CEMS Research Seminar: Marlo Avidon (Cambridge University)

The rapid expansion of luxury consumption in late seventeenth-century England precipitated widespread economic and moral concern amongst contemporary commentators. Increasingly, these concerns were aimed directly at elite women, targeting their ever-growing wardrobes of imported European and East Asian textiles and accessories.  However, for elite women of titled and gentry status residing both within London’s metropolitan centre and across provincial England, awareness of and access to the latest fashions proved paramount, testifying to their taste, cultural acumen, and membership within a privileged feminine social circle. This paper interrogates the ways through which fashionable knowledge and materials circulated amongst elite female consumers, using visual material alongside correspondence, account books, and bills from titled and gentry family papers. It reveals how these varied media, from ornamented French fashion plates to epistolary commentary from family and fashionable tradespeople, ensured women’s continuing fashionability. Reassembling these sartorial pathways reveals that the circulation of fashionable knowledge and garments proved paramount in establishing an enduring elite social identity that transcended the geographic boundaries of Court, Town, and Country. Moreover, the cultural imperative to appear ‘in the fashion’ ultimately triumphed over contemporary polemic decrying the practice.

Marlo Avidon is completing a PhD on fashion, beauty, and female identity at the English Court between 1660-1700. She previously completed her BA in History at Durham University and MPhil in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge. Marlo's PhD project assesses how women’s appearance could be used as a tool of self-fashioning, and its resultant impact on women's reputations and the dissemination of elite, metropolitan fashions.