ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the gendered patterns of consumption which can be found by studying the merchant Johan Friedrich Hackman's luxury consumption when single, his family purchases once he was married with two sons, and, finally, the widowed Marie Hackman's luxury purchases. It illustrates what was considered luxury in nineteenth-century Finland, which at that time was part of Imperial Russia as the Grand Duchy of Finland. It discusses what typical male or female luxury consumption was in this context. The chapter shows that it was not always men who travelled more and who would have been therefore able to make more luxury purchases. Feminine luxury was comfortable and it implied the idea of sociability, whereas masculine luxury purchases were aimed at public life in clubhouses and public duties in offices and the city streets. The Russian aristocracy was renowned for its abundant luxury. Excessive luxury consumption was restricted by several edicts, but no consistent sumptuary legislation existed in eighteenth-century Russia.
