Fashion in History: A Global Look

Tutor: Giorgio Riello

Week 10

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Shopping in the Eighteenth Century

Beauty and Fashion. Mezzotint. c. 1790.

The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University,

797.1.24.1

1. The Consumer Experience

- The Elite: aristocracy and beau monde

- Rising middle class (‘middling classes’)

- The working class (‘plebeian classes’) and the poor

1. The Consumer Experience

                      Following the Fashion: St. James's giving... By James Gillray

A Family of Three at Dinner, attr. Richard Collins. Oil on canvas, c. 1727. 64.2 x 76.3 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, P.9&:1-1934

The role of Accessories

- Fine and Leopold

Concept of ‘populuxe’

- Cissie Fairchilds

Textile Samples and Fashion Plates from album of Barbara Johnson (1736-1825). Victoria and Albert Museum, Picture Library EE015561-01.

Barbara Johnson’s album provides a unique testimony of the dress taste of an English women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

The concept of ‘Involuntary Consumers’

John Styles, ‘Custom or Consumption? Plebeian Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 103-18.   HC 500.L8

John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London, 2007).

1. The Consumer Experience

William Beechey, Portrait of Sir Francis Ford’s Children Giving a Coin to a Begger Boy, 1793. Tate Gallery, London

A St. Giles's Beauty. Coloured mezzotint. c. 1770-80.

The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 784.2.14.2

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London 1674 to 1834A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of

non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

Contains 101,102 trials, from April 1674 to October 1834Version 4.3, updated November 2007 · Website to be Relaunched

in Spring 2008 with 1674-1913 Trials · The Metropolis on Trial: Conference 10-12 July 2008 · Additional Eighteenth-Century Sources to be Digitised in New Project · Research Users Page ·

University Teaching Page · Schools Teaching Page

On This Day in 1781...Suspicion fell on William Price when, claiming at Francis Morrells' house that he'd been sent to collect a parcel for Mr Portal, he set off with it in the wrong direction. Read more...Search the ProceedingsBy Keyword · Name · Place and Map Search · Crime, Verdict and Punishment · Advanced Search · Browse by Date · Reference Number · Statistics · Search the Associated Records · Manuscripts and Ordinary's Accounts Keyword

2. The Culture of Fashion: Places and Media of Consumption

Late eighteenth-century French fashion plate

3. Shopping in the Eighteenth Century

An eighteenth-century shop front

Apple’s shop in NY

Peddlers or Itinerant traders L. Fontaine, History of peddlers in Europe (Cambridge, 1996).

Covent Garden was built in London in the 1640s as a market with shops under the portico

a. Specialisation of shops

“in NewCastle shops are good and are of distinct trades, not selling many things of one shop as it is custom in most country town and cittys”.

From the Diary of Celia Finnes, end of the 17th century

3. Shopping in the Eighteenth Century

b. Increase in the number of shops

1784 ‘Shop Tax’ enacted by PM Pitt

Mui & Mui, Shops and Shopping in the 18th Century (1986)

3. Shopping in the Eighteenth Century

d. Separation between wholesale and retail

“merchants and others may be furnished with all sorts of exportations… Wholesale and Retail at the lowest prices”

3. Shopping in the Eighteenth Century

d. Separation between production and retailing

3. Shopping in the Eighteenth Century

Gersaint’s Shop Sign, by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Oil on CanvasSchloss Charlottenburg, Berlin-Brandenburg

Claire Walsh, ‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design History, 8/3 (1995), pp. 157-176. 

 

“the fine shops, which jut out at both sides of the front doors like big, broad oriels, having fine large window-panes, behind which wares are displayed, so that shops look far more elegant than those in Paris”

Sophie Von La Roche, Sophie in London (1789) (published 1933).

Messrs Harding Howell and Co (1810)

A shoemaker’s shop, c. 1808

François Boucher, La Marchande de modes, 1746

4. The Experience of Shopping

Going into at least twenty shops, having a thousand things shown to us which we do not wish to buy, in fact turning the whole shop upside down and, in the end, perhaps leaving without purchasing anything. It

is impossible to admire sufficiently the patience of the shopkeepers, who endure this nonsense without even

dreaming of showing annoyance.

J. Schopenhauer, A lady travels in England and Scotland (English ed. 1988 [1803]), p. 151.

5. Marketing and Advertising

Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, ‘Commerce and the Commodity: Graphic Display and Selling New Consumer Goods in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Michael North and David Ormrod (eds.), Art Markets in Europe, 1400-1800 (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 187-200. N 8600.A7

Trade Cards John Johnson collection of trade cards onlinehttp://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/johnson/johnson.htm