22 The Language of Fashion
towards the picturesque, and not towards the design principle, towards
the stage prop and not towards the system. Perhaps, paradoxically, the
opportunities offered by drawing have profoundly harmed dress history:
graphic, spontaneous representation removed all speculative work; an
imperfectly established generality was being actualized on the spot. This
is why the most methodologically sound illustrations are, in my view,
those drawings which are overtly schematic, those which aim to arrive
at a state of principle, or abstraction, with regard to the vestimentary
system of a particular epoch, such as those by nevil Truman in Historic
Costuming.
apart from the theatre painters, however, there was a rather interesting
whole literature on clothing in the first half of the nineteenth century,
known as the Physiologies.^7 The flourishing of these short monographs
is well known, with their generally playful tone, covering the most varied
aspects of what we would call today daily life, from the office employee
to the tobacconist. There are a number of physiologies of clothing (the
Corset, the Tie, the Shirt, the Glove, the hat).^8 What is most interesting in
these dissertations is their sociological aspect: the great movement within
masculine dress towards standardization and democratization launched
by the revolution and inspired in form by reference to the austerity of
Quaker dress, was bringing about a whole revision of vestimentary values;
seemingly déclassé, clothing could signal social distinctions only via a
new value, namely that of distinction; inspired by dandyism, this was the
role of the physiologies: to teach the aristocrat how to distinguish himself
from the proletarian or from the bourgeois by the manner in which an
item, now formally undifferentiated, was worn; as one of the Physiologies
puts it, the tie has replaced the sword: in all of these opuscules found in
the Physiologies an outline of an axiology of clothing is beginning to take
shape. In the second half of the nineteenth century the romantic spirit
gave way to archaeological research: clothing was now to be described
by (mainly medievalist) scholars,^9 item by item and according to a
chronology borrowed from the traditional narrative of history (or ‘King’s
history’). To the extent that this work is important, it is the methodological
gaps which come into focus: these historians scrupulously established
a history of items but not one of systems; thanks to them we know
to within a year when a particular garment appeared—but much less
when it disappeared, as inaugural phenomena are always much more
marked than those in the process of obsolescence; we even know in the