Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV

Between 1678 and 1710, Parisian presses printed hundreds of images of elegantly attired men and women dressed in the latest mode, and posed to display every detail of their clothing and accessories. Long used to illustrate dress of the period, these fashion prints have been taken at face value and used uncritically. Drawing on perspectives from art history, costume history, French literature, museum conservation and theatrical costuming, the essays in this volume explore what the prints represent and what they reveal about fashion and culture in the seventeenth century.With more than one hundred illustrations, Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV constitutes not only an innovative analysis of fashion engravings, but also one of the most comprehensive collections of seventeenth-century fashion images available in print.  

Too often, cultural historians and costume scholars invoke fashion engravings as documentary "evidence" for the truth-claims they wish to set forth about the clothing of a particular era; yet as the authors and editors of this superb volume make clear, fashion prints themselves have no less a complex history, and no fewer rich interpretive possibilities, than do other forms of written or visual expression. --Caroline Weber, author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

Kathryn Norberg is a professor of history and gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. She has published on French history and is the coeditor of Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past.Sandra Rosenbaum is the retired curator-in-charge of the Doris Stein Research Center for Costume and Textiles, a part of the Department of Costume and Textiles, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA, for which she developed and supervised an extensive library of primary and secondary source materials.