Fashioning Heads: Valorising Novelty in Eighteenth-Century France

ended

This research investigates innovatory practices and the importance of novelty in eighteenth-century France by considering the specific case of fashion in women’s coiffures. At the crossroads of cultural and material history, it will examine how the search for novelty governed the coiffures trade and how these practices contributed to shape the concept of novelty, at a crucial moment when it became a core attribute of modernity. By focussing on the innovatory strategies of the different actors involved in the creation and the commercialisation of fashionable coiffures, the research will attempt for the first time to map a field, which is still uncharted despite its importance during the Ancien Régime. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, from merchants’ account books to fashion plates and advertisements, and combining different historiographical approaches, this project will shed light on the relations between merchants in different trades, fashion journal editors, customers and government agencies. The investigation will also address the importance of novelty in global trade and foreign imaginaries, by analysing the relationship between economic and symbolic conceptions of value. This undertaking will reassess the role of fashion in the culture and economy of eighteenth-century France: through new archival research it aims to re-connect fashion with the wider philosophical and economic reflexion on the notion of novelty in the Ancien Régime The project also includes a practical component through the recreation of historical coiffures in a fashion museum. This hands-on research methodology, documented in a blog, will not only offer a better understanding of how these hairstyles were made, but it will also reflect on the utility of re-creation both in historical research and in museum exhibitions. Thus, this investigation will propose an embodied critical reflexion on the value of novelty, a timely attempt to address an issue in urgent need of historicization.