The editors of French Historical Studies seek articles for a special issue, to appear in 2020, on the theme of fashion in French history.
Not long ago the history of fashion was considered an illegitimate or inappropriate focus of historical interest. It was lightweight stuff—all right for journalists and popularizers more interested in puff than in the hard, nasty business of real historical research. This perspective has changed dramatically in the last thirty years. Since the publication of Valerie Steele's Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (1988), fashion has become the focus of some of the most sophisticated and interesting work of a new generation of scholars.
Our notion of approaches to this topic is capacious, as befits the wide range of current scholarship: fashion as aesthetics; fashion as work; fashion as social commentary; fashion as revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary) discourse; fashion as shopping; fashion as business; fashion as an artifact of...
