Fashion Beyond Clothing

doi:10.1017/9781108850353.012

10 - Fashion Beyond Clothing

Early Modern Visual Culture of Eurasian Dress

from Part II - Early Modern Global Entanglements

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2023

Peter McNeil

Edited by

Christopher Breward ,

Beverly Lemire and

Giorgio Riello

Show author details

Christopher Breward: Affiliation:
National Museums of Scotland
Beverly Lemire: Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Giorgio Riello: Affiliation:
European University Institute, Florence

Book contents

Get access

Summary

The ‘visuality’ of fashion conjures up thoughts of directional garments, spectacular catwalks, and the fashion image. The term ‘visuality’ was coined by Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s to capture his conservative view of British imperial history as a series of ‘vivid pictures’ exceeding archival facts. It took on a very different resonance within late twentieth-century post-modernism when it came to mean ways of seeing, ‘sight as a social fact’, and the ‘politics of representation in transnational and transcultural form’.1 Fashion studies has been dominated by this discursive mode of analysing the fashion image via the insistence of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard on ‘written fashion’ within twentieth-century media: printed page, photograph, simulation, and copy. This approach tends to obscure the different work and connotation of fashion before modernism, although early modern prints and drawings of dress often resorted to words to convey the colours, textures, and materialities of dress.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Global History of Fashion
From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century
, pp. 314 - 362

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Select Bibliography

Bertucci, Paola, Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017).Google Scholar

Clark, John, Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki by Kuki Shûzô, ed. Sakuko Matsui and John Clark, trans. John Clark (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997).Google Scholar

Desroches, Jean-Paul (ed.), Paris 1730–1930: The Taste for China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Art Museum/Musée Guimet, 2008).Google Scholar

Finlay, Robert, ‘The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, 9/2 (1998), 141–87.Google Scholar

Jolly, Anna (ed.), A Taste for the Exotic: Foreign Influences on Early Eighteenth-Century Silk Designs (Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2007).Google Scholar

Jörg, Christian J. A., ‘Chinese Export Silks for the Dutch in the 18th Century’, summary of a lecture given 18 October 2008, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, 73 (2008–9), 1–23.Google Scholar

Kerr, Rose, ‘Chinese Porcelain in Early European Collections’, in Jackson, Anna and Jaffer, Amin (eds.), Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800 (London: V&A Publishing, 2004), 44–51.Google Scholar

McClain, James L., Merriman, John M., and Kaoru, Ugawa (eds.), Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

McNeil, Peter, ‘“Beauty in Search of Knowledge”: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the World of Print’, in Welch, Evelyn (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 223–54.Google Scholar

Murase, Miyeko, Bridge of Dreams: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection of Japanese Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 2000).Google Scholar

Rado, Mei Mei, ‘Encountering Magnificence: European Silks at the Qing Court during the Eighteenth Century’, in Chu, Petra Ten-Doesschate and Ding, Ning (eds.), Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West (Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2015), 58–75.Google Scholar

Rousmaniere, Nicole Coolidge (ed.), Kazari: Decoration and Display in Japan, 15th–19th Centuries (London: The British Museum Press, 2002).Google Scholar

Sargentson, Carolyn, Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-Century Paris (London and Malibu, CA: Victoria and Albert Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996).Google Scholar

Wigston-Smith, Chloe, ‘Clothes without Bodies: Objects, Humans, and the Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century It-Narratives and Trade Cards’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 23/2 (2010–12), 347–80.Google Scholar

Book contents

10 - Fashion Beyond Clothing

Summary

Access options

References

Select Bibliography

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive