ABSTRACT
In the city of light at the end of the eighteenth century, the stakes were high: French aristocrats had lost real power and the last weapon that was left to them in order to maintain the upper hand was to make a show of themselves. During the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries, the term ‘advertising’, according to contemporary dictionaries, referred to the public nature of a thing or something that had a public use. Production and marketing were intertwined in furthering the growth of the fashion industry. Together they stimulated both supply and demand: supply existed only to satisfy a predicted and anticipated desire. The expectation of the workings of court society transformed the aristocracy, as well as the king himself, into tools of advertising. Powerfully challenged by their clientele’s requirements, they created the fashions of the times and were the inventors of commercial advertising.
