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The Medium of Print and the Rise of Fashion in the West

The study of fashion has taken on a new intensity in recent years, with contributions also from many researchers who might not in the past have associated themselves with the relatively new field of ‘fashion studies’. Thus we find major contributions from historians, art and design historians, literary theorists, anthropologists, heraldists and those who study ‘history from below’. Fashion is both a material product and a feature of the imagination. The way in which it is visualised, disseminated and distributed through representations is central to its social impact and influence across time and space. A study of print culture as it relates to fashion also requires more precise understandings of the producers and reading publics for many different forms of print. Much has to be learned regarding the consumption of print culture generally as it pertains to fashion. What was the relationship between publishers, writers and illustrators of the painted albums, woodcuts, engravings, etchings and later lithographs that depicted fashion in countries such as England, France, Italy and Sweden? Who provided the narrative structure and imaginary settings of the fashion magazines developed in the mideighteenth century that continue to animate contemporary advertising today? How did the transmission of ideas in print work in practice, and what was the role therein of women and men? Fashion in print is generally regarded as a subtopic of the wider category of ‘printed materials’, a vast and all-inclusive world. In its origins it might have been thus, but over the course of the early modern period, fashion expanded key aspects of the medium of print and printing, creating a dialogue between the act of representing and that which was represented, thereby becoming a medium that intimately connected people and things.