Fashion Victims Summary

Continuing the trend of thinking of aristocratic women in the French Revolution as “fashion victims,” Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell’s recent work, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, as its title suggests, details dress at court through the analysis of memoirs, the fashion press, and material culture. Chrisman-Campbell discusses dress for court presentation, mourning, and marriage in addition to foreign influences on French fashion, such as the American Revolution, anglomania, and orientalism. Her titular “fashion victims” include aristocratic figures like Marie-Antoinette, who Chrisman-Campbell acknowledges as “history’s definitive fashion victim . . . accused of single-handedly bringing down the French monarchy through her frivolity and her enormous expenditure on her clothing.” Like Weber,

Like Jones, Cissie Fairchilds emphasizes the economic reasons for the increased interest in fashion during the French Revolution; however, unlike Ribeiro or Jones, she argues that debates over women’s political rights were neither the only nor the most significant causes of the emergence of revolutionary regulations of dress. Instead, Fairchilds focuses exclusively on the policy of consumption and consumer goods, which two notions shaped: the notion that consumers had the right to buy what they wanted and the notion that goods had symbolic, formative and didactic traits that reflected and shaped the consumer’s personality. She examines the Old Regime luxury debates to explain the beginnings of these concepts and how they influenced revolutionary policies concerning dress. Fairchilds focuses primarily on the formative powers of dress used during the early years of the Revolution and hypothesizes that the emerging concept that fashion reflects an individual’s personality emerged from the Revolution’s disregard of the power of