Habit de qualité: Seventeenth-Century French Fashion Prints as Sources for Dress History

Abstract

Historians have debated the significance of a group of late-seventeenth-century French engravings depicting fashionably dressed men and women. At question is the classification of these engravings as fashion prints, images which depict as well as disseminate current fashion information. An analysis of these French prints, which date from the mid-1670s to about 1715, reveals that although often imitative, details of dress and coiffure were continually altered in order to reflect new fashion trends. The print artists responded to current events by changing the captions of their prints, but the subject matter remained fundamentally a presentation of French fashion. Dress information was disseminated by the sheer volume of published French prints, as well as by additional foreign-made copies. The visualization of fashion presented in these prints makes clear their essential role in the fashion print genre, while their short-lived but robust production signaled an emerging hegemony of French fashion in Europe.