The politics of fashion in eighteenth-century America

Abstract

While fops and fribbles may have signified frivolity in eighteenth-century America, Kate Haulman demonstrates that historians need to recognize that such terms and the larger language of fashion carried powerful political weight. Haulman’s meticulously argued book, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America, places what she calls “sartorial struggles” (5) at the heart of political debates as well as the sorting out of social categories in the revolutionary era. Fashion created new distinctions of class, gender, race, and nation, serving as the meeting point of economy, politics, and society.