ABSTRACT
If antiquarian illustration hovered uncertainly between data and decoration, its intellectual presuppositions were at least clearly stated, and its market included scholars, as well as connoisseurs and members of the general public. By contrast, costume books devoted to contemporary clothing, the subject of this chapter, constitute a class of publication which never really advanced any determined claim for intellectual respectability. This is not to say that such productions were entirely whimsical, for they did attempt to provide information and instruction. The difference lies more in the fact that they could not be grafted so easily on to a parent stock, as illustrative topography had on to antiquarian study. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the emergence of what we might call a fledgling sociology, with philosophical disquisitions on society, on the one hand, and parliamentary and other reports on the condition of the people, on the other.1 But, unlike architectural research, of course, such enquiries did not require finely discriminated visual records as their basic data.
