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Fashion and the Culture Wars of Revolutionary Philadelphia
Kate Haulman
| IN 1783 Virginia Congressman Arthur Lee wrote that the city of Philadelphia had "broke suddenly loose from the simplicity of quaker manners, dress and fashion" and was instead "affecting the vanity, & nonsense ... of french parade." Lee was not the only one to regard with dismay the forms of display that suffused the city in the early 1780s. Yet his remark revised the city's recent past, for the preceding decade had seen an upsurge of extravagance in what he mistakenly regarded as a plain and simple Quaker town.1 Marked by increasing socioeconomic stratification, Philadelphia by the early 1770s stood as the largest, most refined, and most fashionable city in the colonies, its position signified by the rise of conspicuous consumption and high style: the ruffled, heavily powdered macaroni mode for men and large, elaborate hairstyles for women. Having emerged as a cultural center, the city also became the locus of colonial resistance and political power with the sitting of the Continental Congress in 1774, and two years later it became the seat of the newly independent Republic. |
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Due to its dual identity as cultural and political capital, Philadelphia served as the locus of a series of culture wars that responded to and produced the revolutionary contest.2 At the center of these battles for the character and look of the new nation's capital, contests that pitted calls for republican simplicity against the "timeless logic of signs of power, brilliant symbols of domination and social difference," lay fashion.3 Fashion, defined as changing styles of apparel and personal adornment that contemporaries recognize and comment on and that stimulate commentary and often debate, served as a screen onto which people projected a host of competing ideas and a vehicle through which they expressed them. Having long functioned as a means of distinguishing among and within social groups in urban areas, fashion possessed intense local and individual significance, helping people read and locate one another in the social landscape. Though some colonists purchased their sartorial distinction, the increasing access to imported goods as well as the theft and pawning of fine, fashionable attire by runaway slaves and other lower sorts helped to discredit the very idea of the latest fashion as exclusive, especially if people were uncertain about what that mode was. Fashion could not only visually establish but also undermine social hierarchy in colonial cities. Yet, dictated for some colonists by Europe, fashion also indicated commercial and cultural inclusion in a far wider, cosmopolitan Atlantic world. It suggested connection and distinction, proving essential to expressions of rank and power dependent on performing one's place in the British Empire.4 |
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