Fashion in the Life of George Sand

Abstract

This essay explores George Sand’s (1804–1876) complicated relationship to clothing. The mythology surrounding her notorious cross-dressing has, we argue, occluded her real engagement with the culture of clothing of her time. While Sand was skeptical of fashion’s tendency to occupy women at the expense of other pursuits, she was nevertheless fluent in the language of fashion and strategically observed its rules of decorum. Drawing on Sand’s rich but unexploited correspondence (1812–1876) and other personal writings, this article contributes a rare first-person voice to the relatively spare literature on women’s lived experience of clothing in the past. Contemporary fashion journals, to which Sand subscribed, and portraits of her en homme and en femme are also considered. Emphasizing the collaborative and communal aspects of the culture of clothing in nineteenth-century France this study challenges the equation between consumerism and individuality that attended celebratory accounts of the history of consumer society. We examine Sand’s central role in a “community of dress,” an extensive network of people she called upon to help clothe herself and her family. Her fraught relationship to her daughter Solange (1828–1899), who was obsessed with fashionable dress, brings into focus the critical distance she maintained from the prevailing fashion culture.