3 - Consuming Fashion

Summary

The history of clothing has seen a ‘recent explosion of methods and approaches’, and a growing interest in the consumption of fashion in English historiography has shed much light both on patterns of ownership and use of clothing and textiles in early modern England, and on the cultural significance of dress. The division of labour amongst historians in the field of general consumption is not quite as pronounced in the area of clothing consumption. While some studies do tend to focus on either the functional and economic importance of dress, or on its cultural meaning, new histories of dress are emerging that are ‘sensitive to the disparities between representation and experience and which immerse clothing fully in its context of ideological, social and economic change’. Richardson has noted, for example, that historians investigating ‘the social reception of religious ideas, gender, identity or social status’, have now also begun to make use of the evidence of clothing consumption.

Furthermore, in contrast to general consumption studies, recent work on dress has done much to broaden the chronological scope of analysis to include the later Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. The sixteenth century has indeed been acknowledged as a period of very significant change in the consumption of dress across Europe. Developing markets and production methods made available new types of fabrics and dress to societies. Traditional heavyweight woollen cloths were replaced by lighter weight ‘new draperies’ that became available in an increasing range of colours and textures. In addition, the Reformation changed the material culture of religion and added a significant moral dimension to the accepted modes of dress. According to Stallybrass and Jones, ‘it was in the sixteenth century that the word “fashion” first took on the sense of restless change’. They noted that the first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary to the term ‘the fashion’ as referring to the ‘mode of dress … adopted in society for the time being’ occurred in 1568.

The study of dress has, in recent years, become central to a number of academic debates. Roze Hentschell, for example, examined the contemporary critiques of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English citizens who dressed in continental fabrics and were accused of ‘disturbing the notion of what it meant to be English’.