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A review by zelanator
The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America by Kate Haulman
4.0
If you were a Quaker woman living during the early eighteenth century you might slip on your fine-spun garments before you began your day of labor, but you would avoid decorative prints, jewelry, or other ostentatious adornments. If you were a New Yorker preparing for a formal ball you would spend hours perfecting your high-roll and assembling the whale-bone hoop to display the skirt you had made from the finest and most colorful materials available. However, if you were a Patriot living several decades later during the Revolutionary War you might trade in your silk and wool for a homespun dress and your jewelry, high-roll, and hat for a small lapel pin or badge to signal your solidarity with the cause. In all three cases what you decided to wear signaled something about your social class, political affiliation, religious beliefs, or gentility. In The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America, historian Kate Haulman traces how individuals mapped political, social, and gender ideas onto fashion and how fashion thus became a flash point for perennial anxieties about gender and gender relations among other things.
Haulman argues that fashion was intertwined with ideas about gender and sexuality in the eighteenth century and it became the primary way to distinguish between sensible and the appetitive or foppish. These distinctions between the sensible and the foppish had important implications for political divisions during the American Revolution as patriotic writers consistently linked treachery and loyalism to modes of high fashion. In turn, they ascribed patriotism to country and military modes, frugality, and bland homespun. Haulman shows that cultural pundits did not create fixed, top-down definitions of fashion. Pamphleteers and fashion critics constantly vied with the “lower sorts,” runaway slaves, and thieves who used fashion to subvert, mock or “pass” in a fluid social hierarchy.
Fashion remained in a constant state of flux during the early-1700s and incidentally provided space for runaway slaves, criminals, and “misfits” to don fashion à la mode and subvert social hierarchies. A lucrative black market trade in fashionable garments grew with the general upshot of consumerism in port-cities. Self-emancipated slaves often stole garments to keep up with the latest trends and pass as free blacks. Those trying to “pass” were always in jeopardy of being exposed. Because advertisers introduced the latest styles and trends of European court culture, and because merchants offered these for purchase, an item’s fashionableness was always ephemeral. For example, calico transitioned from the use in fashion to use in functional work clothing by the 1730s. Fine wools and silks eventually supplanted calico as the essential materials of stylish dress. Thus, calico’s fall from grace threatened to expose any self-emancipated slave who if seen wearing calico by 1730 looked the part of a common servant or slave.
From the French and Indian War onward, two competing discourses of fashion emerged. One argued that an individual’s frugality and plainness attested to their sensibility and capacity for virtue. The second encouraged women and men to continue buying extravagant clothes, stressed the legitimacy of high fashion for distinguishing the social elite, and dovetailed with the economic needs of a market-driven economy. The former discourse originated from political dislocations, especially after the Revenue (Sugar) Act of 1764 exacerbated tension with England. The latter emanated from merchants and consumers who drove demand for fashionable imports. Fashion created political and economic controversy by the 1770s as the consumption of imported fashion became the focal point for extolling ideal conceptions of feminine and masculine virtue and identifying those with a steeled commitment to the Patriot cause. The availability of imports intensified these discourses because the lower classes could ape the appearance of social elites by donning affordable high style garments. Fashion became an important means by which cultural and political pundits tried to locate and fix identity during the Revolutionary War.
These anxieties reached their fever pitch when General William Howe besieged and occupied Philadelphia in 1777. Before Howe’s occupation, Patriot pamphleteers already labeled women traitors who defied prescriptions for frugality and proscriptions against the high-roll and English-styled dress. Outward appearance demonstrated one’s political loyalties during the occupation. It wasn’t only their political loyalties that worried anxious Patriot men but, the sexual license that might accompany British-colonist relations inside Philadelphia—especially among the Quaker women who plied neutrality. Artwork and cartoons vilified colonial women bedecked in frippery who cavorted with the British enemy. Their stylistic and financial dependence on English fashion suggested their sexual impropriety and political disloyalty.
On the whole, Haulman has written a monograph rich with detail about “fashion” as both the physical adornment worn by individuals (e.g. the high-roll, hoops, wigs) and a social concept that individuals packed with various, contested meanings. Haulman has crafted an important work that challenges how historians conceptualize revolutionary politics and particularly how fashion and material culture exacerbated political and social schisms during the imperial crisis and American Revolution.
Haulman argues that fashion was intertwined with ideas about gender and sexuality in the eighteenth century and it became the primary way to distinguish between sensible and the appetitive or foppish. These distinctions between the sensible and the foppish had important implications for political divisions during the American Revolution as patriotic writers consistently linked treachery and loyalism to modes of high fashion. In turn, they ascribed patriotism to country and military modes, frugality, and bland homespun. Haulman shows that cultural pundits did not create fixed, top-down definitions of fashion. Pamphleteers and fashion critics constantly vied with the “lower sorts,” runaway slaves, and thieves who used fashion to subvert, mock or “pass” in a fluid social hierarchy.
Fashion remained in a constant state of flux during the early-1700s and incidentally provided space for runaway slaves, criminals, and “misfits” to don fashion à la mode and subvert social hierarchies. A lucrative black market trade in fashionable garments grew with the general upshot of consumerism in port-cities. Self-emancipated slaves often stole garments to keep up with the latest trends and pass as free blacks. Those trying to “pass” were always in jeopardy of being exposed. Because advertisers introduced the latest styles and trends of European court culture, and because merchants offered these for purchase, an item’s fashionableness was always ephemeral. For example, calico transitioned from the use in fashion to use in functional work clothing by the 1730s. Fine wools and silks eventually supplanted calico as the essential materials of stylish dress. Thus, calico’s fall from grace threatened to expose any self-emancipated slave who if seen wearing calico by 1730 looked the part of a common servant or slave.
From the French and Indian War onward, two competing discourses of fashion emerged. One argued that an individual’s frugality and plainness attested to their sensibility and capacity for virtue. The second encouraged women and men to continue buying extravagant clothes, stressed the legitimacy of high fashion for distinguishing the social elite, and dovetailed with the economic needs of a market-driven economy. The former discourse originated from political dislocations, especially after the Revenue (Sugar) Act of 1764 exacerbated tension with England. The latter emanated from merchants and consumers who drove demand for fashionable imports. Fashion created political and economic controversy by the 1770s as the consumption of imported fashion became the focal point for extolling ideal conceptions of feminine and masculine virtue and identifying those with a steeled commitment to the Patriot cause. The availability of imports intensified these discourses because the lower classes could ape the appearance of social elites by donning affordable high style garments. Fashion became an important means by which cultural and political pundits tried to locate and fix identity during the Revolutionary War.
These anxieties reached their fever pitch when General William Howe besieged and occupied Philadelphia in 1777. Before Howe’s occupation, Patriot pamphleteers already labeled women traitors who defied prescriptions for frugality and proscriptions against the high-roll and English-styled dress. Outward appearance demonstrated one’s political loyalties during the occupation. It wasn’t only their political loyalties that worried anxious Patriot men but, the sexual license that might accompany British-colonist relations inside Philadelphia—especially among the Quaker women who plied neutrality. Artwork and cartoons vilified colonial women bedecked in frippery who cavorted with the British enemy. Their stylistic and financial dependence on English fashion suggested their sexual impropriety and political disloyalty.
On the whole, Haulman has written a monograph rich with detail about “fashion” as both the physical adornment worn by individuals (e.g. the high-roll, hoops, wigs) and a social concept that individuals packed with various, contested meanings. Haulman has crafted an important work that challenges how historians conceptualize revolutionary politics and particularly how fashion and material culture exacerbated political and social schisms during the imperial crisis and American Revolution.