Fashioning the Bourgeoisie

Philippe Perrot shows, through a delightful tour of the rise of the ready-made fashion industry in France, how clothing can not only reflect but also inculcate beliefs, values, and aspirations. Richly detailed, entertaining, and provocative, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie reveals to us the sources of many of our contemporary rules of fashion and etiquette. Fashion history is not about hemlines, it is about the nuts and bolts of living. It is because he accepts this fact that Perrot's examination of a period so germane to our own is valuable.--Colin McDowell, Sunday Times (London) Perrot puts a serious and persuasive case for the importance of clothing to understanding the 'aesthetic and moral' values of the nineteenth-century middle-class._Immensely learned, yet written with great delicacy and lightness of touch, it remains the best account available of the meaning, and eventual triumph, of the bourgeois trouser--that most resilient and universal survival of nineteenth-century Europe's dominance of the globe.--John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph A fascinating book: not so much a history of clothing, as a history of French society seen through its fashions and its clothes.--Sharif Gemie, Modern & Contemporary FrancePerrot, Philippe is the author of 'Fashioning the Bourgeoisie' with ISBN 9780691033839 and ISBN 0691033838.