Fashioning America

When Thomas Dwight lamented in 1796 that "Fashion, like Robespierre and Marat, deals havoc and destruction without ever assigning a reason to any tribunal," he drew on revolutionary political metaphors to express his era's alarm over the rapidly changing forms and consequences of bodily display. Moreover, his linkage demonstrated that clothing consumption was not simply an exuberant entertainment or a genteel ritual, but had come to be seen as a political and social threat in the decades following the American Revolution. This dissertation examines Americans' conflicted relationship with fashion and consumerism in the early republic. I analyze a broad range of sources, including diaries, letters, newspapers, periodicals, conduct literature, account books, prints, along with surviving artifacts, to link texts with objects to uncover how political contests for power and authority were waged through material life. Fashion proved a rich field for contestation, since the fluidity of dress forms and vocabulary allowed it to be used in a remarkable variety of ways: to articulate competing ideas of nationalism, to challenge cultural ideals about taste and refinement, and to contest emerging gender, class, and racial boundaries. In the wake of independence, a wide range of Americans anxiously debated the role and rules of fashion in a democratic republic, raising questions about the nature and limits of personal freedom that were central to the project of nation-building. Members of the political elite like George Washington encouraged a conceptual and material transformation of fashion from European luxury to domestic virtue in order to bolster nationalism and encourage domestic manufacturing and consumption. But others opposed a process that threatened to blur social distinctions and confuse the visual hierarchy of daily life; in response, they began to construct increasingly sophisticated and complex dress codes that imbued personal possessions with new characterological significance. In a series of five thematic chapters, I demonstrate how American consumers came to embrace fashion and show the central roles gender and race played in this process. By feminizing fashion and placing it in the service of the state and the family, Americans helped to promote the expansion of consumer culture as well as manage some of the anxieties and conflicts it generated. At the same time, I argue that material life was never as hierarchical or univocal as etiquette manuals and style writers suggested. Through everyday acts and objects, ordinary individuals worked to democratize and individualize the meaning of fashion, drawing on its rich expressive power to fulfill their own psychological, political, and social needs.