As an article of consumption, clothing is uniquely sensitive. There is no other thing which has such a tactile and visual presence in our lives. We touch it, see it, feel it. The clothes we wear contribute to our sense of our bodies. The line between ‘us’ and ‘the thing’ is therefore a fuzzy one. One recent philosopher has even generously accorded clothes a kind of ‘half-life’, since they move with our bodies: ‘We live our clothes as though they were alive. Your trousers do the walking.’116
But clearly, the liveliness of clothes depends on material and cut. The shift in fabrics in the eighteenth century had huge consequences for people’s experience of themselves. Cotton was a material manifestation of the new culture of comfort. It was softer on the skin and lighter than linen and wool, reinforcing the fashion for a looser fit already under way in the seventeenth century. The way it took dyes democratized colour and fashion. In 1700, European capitals were largely a sea of black and white with shades of brown and grey. A century later, there was a rainbow of colour, with reds and blues, yellows and greens, a common sight among labourers’ clothes as well as those of aristocrats and their servants. Before cotton, fashionable clothes had been a monopoly of the few, not only because of sumptuary legislation but because they were expensive and costly to maintain, silk notoriously so. When the painter Lorenzo Lotto bought himself a new wardrobe in Venice in the 1540s, it cost him a small fortune; the woollen cloak and tunic alone took three months of his wages.117 Printed cotton cost more than plain worsted (wool) but was cheaper than silk or patterned wool. In the 1770s, a ready-made cotton gown could already be had for 8 shillings new, and 3 shillings second-hand (there were 20 shillings in the pound), at a time when an artisan earned between £20 and £40 a year. A market in ready-made garments sprang up. Bright, fashionable clothes with patterns or flowers provided workers and the poor with a new sense of identity. Victims of theft recorded their favourite dress in fine detail. One poor British woman described ‘a small running sprigged Purple and White Cotton Gown, washed only once, tied down with red Tape at the Bosom, round plain Cuffs, and the Bottom bound round with broad Tape’.118
The relative cheapness and growing variety of dress had paradoxical effects. Lighter fabrics meant adding layers to keep warm – Europe is not India. And this opened up fresh opportunities for fashionable combinations and accessories such as ribbons, hats and handkerchiefs wrapped around the neck. Patterned neckerchiefs moved within the reach of poor workers and peasants. The wheel of acquisition and replacement accelerated. While the price of a coat or gown was declining, the actual proportion of income spent on clothing went up, as people’s wardrobes became more varied and changed more frequently. In 1700, French servants spent 10 per cent of their earnings on clothes. By 1780, it had risen to a third. Ironically, it was probably the urban poor who changed their clothes most frequently, for theirs wore out most quickly, without the benefits of soap, laundry and repair.119
Branding and labelling can be traced back as far as ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, where courts and bureaucracies used them to add value by distinguishing quality and origin.120 In the eighteenth century, traders and makers raised branding, product differentiation and sales promotions to new heights. In 1754, Robert Turlington first sold his ‘Balsam of Life’ – a remedy for kidney stones, colic and ‘every malady’ – in pear-shaped bottles with the name and royal patent moulded into the glass. The kings of marketing were the pottery-maker Josiah Wedgwood and his partner Thomas Bentley. Neil McKendrick gives a sense of their innovative salesmanship. They used:
inertia-selling campaigns, product differentiation, market segmentation, detailed market research, embryonic self-service schemes, money-back-if-not-satisfied policies, free carriage, give-away sales promotions, auctions, lotteries, catalogues . . . advanced credit, three-tier discount schemes, including major discounts for first orders, and almost every form of advertisement, trade cards, shop signs, letterheads, bill heads, newspaper and magazine advertisements, fashion plates and fashion magazines, solicited puffs, organized propaganda campaigns, even false attacks organized to produce the opportunity to publicize the counter-attack.121
As we have seen, it would be wrong to write off earlier societies as static, and this was true of fashionable goods as well as of consumption more generally. Already in the fourteenth century, the court of Burgundy had acted as a European fashion centre. The Dukes of Burgundy were renowned for their lavish dress. Philip the Bold (1342–1404) had a scarlet doublet, with pearls embroidered in the shape of forty lambs and swans which carried gold bells around their necks and in their beaks. Burgundian ladies introduced tall, peaked hats. Travelling to foreign courts made the Dukes of Burgundy fashionable trendsetters among the European aristocracy. It was then that hemlines were getting shorter while men replaced long, loose tunics with tailored doublets and jackets that fell just below the waist. In the course of the fifteenth century, fashion switched from wide funnel-shaped sleeves to the ‘bag-pipe’ style which ended in a tight cuff.122 Ming China had fashion, as we have seen earlier in sixteenth-century complaints about the frequent change in the lengths and widths of skirts and pleats. European merchants trading in the East knew that many Asians were discerning customers. In 1617, the director-general of the Dutch East India Company noted how locals were ‘very particular about the quality’ of their tapis or wrap-around skirts and were ready to pay good money for a good design. Peasants might do with coarse cotton, but richer customers wanted theirs colourful, patterned on the loom, with borders, and often incorporating gold thread. Order books reflected the detailed attention given to local tastes. In 1623, for example, VOC directors in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, asked producers in Coromandel to make tapis with ‘bright red borders and small flower work in lively colour’.123
What was new in late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe was that fashion was institutionalized into an industry, with its own spaces, calendar and media. This was a global as much as a local achievement. Paris set the pace, but it needed Indian weavers to follow. The Dutch and English East India companies played a critical role in connecting the trendsetter with the producer and the consumer. In the 1670s, the English East India Company took samples of clothes fashionable in Paris and sent them via Syria to India to be copied there by local weavers. In the next decade, the loop was closed, with new designs and samples from India having their appeal first tested in Parisian salons before going out to European markets. ‘Note this for a constant and General Rule,’ the EIC directors explained in 1681: ‘in all flowered Silks you change the fashion and flower every year, as much as you can – for English ladies, and they say the french [sic], and other Europeans – will give twice as much for a new thing not seen in Europe . . . than they will give for a better Silke of the same fashion worne the former yeare.’124
Those without immediate access to a salon or royal court could take advice from the new fashion magazines. The French Mercure started to give fashion tips in 1672. Ladies’ almanacs multiplied in the next century and included engravings of the newest designs and recommendations on where to shop. In its January 1777 issue, the Magazine à la Mode, or Fashionable Miscellany listed the gentleman’s dress for the drawing room as worn on the queen’s birthday earlier that month: ‘The waistcoat lined with fur . . . The make of the coat is the same as has been for some years, except that the waist is shorter – the skirts of course longer . . . The cuff is small, and close, with three buttons on the upper side.’ For a lady, the ‘most fashionable morning dress . . . is a deshabilié, which consists of a short jacket and petticoat: the coat is generally puckered round the bottom about a quarter of a yard deep, with gawze [a translucent, loosely woven fabric], or the same silk. But fur is more in vogue this month than any other trimming’. The cap was French. To be in style, it needed to have a ‘full lappet across the head, but none descending behind . . . an alteration which has taken place this month’. Fashion-conscious ladies were directed to Mr Kluht of London’s Covent
Garden for the dress, and to Mrs Taylor of Rathbone Place for the cap.125 Readers had two black-and-white engravings to consult. It was around this time that colourful fashion plates and fashion dolls made their entry (see Plate 8). Initially made of wood, the fashion doll had by the 1790s evolved into an article fit for mass consumption: a flat-pack cardboard-cut-out figure, 8 inches high and sold at 3 shillings. From here it was a short step to a children’s toy with a set of six dresses and other exchangeable accessories. Fashion had crossed the generational divide.126
Thus, a new regime of consumption came into being in the north-west of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, characterized by volume, variety and innovation. The circular flow of the Renaissance did not disappear but was channelled into a dynamic system that injected constant novelty. Second-hand clothes, pawnshops, auctions and the giving of gifts brought cotton gowns and teapots to everyone. Novelty, not antiquity, fired the pistons, unlike in late Ming China. British historians have quibbled about the precise date of this shift. The bigger question, however, is ‘why?’, not ‘when?’ Why did this switch happen in Britain and the Netherlands and not in China or Italy?
There are three leading answers competing with each other: the standard of living (Britons had higher real wages); emulation (they copied their superiors); and the ‘industrious revolution’ (individuals worked harder in order to buy more things). Let us consider them in turn.
Appreciation of China’s commercial vitality in the early modern period has led to a vexed controversy over whether the Dutch and English really were so much better off. In the most advanced area of China, the Lower Yangzi, people in 1800 enjoyed a standard of living comparable to that in England and the Netherlands, according to the China historian Kenneth Pomeranz. The ‘great divergence’, he has argued, happened in the nineteenth century and resulted not from Europe’s genius for modernity but rather, in Britain’s case, from geographic luck and imperial force that provided the first industrial nation with abundant coal, slaves and cheap food.127
Recent calculations confirm that British wages did decline between 1740 and 1800, but they also highlight that this was a comparatively small dip from a unique high-wage plateau that Britain had enjoyed for four centuries following the Black Death. High wages preceded imperial expansion and were in large part the result of a small population and cheap energy, which encouraged innovation and productivity, with big inventions, such as Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine (1710), but also smaller ones of tinkering and adaptations, such as James Watt’s development of the separate condenser in the 1760s, which made Newcomen’s engine even more efficient. Already by the seventeenth century a divergence was under way that cut across Europe as well as separating East from West. Workers in Delhi and Beijing lived near a subsistence level comparable to those in Florence and Vienna. Those in London and Amsterdam were in a different league again, enjoying a more varied and high-quality diet of meat, alcohol and wheat (instead of plain oats). During the Industrial Revolution, English workers were getting poorer relative to their superiors, but this left them still better off than their fellow labourers in Asia or Southern Europe.128
One riposte to these calculations is that wages may not offer a good yardstick for comparison between these societies. Europe had a large and growing army of wage earners, while in China proletarians were a poor minority, marginalized and unmarried, whereas the families of the tenant farmers who dominated the Yangzi Delta were better off. In India, similarly, weavers received meals, housing and other benefits in addition to their wages, which makes direct comparison treacherous.129 Data compiled by Bozhong Li suggests that life in 1820s Songjiang, near Shanghai, was respectable. Peasants enjoyed 2,780kcal a day, a figure China would not reach again until 2000 and slightly above the figure recommended by health experts today. They drank twice as much tea as Britons, ate half as much sugar and, on top, smoked a little tobacco and opium, ‘the lusty friend’.130 On the other hand, Britain’s lead looks even larger when we take into account the much greater variety of affordable goods available to its population, which went well beyond the bread, cheese, linen and candles that feature in the standard basket of goods underlying statistical comparisons of the standard of living in this period. Chinese tenant farmers who produced cotton on the side managed to reach a level above subsistence. Yet this kind of labour might have made it harder to climb further up the ladder of development, because doing a bit of this and a bit of that limited the scope for specialization and innovation. In a world with industrializing nations this would prove a big handicap.
The standard of living debate has concentrated on workers, but equally important for our concerns is the group above them. Britain was distinguished by its large ‘middling sort’, the many merchants, members of the professions, officers and industrialists. Four in ten families had an income of £40 or more a year in the 1750s, twice as much as was considered necessary for survival. This group had a lot to spend on comfort and conveniences. In the course of the Industrial Revolution, Britain would become a more unequal society. Still, by comparison with China and India, as well as with Southern Europe, its middle class was enormous.131 And it was increasingly self-confident, its members making the most of a dynamically growing world of goods to carve out their own place in society. Instead of emulating the old elite, this large group used new goods and tastes to establish new distinctions and create their own, more private culture of comfort.
In the original thesis of the British birth of consumer society, emulation was the parent of demand: its midwife was ‘the mill girl who wanted to dress like a duchess’, in McKendrick’s words.132 Contemporaries were constantly sneering at uppity consumers. This is hardly surprising. The clothing revolution ran roughshod over an inherited system of sartorial distinctions that had mapped dress on to rank. Instead of reflecting a person’s origin, clothes suddenly seemed to make the person. Servants who dressed above their station were a cause of particular concern. ‘It is a hard matter,’ Daniel Defoe lamented in 1725, ‘to know the mistress from the maid by their dress; nay, very often the maid shall be much the finer of the two.’ This set off a spiral of aspirational spending: ‘the maid striving to outdo the mistress, the tradesman’s wife to outdo the gentleman’s wife, the gentleman’s wife emulating the lady, and the ladies one another’.133
Contemporary ridicule, however, is not the same as convincing historical argument. For one, similar complaints can be found in many societies then and before, including Ming China, as we have seen. Secondly, imitation was rarely the chief motivation for adopting new clothing styles. Servants often had little choice but to wear the dress given to them by their masters. British artisans and workers did not dress smartly in order to pass as a duke or duchess but to fit in with their own peers, to show their coming of age and independence, or in hope of a better job.134 More generally, the spread of novelties belies notions of a simple trickle-down process. Elite women, for example, began wearing chintzes on the outside of their gowns only in the 1690s, after the calico craze had taken off. Rather than aping the aristocracy, the middling sort was often the trendsetter.
The ‘industrious revolution’, similarly, is a historical interpretation that takes its cue from contemporary observers. In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe described textile districts where ‘you see the wheel going almost at every door’. Everyone was busy: husbands, wives and children. Together, their wages made for ‘a tolerable plenty’. By 1770, the enlightenment thinker James Steuart concluded that if, before, people had worked because they had been forced to, ‘men are forced to labour now because they are slaves to their own wants.’ The economic historian Jan De Vries has argued that this was precisely what happened in the early modern Netherlands and Britain. Drawing on the Nobel-prize-winning work of economist Gary Becker, De Vries pictures the household as an economic unit that makes rational decisions about how best to allocate its time. Instead of just producing what they needed themselves, households began to sell their labour
so they could buy more stuff. The taste for tea, sugar and the many other new consumer goods made whole families join the ranks of wage earners. And it made them work longer and harder. The Industrial Revolution was preceded by a revolution in demand.135
At first glance, this thesis looks attractive. Instead of treating it as a reaction to supply, demand becomes the tail that was wagging the dog. It is a neat explanation of how consumption was able to expand in Britain while wages were falling in the second half of the eighteenth century. Overall, however, the thesis runs into a barrage of frustrating problems. For one, it starts in the middle of the story and mixes cause and effect. People ended up buying more consumer goods, but that may not have been the initial motivation that drove them to work harder. The opposite was probably the case. Puritans started to preach ‘industriousness’ in the early seventeenth century as times were getting harder.136 People started to work longer and sell more of their labour to stay alive, not to indulge themselves. Living conditions improved in the century after the English Civil War (1642–51), and when they did, labourers tended to spend their money on better furniture rather than tea and sugar or other novelty items. In other words, their preferences stayed pretty much the same. Industriousness, too, was a prescriptive ideal – not an innocent reality – that told people how they ought to live, which liberalism and imperialism would export to the rest of world. For most workers the shift from leisure to wage labour was probably by necessity, not choice. They were pushed by rising food prices rather than pulled by material desire. Working hours lengthened further in the second half of the eighteenth century – by a third 137 – but, again, this was in response to soaring inflation and an increasingly tough labour market in these decades.
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