The Image of Fashion : Some Eighteenth Century Perspectives on Pictures, Texts and Textiles

The eighteenth century saw an unprecedented rise in all things printed, and more specifically, the emergence of two new genres: the novel and 'modern moral subjects', ie realistic satirical print-engravings. Both new genres, for reasons I cannot elaborate on here, appear to be obsessed with fashion. The central aim of this paper is to analyse the difference(s) between looking at pictorial depictions of dressed individuals and reading verbal descriptions of these. How does a reader / beholder engage with (fictional) descriptions and depictions of dress? How do the representations present dress? While I will follow a phenomenological method, this phenomenological account is embedded in and determined by a specific, culturally and historically situated context. The thesis of this paper is that the double representation of fashion in mass-mediated, imaginative pictures and texts contributed decisively to the construction of fashion as a phenomenon that is - as Georg Simmel defined - simultaneously individualising and uniforming.