ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century home, loose-fitting and simple garments were the growing preference of all classes. There appears the first of the terms of the divide between the public and the private realm: the private realm being more natural, the body appeared as expressive in itself. Squire remarks that, during the Regence, Paris saw the complete adoption of a neglige appearance. For one thing, many of the new mercantile occupations had no seventeenth-century precedent, so that those who worked in the accounts-receivable section of a shipping firm had no appropriate clothing to wear. Personality entered the public realm in a structured way. It did so by meshing with the forces of industrial production, in the medium of clothes. The two phenomena which bourgeois people personalized in public appearances were class and sex. Through reading details of appearance strangers tried to determine whether someone had metamorphosed economic position into the more personal one of being a “gentleman”.
