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Abstract
This article focuses on the seventy-three essays that were submitted to the Swedish Royal Patriotic Society in 1773, in response to a competition for the best essay on the advantages and disadvantages of a national dress. When presenting their thoughts on the design and realization of a national dress, the authors came to reflect on deeper issues of social order and sartorial culture, describing their views on society and its constituent parts, as well as the trappings of visual appearances. Clothes were an intricate part of the visual culture surrounding early modern social hierarchies; differentiation between groups and individuals were readily visualized through dress. Focusing on the three primary means for visual differentiation identified in the essays — colour, fabrics and forms — this article explores the governing notions of hierarchies in regards to sartorial appearance, and the sartorial practices for making the social order legible in late eighteenth-century Sweden.
Acknowledgements
This article was originally presented as a paper at the European Social Science and History Conference (ESSHC) in Vienna, in 2014. I would like to thank all the participants at the session ‘Practices of Social Inequality in Early Modern Europe’. I would also like to thank my fellows and other colleagues at the research seminar at the Department of History, Uppsala University, as well as the fellows and participants at the seminar at the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London, for the many constructive comments that I received when presenting the article as a work in progress.
Notes
1 Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet), The Patriotic Society’s archive, supplement to Proceedings 1774 (PS Proceedings), No. 10.
2 Eva Bergman, Nationella dräkten: En studie kring Gustaf III:s dräktreform 1778 (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1938), p. 15. Founded in 1766, and placed under royal patronage in 1772, the Society set out to promote domestic industries by way of journals, rewards and competitions such as the one in 1773.
3 See, for example, Philip Mansel, ‘Monarchy, Uniform and the Rise of the Frac 1760–1830’, Past & Present, 96 (1982), 103–32; Philip Mansel, Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 28–29, 57–58, 61–63; Gunner Lind, ‘Uniform and Distinction: Symbolic Aspects of Officer Dress in the Eighteenth-Century Danish State’, Textile History, 41:1, supplement (2010), 49–65. The Swedish dress reform in 1778 was mainly aimed at the court and the branches of military and civil government, although it also invited the public to wear it. See Bergman, Nationella dräkten, pp. 80–119.
4 Bergman, Nationella dräkten, pp. 40–48.
5 Bergman, Nationella dräkten, pp. 40–42. Regarding Des Combes, not noted by Bergman, see PS Proceedings, No. 52.
6 There are two essays in French (Nos 13, 52) and eight in German (Nos 7, 11, 16, 51, 55, 57, 63, A4). Most likely, however difficult to ascertain, there were women among the authors. On the public sphere in Sweden at the time, see Margareta Björkman, Läsarnas nöje: Kommersiella lånbibliotek i Stockholm 1783–1809 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1992), pp. 405–86; Anders Simonsson, Bland hederligt folk: Organiserat sällskapsliv och borgerlig formering i Göteborg 1755–1820 (Göteborg: diss., 2001), pp. 71–95.
7 Bergman, Nationella dräkten, pp. 34–39.
8 As the winner was announced, the envelopes with names were destroyed, and unclaimed essays were filed, numbered ‘1’ and onwards in the Society’s archive, where they (in all, sixty-five of the seventy-three submitted) reside today. Bergman, Nationella dräkten, pp. 40–48. See also Mikael Alm, ‘Überlegungen zu einer Nationaltracht. “Social Imaginary” im Schweden des späten 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Diskurse–Körper–Artefakte: Historische Praxeologie in der Frühneuzeitforschung, ed. by Dagmar Freist (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015), pp. 267–86.
9 PS Proceedings 1774, Nos 3, 34, A3. The preoccupation with legibility in dress is a well-known phenomenon in early modern Europe. See e.g. Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (London: Berg, 1986), pp. 12–15, 95–118; Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Dress for Deference and Dissent: Hats and the Decline of Hat Honour’, Costume, 23 (1989), 64–79 (pp. 66–68).
10 Roland Mousnier, Social Hierarchies, 1450 to the Present (London: Croom Helm, 1973), p. 19. See also Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Gail Bossenga, ‘Estates, Orders and Corps’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime, ed. by William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 141–66.
11 Gerda Cederblom, Pehr Hilleström som kulturskildrare, i–ii (Stockholm: The Nordic Museum, 1927–1929). See also Mikael Ahlund, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby in a Northern Light. Swedish Comparisons and Connections: Pehr Hilleström & Elias Martin’, The British Art Journal, 11 (2010), 33–40 (p. 39).
12 Bergman, Nationella dräkten, p. 15.
13 Amanda Vickery, ‘Mutton Dressed as Lamb? Fashioning Age in Georgian England’, Journal of British Studies, 52 (2013), 858–86 (p. 868); Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 9.
14 Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 39; Carlo Marco Belfanti and Fabio Giusberti, ‘Clothing and Social Inequality in Early Modern Europe: Introductory Remarks’, Continuity and Change, 15 (2000), 359–65 (p. 359).
15 See, for example, John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 181: ‘dress constitutes a language, capable of being manipulated by its wearers and read by those who observe them’; and Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 78: ‘Clothes could thus be imagined to literally speak their own language; they made the most immediate and powerful statement about social status to contemporaries […]’.
16 On this complex correspondence, see Roche, Culture of Clothing, p. 5; Richard Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford: Berg, 2002), p. 7; Belfanti and Giusberti, ‘Clothing and Social Inequality’, and Amy Wyngaard, ‘Switching Codes: Class, Clothing, and Cultural Change in the Works of Marivaux and Watteau’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33 (2000), 523–41.
17 Regarding gender and age, see Vickery, ‘Mutton Dressed as Lamb’; regarding religion, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, ‘“A Church-Going People Are a Dress-Loving People”: Clothes, Communication, and Religious Culture in Early America’, Church History, 58 (1989), 36–51; regarding social identity and rank, see Vincent, Dressing the Elite, especially pp. 117–52; regarding political identity, see Wrigley, Politics of Appearances; regarding cultural identity, see Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up.
18 Roche, Culture of Clothing, p. 59. See also Wyngaard, ‘Switching Codes’, who characterizes the period as the ‘gradual effacement of the apparent distinctions between classes’, making clothing a ‘highly charged symbol of this emerging conflict of social systems and hierarchies’ (p. 524).
19 On these three, see, for example, Roche, Culture of Clothing, p. 39; Maria Hayward, Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. xv. The distinction was equally present at the time. ‘In regards to the order of dress’, one author states, ‘it is materialised through these three circumstances: Material, shape and colour’. PS Proceedings, Nos 10.
20 There are a few exceptions, with authors that denounce sartorial visualization of difference altogether. PS Proceedings, Nos 42, 46.
21 PS Proceedings, Nos 29, 37, 59.
22 See Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 11, who calls on the concept of ‘social imaginary’, meaning ‘how people in the past experienced the social world’, that is how people — granted the more or less institutionalized variables of ownership, precedencies and social practices — understood and chose to describe the social order and its hierarchies. See also Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 14, who refers to the object of study as ‘the space of possibilities between the social reality and its representation’.
23 PS Proceedings, Nos 23, 34.
24 PS Proceedings, No. 67.
25 Bergman, Nationella dräkten, pp. 80–119. See also Lena Rangström, ‘Swedish Lions of Fashion in Spanish Costume’, in Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe, vol. 2, ed. by José Luis Colomer and Amalia Decalzo (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2014), pp. 173–94.
26 PS Proceedings, Nos 18, 23, 29, 32, 34, 37, 40, 67.
27 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 59–85; Sabine Doran, The Culture of Yellow: Or, The Visual Politics of Late Modernity (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), especially p. 5. See also Kekke Stadin, ’Stormaktsmän’, in Iklädd identitet: Historiska studier av kropp och kläder, ed. by Madeleine Hurd, Tom Olsson and Lisa Öberg (Stockholm: Carlssons, 2005), pp. 31–59 (pp. 52–53), who aptly refers to a ‘semiotics of colours’, and Karin Sennefelt, ‘Runaway Colours: Recognisability and Categorisation in Sweden and Early America, 1750–1820’, in Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World. Provincial Cosmopolitans, ed. by Göran Rydén (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 225–46 (p. 237), who offers concrete examples of these ‘semiotics’ and meanings (such as black for loyalty, red for power and, in Sweden at least, blue for distinction). French historian Michel Pastoureau has written extensively on the symbolic qualities of colours. See, for example, Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
28 PS Proceedings, Nos 3, 5, 24, 37.
29 PS Proceedings, No. A2.
30 PS Proceedings, No. A5.
31 PS Proceedings, No. A2. See also Essay Nos 19, 28, 59, 61, A3.
32 PS Proceedings, No. 61.
33 PS Proceedings, No. A2. See also Nos 28, 59.
34 PS Proceedings, Nos 3, 22, 38, 40, 61, A2, A5.
35 PS Proceedings, Nos 5, 37, 61, A2, A5. Regarding grey as a traditional colour of the peasantry, see also Peter Henningsen, I sansernes vold: Bondekultur och kultursammenstød i enevældens Danmark, 1 (København: Københavns Stadsarkiv, 2006), pp. 340–41.
36 PS Proceedings, Nos 19, 22, 61, 62, A2.
37 See, for example, Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Laws (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1996); Hayward, Rich Apparel; Vincent, Dressing the Elite, pp. 117–52. On Sweden, Leif Runefelt, Dygden som välståndets grund: Dygd, nytta och egennytta i frihetstidens ekonomiska tänkande (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2005), pp. 101–23; Eva I. Andersson, ’Foreign Seductions: Sumptuary laws, consumption and national identity in early modern Sweden’, in Fashionable Encounters: Perspectives and Trends in Textile and Dress in the Early Modern Nordic World, ed. by Tove Engelhardt Mathiassen et al. (Oxford: Oxbow, 2014), pp. 15–29.
38 The quoted examples, in order of appearance, PS Proceedings, Nos 13, A1, 34.
39 PS Proceedings, No. 46.
40 PS Proceedings, Nos 42, 54.
41 PS Proceedings, Nos 40, 28. See also Nos 19, 22.
42 PS Proceedings, Nos 6, 18, 34, 58, 59.
43 PS Proceedings, No. 3.
44 PS Proceedings, Nos 3, 18, 22, 34, 59, 61.
45 PS Proceedings, Nos 3, 18, 22, 34, 59, 61.
46 PS Proceedings, Nos 6, 7, 18, 33.
47 PS Proceedings, No. 45.
48 PS Proceedings, Nos 1, 9, 10, 13, 15, 21, 23, 24, 31, 61, A2.
49 See Madeleine Delpierre, Dress in France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 7–31.
50 PS Proceedings, No. 59.
51 Regarding the distinction between ‘use value’ and ‘status value’, see Gudrun Andersson, ‘Forming the Partnership Socially and Economically: A Swedish Local Elite, 1650–1770’, in The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain 1400–1900, ed. by Maria Ågren and Amy Louise Erickson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 57–73 (p. 62).
52 PS Proceedings, Nos 3, 6, 38, A3.
53 PS Proceedings, Nos 38, A2, A5.
54 PS Proceedings, Nos 22, 29, 32, 59.
55 The author sets out from the official order of precedence of 1714, which consisted of no less than forty classes, and revises it by ‘excluding some [offices] that have at a more recent time been added, and also added some [offices] that were not considered of rank before’.
56 PS Proceedings, Nos 59, 60.
57 The word ‘balletter’ is only found in this specific essay. There are no notes of it in a textile meaning in the authoritative dictionary Ordbok över svenska språket. There, the word ‘balletter’ occurs at two instances, first as an alternative spelling of ‘ballet’ (the theatrical dance), and secondly — and opening for my understanding of it as referring to stripes — as an alternative spelling of ‘paletter’ (changing ‘b’ for ‘p’ was common), referring primarily to the tool of the painter (Eng. palette/pallet). However, ‘balletter/paletter’ also opens up to the vocabulary of heraldry, where a ‘pallet’ referred to the heraldic sign of a pale, from the French Pal, which in a diminutive form — as a small pale, i.e. a vertical stripe — would be palette, which in turn, in the hands of a French speaking Swede in 1773, could become ‘balletter’. See Ordbok över svenska språket, B162, P73. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, pale 5, pallet.
58 PS Proceedings, No. 60. A further distinction is proposed, but not elaborated, with varying applied decorations for the different branches of the armed forces — ‘the infantry, cavalry, artillery and admiralty’.
59 PS Proceedings, Nos 38, 60. See also essay No. 32, with the suggestion that regional judges should, ‘in remembrance of ancient practices’, and certainly with a visualizing effect, grow ‘pointed beards’.
60 PS Proceedings, No. 61.
61 The essays present a socially reflective source material, comparable to that used by social historians such as Robert Darnton, Daniel Roche and Arlette Farge in their studies of the social order in early modern France. See Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Additional information
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Mikael Alm
Mikael Alm is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, Uppsala University. He is the Director of the department’s international research masters programme in Early Modern Studies. His research is focused on the political and social culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, spanning from the struggles for legitimacy of late Swedish absolutism through art, rhetoric and ceremonial display, via the ritual and symbolic making of the Bernadotte dynasty in Sweden during and after the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars, to — presently — the social imaginary and the sartorial practices for social differentiation in late eighteenth-century Sweden.