The Culture of Clothing

This book is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In it Roche discusses general approaches to the history of dress, locates the subject within current French historiography and uses a large sample of inventories to explore the differences between the various social classes in the amount they spent on clothes and the kind of clothes they wore.
This book is easily the most thorough and wide-ranging study of clothing and its social meaning that has been written to date.
"...the book demonstrates brilliantly how to write social and cultural history." Choice
"At the outset Daniel Roche makes it known that he seeks to retrieve the history of clothes from the highly specialist world of folk museums and historians of costume. This stimulating work is the proof of his success." Times Literary Supplement