Why read The Dress of the People?

Book cover of The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England

Book description

This inventive and lucid book sheds new light on topics as diverse as crime, authority, and retailing in eighteenth-century Britain, and makes a major contribution to broader debates around consumerism, popular culture, and material life.

The material lives of ordinary English men and women were transformed in the years following…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Dress of the People as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Robert S. DuPlessis

Author

When we think of fashion, we tend to envisage attention-getting, usually very expensive clothing. And because many of those pieces have been carefully preserved, most historical works also focus on costly luxury apparel.

But as John Styles, one of today’s most imaginative historians, demonstrates in this gorgeous book, fashion is not just a matter of big-name designers who show in Milan, Paris, or New York. Having discovered a wealth of new sources—fabric swatches pinned onto orphan records are just one of them—Styles reconstructs the ways in which ordinary Britons created apparel styles during the first “Consumer Revolution.”

From Robert's list on innovations in the first consumer revolution.