Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century.

Despite kindred concerns about fashion and an occasional similarity in organization, these two works otherwise bear striking differences in tone and even substance. Perrot invites the reader to join his Second Empire shoppers for a spree at Le Bon Marche and shows how crinolines, corsets, frock coats, and underwear interacted with fashion, style, propriety, and etiquette to produce an uncommon kind of both cultural and social history. Maynard, for her part, analyzes the dress of impoverished colonial Australia and the impact which its mythologies had on the perception of that nation's subsequent history. While Perrot's vehicle for recounting bourgeois fashion is a style that is at once witty, elegant, and delightfully impressionistic, Maynard's is standard academic, not inappropriate for detailing Australian attire from the time of its convict, emancipist, and Aborigine origins.

Perrot's Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, or Dessus et les dessous de la bourgeoisie has been around since 1981; but, happily, this superb translation by Richard Bienvenu will allow for a larger readership. The work is marvelous for its diversity - Old Regime male attire in brocades, silks, velvets, and laces contrasted with Second Empire "black" in frock coats, trousers, and pipe hats; feminine dress between 1760 and 1937 reduced to 178 years of the bustled, tubular and bell-shaped; the rise of ready-made clothing; and the birth of the grand magasin, which created "vestimentary democracy" (for the bourgeoisie if not peasants and proletarians) by bringing products and buyers together.

Perrot's explanation of the limits of "democratization" in the context of propriety evidences his encyclopedic treatment and even a bit of snobbery: "It was ... through comprehension, whether naive, subtle, vulgar or refined, of this model [of propriety], all the more discriminatory because it was initiatory, that everyone's vestimentary behavior was distinguished and relentlessly classified." (p. 87) A woman's wardrobe, he added, was expected to "bring her toilette into harmony, not only with herself, with her character ... but also with wealth and rank in society." (p. 91)

The author painstakingly enumerates accessories that distinguish otherwise commonplace dress - women's shoes, gloves, shawls; men's vests, paletots, tails, cravats, gloves (whether pale blue, pearl gray, peach, tobacco brown, or fawn or of doeskin, beaver, kid, reindeer, or dog), hats, and shoes. Although Perrot holds ideals of propriety, simplicity, and cleanliness [in clothes] indispensable in the art of dress, he admits that "[body] washing injunctions and practice remained extraordinarily parsimonious compared to our own times." (p. 125) At this point the history of fashion is inextricably linked to that of laundering and cosmetics to obscure both odors and filth!

Perrot treats "invisible clothing" effectively by detailing both male and female articles of intimacy and manufacturing a few well-turned phrases. He marvels at the bourgeois compulsion to covers such as "enveloping, carpeting, padding, or burying nudity" (p. 144) and regrets the consequences for the embattled female form: "While the rest of the body was enveloped, harnessed, trussed up, and buttoned, the bosom remained exposed to view, cold, and illness, the sacrificial portion offered to men, just like waists strangled by corsets." (p. 150) These corsets were, he noted, intended for "drawing in the waist, supporting the breasts, rounding out the rump, and arching the figures according to the erotic-aesthetic canons of the moment." (p. 150) Nocturnal clothing, hardly worth mentioning in an earlier age, became an unmentionable taboo in the nineteenth century.

Maynard's Fashioned from Penury, if less scintillating and impressionistic, is certainly solid and no less informative than Perrot. Organized into three segments - Penal Dress, 1788-1840, Colonial Dress, 1840-1901, and An Australian Distinctiveness - the book purports to dispel notions and mythologies of the Australian national type. The Crocodile Dundee mode - replete with bush hat, moleskins, shirt, and boots and derived in part from 1840s and 1850s goldfield prototypes - requires historical adjustment irrespective of its profitability for retail shops in Sydney and New York.

Discussing the dress of early Australia is unlikely to alter the darkened images of this dreary epoch. Penal dress was stark; that of Aborigines often was none at all. In this first part Maynard's methodical treatment contrasts most sharply with Perrot's declamation of bourgeois taste. Yet, like Perrot, Maynard expansively treats clothing supplies and manufacturing, both of which proceeded at a painfully slow pace in colonial Australia. In Australia as in eighteenth-century Europe consumption encoded power and status: the "wearing of ultra-stylish dress in the European mode was a triumphant sign of the colonisers' ability to transcend stain of convict association." (p. 58)

By the 1840s distinctions in dress were increasingly dictated by ethnicity fostered by immigration and urbanization as well as class. Maynard explores these themes and, like Perrot, looks at relationships between etiquette and dress and the increased availability of ready-made clothing, whether through retail outlets or mail-order. Her treatment of immigrant perceptions and misperceptions about Australia is a useful addition to the fashion theme and leads nicely into a concluding section on "Australian Distinctiveness."

In conclusion, these works, each original in concept and lucid in presentation, show that dress reveals more than it conceals. The Second Empire bourgeoisie have been almost magically exposed through a master's manipulation of the medium of fashion; Maynard, for her part, interprets dress in Australian history that is consistent with that nation's contemporary multicultural society and the enhanced role of women.

Both Perrot and Maynard are well-documented, contain excellent bibliographies, indices, and are abundantly illustrated. Perrot's illustrations and captions nicely embellish the reading and are often humorous; Maynard's are crucial to and integrated with her text.

Albert J. Schmidt George Washington University