• What was the problem/issue being addressed?
By considering the specific case of women’s hairstyle fashion, the project ‘Fashioning Heads: Valorising Novelty in eighteenth-century France’ sought to deepen our knowledge of a trade which until now has been of little interest to historians, despite its significance and complexity: that of women’s coiffures. This trade crystallises and problematises the major issues raised by the emergence of the value of novelty in the material culture and the history of ideas at the end of the ancien régime. It also reflects the struggles for recognition that shaped the artisanal work environment during that period. The transformation of early modern society which led to the advent of a culture of innovation radically changed the value of novelty, a highly ambiguous notion during the period under consideration: on the one hand, it was a synonym of progress, and on the other, of decadence. However, at the dawn of modernity, the notion of novelty was increasingly appreciated, especially in the arts, scientific innovations and commerce, where it became a value in itself. This major axiological shift, which transformed the relation of modernity to tradition and posterity, and established new criteria for evaluating goods, practices and behaviours, was particularly embedded in the expansion of the trade fashion throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Women’s hairstyles, whose variation increased throughout the second half of the 18th century, are the area of fashion that best embodies these paradigm shifts.
• Why is it important for society?
This research contributed to the history of fashion, the history of labour, the history of the press, the history of women, and the history of guilds during the ancien régime. This historical perspective is also in dialogue with contemporary issues related to mass consumption, the rhetorical and media mechanisms of creating the value of novelty, and the human and environmental consequences of the constant race for the new that fuels the global economic system. The research highlights the establishment of these mechanisms and allows for a critical look at contemporary realities.
• What were the overall objectives?
At the crossroads of cultural and material history, the research aimed to study the practices of innovation and the promotion of novelty in the context of women’s hairstyle fashions in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. It investigated how
novelty governed the hairdressing trade and how these commercial practices in turn contributed to shape the concept of novelty at a crucial moment when it became a core value for modernity in economic, moral, and symbolic terms. The research project aimed to contribute to the history of fashion, innovation and coiffure by focussing on producers and distributers of fashion (merchants, milliners, craftsmen and women, pedlars, new fashion professionals like coiffeurs, journalists, etc.), and the way their innovation strategies interacted with other actors, guilds, states and governments on the one hand, and customers on the other. The research aimed to provide an overall mapping of the early modern hairdressing fashion system, by bridging research carried out in different disciplines, in order to analyse the issues related to the value of novelty, and to deepen the knowledge of a neglected element of fashion history: French eighteenth-century coiffure.
