began to make a small figure in dress, but much inferior to
that two years ago.' He bought a coat and in 1746 Ôa tolerably genteel suit
of clothes, and was so careful of them, lest I should not be able to procure
another, that they continued my best for five years.' The next year he was
able to buy a silver watch, which had long been his greatest ambition, and in
1751 he finally moved to Birmingham to set up in the book trade, where he
made his fortune. |
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Cotton:
FashionÕs Favourite. Edeney
Wareham was a poor, widowed silk winder who lived in a one-room London
lodging in George Street, Spitalfields in 1756. She owned a cotton gown in a
fashionably flowered pattern. It was stolen while drying on a washing line
strung across her room. What
attracted humble women like Edeney Wareham to cotton materials for their
gowns? Above all it was cottonÕs capacity to be printed with bright, washable
colours in fashionable designs. These designs incorporated the modish look of
silk gowns worn by the aristocratic trend-setters of high fashion, costing
ten or twenty times more. Even the cheapest techniques for cotton printing
could provide a fashionably Rococo effect featuring botanically-inspired
sprigs or shells on bright white grounds. Previously,
ordinary women had been confined to gowns made from woolen or worsted
fabrics. Plain or patterned, they had been densely coloured, dark and drab.
Now they could walk out on high
days and holidays in cotton gowns that were clean, colourful and stylish. |
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ÔFlowered cottonÕ, 1747 |
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