Le Remodelage du Vestiaire et du Corps à la Fin de la XVIIIe Siècle en Angleterre, trans. into French by Pascal Dupuy [also published in English as 'Refashioning Dress and the Body in late-Eighteenth Century England']

This paper considers the ‘revolutionary’ influence of the new English modes of dressing and longitudinal changes in wardrobes in which came to influence much of Western Europe at the time of the French Revolution. Its core is the well-known English ‘macaroni’, a time-specific fashion-oriented fop, 1760-1780, with its focus being the changing clothing choices of ‘The Original Macaroni’, the Whig politician Charles James Fox. We tend to think of clothing cultures such as macaroni dress through concepts with which we are familiar, such as the ‘subcultural’, which privileges counter-cultural or youth dressing. The essay also connects Britons’ interest in the sartorial emblems of Revolutionary patriotism with aspects of their own highly coded fashion landscape, as England had a tradition of clothing types that might indicate party-political, sociable or patriotic affiliations. Following the French Revolution, a Burkean reaction restated many of the older perceived Anglo-French dualities, in which national-character difference was expressed via consideration of clothes, social manners and their role within rituals of public life