Nick Valvo

Costuming the Historical Figure

Neoclassicism in Europe around the end of the eighteenth century carried with it transformations not only in the form of dress, but also change just as dramatic in the attitudes about how sartorial form fit into broader worlds of politics and history. The striking sense of timelessness recognizable in this clothing was most pronounced in the toga-like uniforms designed by Jacques-Louis David for the pageantry and bureaucracy of the French Revolutionary state (many of which existed only as designs), but historically-conscious and politically-inflected dress surfaced in other times and places as well. British women arranged “party patches” on their faces during the 1770s to indicate either their support for or displeasure with the Ministry; French aristocrats after the Terror cut their hair à la victime to indicate solidarity with those executed; and decisions made in portraiture, with an eye to posterity, served as both foil and impetus to fashion as worn outside the painter’s studio.

Beginning with a discussion of his costume at a 1808 New Year’s costume party in Bamberg, my paper will use Hegel’s treatments of clothed figures in art and historiography to rehearse the historical dialectic between clothing as ahistorical accident, on the one hand, and the experience of negativity offered the clothed historical agent by sartorial choice, on the other. These readings will allow some insight into what it meant to eighteenth-century Europeans to live when they did as self-conscious historical actors situated in historical time.

Nick Valvo is working on a literary history of debt in eighteenth-century England at the University of California at Davis. He is interested in the history of consumer culture, everyday life studies, and psychoanalysis.