16 The Language of Fashion
p.10 ff. [Editors’ note: this is in fact not the title at all of Febvre’s ideas, but
part of a conference discussion based on a presentation by o. de halecki
on ‘Divisions’ in the history of the middle ages; Febvre’s commentary on
de halecki’s ideas is in section II (pp. 22–26), and the key passage is on
pp. 24–26, where Febvre suggests that the only way to overcome the
difficulty of dating periods is to ‘place onself inside man—this crossroads
where all influences congregrate’. This is an early example of what the
Annales historians would go on to call a ‘conjuncture’; and it is capitalism
in Pirenne’s Périodes de l’histoire sociale du Capitalisme that is Febvre’s
example of ‘the stunning regularity of periodicity’ (23); for Febvre (and
the Annales school) the period needs to be defined as the meeting of
the end of the past and the start of the future as found in human beings;
but, stresses Febvre, it is churlish to suggest here a precise end point
of course; instead, he argues, we should look for ‘one of the states of
momentary equilibrium, of temporary stability that are eye-catching, where
it appears that, for a short instant, all things are in harmony and mutually
help one another, and to look for, in the run-up, that which comes before
this equilibrium and which prepared it, and then following it that which
slowly undoes and ruins it; there is nothing arbitrary about this kind of
research’ (25). and so, for Febvre, ‘it is not the outside, but the inside that
history should define as its “regions” [.. .], its historical periods’ (26).]
10 on the deep regularity in fashion rhythms, see Jane richardson and alfred
Louis Kroeber, Three Centuries of Women’s Dress Fashions. A Quantative
Analysis, Berkeley, university of California Press, 1940.
11 The return of certain forms over centuries has led to authors placing dress
within the perspectives of a species of universal anthropology. on this,
see rudolf Kristian albert Broby-Johansen, Krop og kloer, Copenhagen,
Kultur Forlag 1953 [trans. as Body and Clothes by Karen rush and Erik
Friis, London, Faber, 1968], and Bernard rudofsky, Are Clothes Modern?,
Chicago, Paul Theobald, 1947.
12 [Editors’ note: see Braudel’s 1950 inaugural lecture at the Collège de
France, published as ‘Position de l’histoire en 1950 (1)’ in F. Braudel,
Ecrits sur l’histoire, Paris, Flammarion 1969, pp.15–38 (p. 24); trans. as
‘The Situation of history in 1950’ in Fernand Braudel, On History, trans.
Sarah matthews, Chicago university Press, 1980: ‘Though we must of
course be clear that social time does not flow at one even rate, but goes
at a thousand different paces, swift or slow, which bear almost no relation
to the day-to-day rhythm of a chronicle or of traditional history’ (12). See
also ‘histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée’, in Annales 4, oct–Dec
1958 (On History, 25–54).]
13 For this discussion, see, above all, J.-C. Flügel, The Psychology of
Clothes, London, hogarth Press, 1950 [1930], ch. 1, and hilaire and
meyer hiler, Bibliography of Costume, new york, h. W. Wilson Co., 1939,
preface. on the desire for modesty, apart from those cited, Pearl Binder,