The History of Fashion in France

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Fashion in France begins here as more than ornament: it is a mirror of rank, morality, beauty, and national identity, shaped by imitation, commerce, and the restless desire to please. From Gallic and Gallo-Roman dress through medieval veils, jewels, and court costume, the book follows women's fashion as it moves from restraint to splendor and back again, always under the pressure of sermons, sumptuary laws, and public criticism. Paris emerges as the great engine of style, sending trends outward across France and beyond, where even peasant dress feels its influence. The story then sweeps through the Renaissance and Bourbon courts, where ruffs, vertugadins, masks, fans, wigs, patches, and towering hairstyles turn clothing into a language of power, seduction, and wit. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fashions shift with court life, theater, and prominent women, while the revolutionary and imperial eras replace old extravagance with symbolic simplicity, then revive luxury in new forms. In the nineteenth century, crinolines, bonnets, mantles, and postwar inventions reveal fashion as a vivid record of upheaval, recovery, and modern taste.