ABSTRACT
Fashionable dress proliferated in late-eighteenth-century Scotland and there were a variety of reactions to that change. As John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, a commentator on Scottish life, wrote in the late eighteenth century:
As Ramsay’s description suggests, and despite significant evidence of men as fashionable consumers, women were intimately linked to fashion and particularly fashionable dress in the eighteenth-century imagination. As a result, fashionable dress acts as a key to understanding the changes and complexities of women’s role within society and its display acts as a visual demonstration of patterns of
consumption and taste. Moreover, during this period, consumption and taste were not simply markers of individual identity, but used to demonstrate a person’s social class, their respectability and their membership of polite society. This incorporated balancing conspicuous consumption of everything from exotic foodstuffs, such as sugar and spices from the East, to fashionable clothing, whilst not exceeding the bounds of good taste and politeness.3 This chapter explores the growth of the purchase and display of fashionable dress in the latter part of the eighteenth century in Scotland’s growing urban landscape, as well as the etiquette and meanings of wearing fashion in public. For the purposes of this chapter, ‘fashionable’ will be defined as ‘luxury’ items as opposed to ‘necessaries’, whilst recognizing that in practice there was significant fluidity between these categories. The growth in the fashion market was underpinned in Scotland by the most intense urbanization in Europe from 1760, where in the period from 1780 to 1830, the focus of industrialization was in the textile industries, such as the silk gauze industry in Paisley, that provided much of the materials used in fashionable dress.4 Urban development coincided with a rise in the professional, merchant, trading and business groups and in the opportunities exploited by those people.5 Moreover, fashionable dress afforded women the opportunity to participate in business life as milliners and dressmakers, as well as taking part in polite society as consumers.
