Reply

Abstract

I would like to thank Michael Sonenscher for his learned and respectful comments on my article. In his comments he has filled out an aspect of the topic of ‘fashion’s empire’ that I made no sustained effort to cover in my own essay: varying contemporary opinions about the economics of fashion and about fashion’s relationship to France’s monarchical and aristocratic constitution. However, I think that his reflections on these eighteenth-century (or, in the case of Jean-Baptiste Say, early nineteenth-century) arguments about fashion have little bearing on what I take to be the central points of my essay. These are: (1) that fashion played a central role in French (and European) capitalist development in the eighteenth century; (2) that the dynamism of the fashion sector was based to a significant extent on harnessing the desires and labour of consumers; and (3) that certain consequences of the rise of fashion in eighteenth-century France ‘were … conducive to notions of equality of the sort specified in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789’ and were therefore ‘a key source’ of the French Revolution’s ‘epochal political and cultural transformations’.1