| To 'cut a fine figure' or faire figure was to produce a favorable impression in public. This thesis analyses how tailors fashioned figures and how men and women experienced these fashions bodily. Class and gender were physically constructed and reconfigured during the nineteenth century, as the boundaries separating worker and bourgeois, man and woman became more fluid. In much theoretically-driven literature on dress, clothing proves a mere foil for abstract concepts. By contrast, I insist that concepts were materially expressed in the construction, consumption and depiction of tailored garments after the French Revolution. The stitches, seams and very fabric of objects serve as a springboard for analyzing larger ideas of class, gender, self-presentation and consumption. The mannequin or tailor's dummy, the military uniform and tailoring for women provide in-depth case studies for exploring these themes.;The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a pivotal moment in the history of European concepts of the body. Scientists, administrators, artists and doctors abstracted and depersonalized the human body, producing statistical averages and mathematically quantifiable norms. Though it was closely tied to anthropometric discourses, the problems of dressing actual, not abstract bodies were a constant and compelling concern for the tailor.;Nineteenth-century tailoring practices allow me to consider the body from both a post-structuralist and an experiential perspective: corporeal norms were imposed externally in the form of fashion plates representing the body beautiful and paper patterns designed for an 'average' male body. These norms found expression in garments made in standardized sizes. This vestimentary standardization was often experienced negatively by people who felt that they had become impersonal numbers. The tensions between democratic principles of sartorial uniformity and more personal demands for individual identity informed heated contemporary debates over tailoring. By using interpretive methods derived from art history, textual analysis and material culture studies, I find a model of subject construction and self-presentation that is flexible, one which 'cuts across' traditional class and gender categories. Tailoring enabled men and women to cut new figures, to self-consciously 'produce impressions of specified character' that changed the face of modern urban France. |
