Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell
I've been getting really into costuming lately, for reasons I honestly can't articulate, with the result that I have been getting a LOT of costuming books on inter-library loan. I'm pretty sure the people in my local ILL office think there's a new stage or something in town. Anyway, Fashion Victims came in sometime in March and I went through it pretty damn quickly.
Fashion Victims does a very good job of striking that elusive nonfiction balance between academic rigor and readability. Chrisman-Campbell quotes extensively from contemporary material and includes as many pictures as she can; many of them were the extant examples of clothing from the period, but where she couldn't include those, she instead put in contemporary illustrations from the emerging fashion magazines of the period.
The thesis of the book is that French court fashion was so intertwined with politics and the actual life of the nation that, in some senses, the relaxing of court fashion caused the revolution by blurring class lines and allowing the lower classes to dream of a better life. I don't know that I super agree with that, but Chrisman-Campbell does make a very intriguing case. Perhaps fashion as a reflection of the class lines blurring in other senses, a correlation instead of a causation? I don't know for sure.
A little bit about how the book itself is set up: it's divided into four parts with four distinct themes. The parts and their themes are, in order: Court and City, about the interplay of court fashion and city fashion, and the links between them; New and Novel, about the rapid evolution of fashion and the way new and novel became everyone's watchword; Fashion and Fantasy, about the way the French court appropriated various events and peoples and transformed and reflected them in their fashions; and Revolution and Recovery, about how fashion played into and was changed by the revolution and the aftermath. It's a really good read. If you're interested in costuming at all, maybe see if your local library can get hold of it for you.
This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/386415.html. Please comment over there if possible.
Fashion Victims does a very good job of striking that elusive nonfiction balance between academic rigor and readability. Chrisman-Campbell quotes extensively from contemporary material and includes as many pictures as she can; many of them were the extant examples of clothing from the period, but where she couldn't include those, she instead put in contemporary illustrations from the emerging fashion magazines of the period.
The thesis of the book is that French court fashion was so intertwined with politics and the actual life of the nation that, in some senses, the relaxing of court fashion caused the revolution by blurring class lines and allowing the lower classes to dream of a better life. I don't know that I super agree with that, but Chrisman-Campbell does make a very intriguing case. Perhaps fashion as a reflection of the class lines blurring in other senses, a correlation instead of a causation? I don't know for sure.
A little bit about how the book itself is set up: it's divided into four parts with four distinct themes. The parts and their themes are, in order: Court and City, about the interplay of court fashion and city fashion, and the links between them; New and Novel, about the rapid evolution of fashion and the way new and novel became everyone's watchword; Fashion and Fantasy, about the way the French court appropriated various events and peoples and transformed and reflected them in their fashions; and Revolution and Recovery, about how fashion played into and was changed by the revolution and the aftermath. It's a really good read. If you're interested in costuming at all, maybe see if your local library can get hold of it for you.
This entry is crossposted at http://bookblather.dreamwidth.org/386415.html. Please comment over there if possible.