Professor Beverly Lemire
History
University of New Brunswick
lemire@unb.ca
Beverly completed her BA, MA, in History, University of Guelph, Canada; DPhil, History, Oxford University. Her publications include "Fashion's Favourite: the Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660-1800" (Oxford University Press, 1991); "Dress, Culture & Commerce: the English Clothing Trade before the Factory" (Macmillan, 1997); and most recently the co-edited volume, "Women & Credit: Researching the Past, Refiguring the Future" (Berg Publishers, 2002). >From 2003, I will be co-editing the journal "Textile History".
Fashion & Tradition: Wearing Wool in England during the Consumer Revolution, c. 1660-1820
The power of tradition had long been an unspoken factor in the marketing and wearing of wool cloth; however, from the late seventeenth century this association with tradition began to be a liability. Fashion's mounting influence among the urban middle classes, and even labouring peoples, resulted in demands for new commodities, for goods capable of creating more individual figures. Popular fashion, what Gilles Lipovetsky calls the "instability of appearance," reflected new preoccupations with individualism manifested in self-conscious amendments in dress. And, from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, many more men and women acquired the capacity to purchase a wider array of material goods. Tradition and fashion collided. I will assess the challenges faced by the wool trade as it struggled to maintain its hegemony in the face of shifting societal demands. How did the acceptance or rejection of woolens define masculine and feminine norms? Were gender ideals redefined? Shifting cultural preferences will be explored as the ideal male and female styles were recreated, illuminating significant factors in the cultural clash between tradition and fashion in a transitional era.
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