3Chapter 1
History and Sociology
of Clothing: Some
Methodological
Observations
1
up until the start of the nineteenth century there had not been, in the
true sense of the word, a history of dress, but only studies in ancient
archaeology or of qualitative inventories of garments.^2 at first, the history
of dress was an essentially romantic notion, either providing artists,
painters or men of the theatre with the necessary figurative elements
of ‘local colour’, or enabling the historian to establish an equivalence
between vestimentary form and the general mindset of the time or of
the place (Volksgeist, Zeitgeist, spirit of the times, moral disposition,
atmosphere, style, etc.). Truly scientific research on dress started in
about 1860 with work by scholars and archivists such as Quicherat,
Demay or Enlart,^3 or by medievalists in general. Their principal method
was to treat dress as the sum of individual pieces and the garment
itself as a kind of historical event, the main aim of which being above
all to locate its date of birth and the circumstances surrounding it. This
kind of work still dominates, to the extent that it continues to inspire
the numerous vulgarized histories that abound to this day and that are
linked to the development of fashion’s commercial myth-making. So the
history of dress is yet to benefit from the renewal of historical studies
that has been taking place in France for the last thirty years: this renewal