Michael Kwass | Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France | The American Historical Review, 111.3

Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France

MICHAEL KWASS

FRONTISPIECE: Wigs. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonnée des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Recueil de planches, sur les sciences, les arts libéraux, et les arts méchaniques, avec leur explication, 11 vols. (Paris, 1762–1772), s.v. "Perruquier."

In the winter of 1751, after accepting a position of some responsibility in the world of finance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau fell gravely ill. Bedridden, delirious with fever, and facing the prospect of his own death, the philosopher resolved to change the course of his life. He renounced "all projects of fortune and advancement," including his new job, and vowed to spend what little time he had left in a state of "independence and poverty." After his convalescence, Rousseau remained true to his pledge and embarked on what he called his "personal reform." His first act was to change his wardrobe: "I began my reform with my finery," he wrote. "I gave up my gold trimmings and white stockings, I took a short wig, I laid aside my sword, I sold my watch." Later recounting the same episode, he stated: "I left le monde and its pomp. I renounced all finery: no more sword, no more watch, no more white stockings, gold trimmings, hairdo." Instead, he wore "a simple wig and clothes of good rough wool." ¹

As a philosophical statement, Rousseau's personal reform was loaded with meaning. The act of dressing down signified that the author of the recently published Discours sur les sciences et les arts was putting his philosophy into practice; he was turning his back on the luxury and artifice of Parisian high society and embracing a virtuous and authentic mode of living. I invoke Rousseau's reform, however, not only to raise its philosophical implications but also to make a specific sartorial observation. Although Rousseau renounced fashionable clothing and accessories, he did not jettison the wig. Instead, he abandoned his old wig to adopt a simpler and shorter model, the round wig, a gesture that raises a number of questions. Why, if Rousseau was intent on rejecting the artifice of le monde, did he not simply discard the wig altogether and wear his natural hair? Why opt instead for a different style? Were certain styles not implicated in the corrupt high society that Rousseau was determined to repudiate? These may seem frivolous affairs of fashion, but, as I will argue, the multiple meanings attributed to wigs illuminate an important Enlightenment transition—economic, social, and cultural in scope—from courtly to modern forms of consumption.

Liberal scholars have long hailed the Enlightenment as the birthplace of the modern world, an era in which great thinkers deployed reason to battle faith and superstition in an effort to liberate the individual from the constraints of custom. ² Today, historians are rightly suspicious of such linear—call them Whiggish—interpretations of the period, yet many still cling to the idea of the eighteenth century as threshold to the modern world. As it is now described, however, the modernity of the eighteenth century has less to do with a philosophical or literary canon than it does with transformations in a wide range of social, cultural, and political practices. Among such changing practices, consumption looms large. Indeed, the study of consumption has been central to the historiographical project of recasting the relationship between eighteenth-century life and modernity. ³

Historians of consumption have generally followed social theorists in emphasizing two different aspects of modernity. While social scientists emphasize long-term processes of "modernization," such as urbanization and industrialization, cultural historians and literary critics define modernity in terms of consciousness, stressing in particular the development of a reflexive self and a heightened awareness of one's present age as new and set off from the past. ⁴ Both understandings of modernity underpin current historical literature on eighteenth-century Western European consumption. Highlighting socioeconomic processes of commercialization, historians argue that eighteenth-century Western Europe experienced a "consumer revolution" as men and women freed themselves from the grip of scarcity to initiate a buying spree of historic proportions. Although its geography and periodization remain highly controversial, such a revolution is commonly represented as a step toward modern consumer society. ⁵

At the same time, the study of consumption, especially French consumption, has taken a cultural turn, opening new doors between the Enlightenment and late modernity. ⁶ Daniel Roche, whose work has defined the field, argues that the birth of consumption was an integral part of a larger cultural change in which the traditional values of a stationary Christian economy gradually gave way to the egalitarianism and individualism of modern commodity culture. For Roche, the story is principally one of emancipation: "It is important to recognize that ... commodities did not necessarily foster alienation; in fact, they generally meant liberation." ⁷ The diffusion of fashion led to "a new state of mind, more individualistic, more hedonistic, in any case more egalitarian and more free." ⁸ Less optimistic than Roche but equally intent on establishing a connection between Enlightenment consumption and modernity, Jennifer Jones contends that the late-eighteenth-century discourse on fashion helped to produce modern, essentialized definitions of gender. As social differentiation faded from fashion commentary, gender differentiation took its place. ⁹

As with all sharp historiographical turns, acknowledging the growth of consumption has produced a host of questions in its wake. First, historians disagree on the extent to which consumption did in fact reshape eighteenth-century society. Although some see in the rise of consumption the revolutionary birth of modern consumer society, others cautiously emphasize consumption's economic and social limits. ¹⁰ How far-reaching were the effects of the so-called "revolution" in consumption? Second, studies have not analyzed with sufficient specificity the cultural ramifications of new modes of consumption. How exactly did the emergence of new forms of consumption alter understandings of self and society? Generalizing about the emancipatory effects of consumption runs the risk of reconstructing, along materialist lines, an older liberal or Whig interpretation of the Enlightenment. Instead, we need to investigate more closely the meanings attached to specific consumer goods, and to consider how such meanings evolved.

Social and cultural approaches to consumption dovetail in a history of one of the most successful commodities of the eighteenth century: the wig. ¹¹ The social life of this odd consumer good reveals much about the chronology, social depth, and geographic range of new consumer practices in the Age of Enlightenment. Rather than validating simplistic conceptions of consumer revolution, the wig's diffusion demonstrates a dramatic expansion in an intermediate zone of consumption situated between aristocratic luxury and popular necessity. Equally important, the cultural life of the wig casts doubt on the long-standing theories of consumer emulation formulated by Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen, and Norbert Elias, for the meaning of the wig cannot be interpreted solely in the context of conspicuous consumption or the pursuit of social status. Indeed, the language of eighteenth-century taste leaders suggests an attempt to move beyond a courtly consumer culture in which the main purpose of goods was to mark social rank. Through the printed word, taste leaders carved out a new set of consumer values—convenience, natural authenticity, and self-expression—to mediate the relationship between consumption and status.

It is common to regard the wig of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an aristocratic ornament of Old Regime Europe, an exclusive marker of high birth and status worn by the privileged few. Indeed, the wig enjoyed the most noble of pedigrees, its origins stretching back to the seventeenth-century French courts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, where fashion had become part of an aristocratic world of power and display. By the end of the Sun King's reign, wigs had spread well beyond France, crowning kings at royal courts across Europe and becoming an essential feature of European noble costume. ¹² And yet, despite this illustrious lineage, the wigs of eighteenth-century Western Europe seem to have tumbled down the social hierarchy, so far down that writers now observed them sitting atop the commonest of heads. ¹³ For the marquis de Mirabeau, a French gentleman-physiocrat who decried the spread of luxury, the social diffusion of the wig was a most disturbing phenomenon. "Everyone [in Paris] has become a Monsieur," he lamented in his mid-century best-seller L'Ami des hommes. "On Sunday, a man came up to me wearing black silk clothes and a well-powdered wig, and as I fell over myself offering him compliments, he introduced himself as the oldest son of my blacksmith or saddler; will such a seigneur deign to dance in the streets?" ¹⁴ Equally struck by the presence of wigs among the lowborn, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a shrewd observer of Parisian daily life, listed the many types of ordinary men who had taken to wearing wigs: schoolmasters in the environs of Paris, old choirmasters, public scribes, law court ushers, shop boys, legal and notarial clerks, domestic servants, cooks, and kitchen boys. ¹⁵

Did the French wig truly undergo such a dramatic process of diffusion? Literary accounts are colorfully suggestive, but they need to be tested against more reliable kinds of evidence, such as the size of the wig trade, the social composition of wigmakers' clientele, and the incidence of wigs in after-death inventories. We begin with the wig trade. Although historians have argued that the French luxury and fashion trades expanded dramatically in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to became a substantial sector of the urban economy, the loss of many Parisian guild records has made it difficult for the long-term growth of particular trades to be tracked with any precision. ¹⁶ The trade in wigs makes for an excellent case study in this respect. Unlike masters of other trades, master wigmakers purchased venal offices from the French monarchy, leaving a long paper trail that makes them much easier to count. ¹⁷

The numbers are impressive. From 1673, when an independent wigmakers' guild was created, to the late eighteenth century, the number of French master wigmakers grew more than four times over, far outpacing the kingdom's rate of population growth. In Paris, the number of masters skyrocketed from 200 in 1673 to 835 in 1765 to 945 in 1771. ¹⁸ By 1776, one Parisian almanac explained that it would be superfluous to list the names and addresses of the most famous wigmakers, "because there is no neighborhood where one does not find many of them, and there is nothing easier than informing oneself about the most renowned." ¹⁹ Such a steep rise in wigmakers might be expected in Paris, the center of European fashion in the eighteenth century, but master wigmakers mushroomed in provincial cities as well. In the booming port town of Nantes, the number of master wigmakers jumped from ²⁰ in 1691 to 92 in 1789.20 In the demographically more stable city of Rouen, the profession expanded from 7 masters in the middle of the seventeenth century to 20 masters in 1680 to 83 in 1781. ²¹

And master wigmakers were merely the tip of the professional iceberg. Below the level of master, journeymen were employed in great numbers. In western France, for example, throngs of garçons perruquiers trudged up and down the Atlantic coast, from Bordeaux to Le Havre, fanning out across the Breton and Norman peninsulas or turning inland toward Orléans, Rouen, Versailles, and Paris. In Nantes, as many as 683 garçons a year, on average, moved in and out of the city between 1773 and 1786. ²² In Rouen, the wigmakers' guild placed a stunning 500 to 600 garçons a year in the city's wig shops in the 1780s. ²³ Figures for Parisian journeymen remain elusive, but Louis-Sébastien Mercier estimated their ranks at nearly 10,000. ²⁴ Such numbers, moreover, do not include the countless chambrelans, artisans who produced wigs illegally without the guild's consent. We can only guess at their number—Mercier put the figure for Paris at 2,000—but given the intense strife between master wigmakers and journeymen, the temptation to slip out of the regulated world of work and produce wigs clandestinely must have been irresistible for many young men. ²⁵

Most astonishing was the penetration of the wig trade into small towns and villages in the countryside. Daniel Roche and Laurence Fontaine have described how peddlers, markets, and fairs acted as intermediaries of consumption, channeling urban consumer goods to rural villages. ²⁶ The geographic spread of the wig trade suggests, however, that some fashion goods need not have been imported into the countryside. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for wigmakers to establish shops in relatively small towns in order to cater to a local clientele. After conducting his own investigation into the wig trade in 1781, the intendant of Rouen learned that while the provincial capital was home to 83 masters, the généralité as a whole had as many as 416. The intendant was especially surprised to find that a "third-order town" such as Le Havre had 29 master wigmakers, a "considerable" number given the town's population of 18,000. Even small villages, he discovered, such as those that dotted the countryside between Rouen and the Atlantic coast, could boast several wigmakers. The little town of Aumale, whose population fell below 2,000 in the eighteenth century, welcomed its first master wigmaker in 1710. By 1789, it had 7. ²⁷

Clearly, the wig had become big business in the eighteenth century—big enough to suggest that it was no longer an exclusive luxury article. If certain non-aristocratic professional groups had already taken to wigs in the seventeenth century, including high magistrates and clergymen, financiers, well-placed domestic servants, and wigmakers themselves (who, like other luxury and fashion artisans, enjoyed the products they so diligently produced), many more middling groups appear to have appropriated the wig in the eighteenth century. ²⁸ A mid-century account book belonging to a Rouen wigmaker named Le Tellier confirms this impression. ²⁹ Le Tellier sold wigs to parish curés and procureurs, hardly aristocratic types, and set the price of his least expensive wigs as low as twelve livres (less than half the cost of a decent secondhand coat or the simplest of silver snuffboxes), putting them within easy reach of merchants, professionals, and successful artisans. ³⁰ Further, Le Tellier's single shop could produce more than a hundred wigs a year, meaning that the number of wigs produced annually by the totality of the city's wigmakers could well have been in the thousands. Le Tellier's customer base, price structure, and scale of enterprise all suggest that by mid-century the wigmakers of Rouen were producing wigs for a clientele that extended well beyond the nobles and magistrates who composed the city's elite.

That the proliferation of shops such as Le Tellier's contributed to a greater social diffusion of wigs is borne out by the surprisingly robust presence of wigs in the after-death inventories of the middling classes. Drawn up by notaries, who listed the movable possessions belonging to an individual at the time of his or her death, such inventories provide the most direct evidence of the social diffusion of wigs in the eighteenth century. First, inventories demonstrate that the spread of wigs encompassed better-off Parisian artisans. Of the 101 eighteenth-century Parisian bakers for whom Steven Kaplan found inventories, nearly one-fourth, 23 of the wealthier bakers, possessed a wig. Of the 23 wig-wearing bakers, seven owned two wigs, one owned four, and another owned five. ³¹ Mirabeau's confusing encounter with the bewigged son of his blacksmith (or saddler) was doubtless an exaggeration, but it was a plausible exaggeration—and therefore an effective one—in a city where many bakers sported wigs of their own.

Inventories also confirm what the growth of the wig trade indicates: that the spread of wigs was not limited to large cities. Among inventories of fermiers in the Ile de France, the region around Paris where large-scale commercial agriculture took hold, Jean-Marc Moriceau found an increasing incidence of wigs over the eighteenth century. From 1650 to 1689, he found no wigs at all, but from the turn of the eighteenth century on, the percentage of farmers' inventories that listed wigs rose substantially, to 12 percent between 1690 and 1709, 29 percent between 1710 and 1729, 16 percent between 1730 and 1739, 21 percent between 1740 and 1749, and—here's the real jump—46 percent between 1750 and 1759. By mid-century, many of the rustic fermiers of the Ile de France had transformed themselves into bewigged gentlemen farmers. ³²

Circling farther from Paris, we find similar patterns. In the small Norman town of Pont-St-Pierre, five of thirteen inventories drawn up between 1750 and 1775 registered wigs, including one bourgeois who possessed two wigs even though his total fortune amounted to a paltry forty-five livres. Other wig-owning residents included a poor noble, a business agent of the local marquis, and a gardener who worked for another noble family. ³³ (Such men, it is worth recalling, need not have traveled as far as Rouen to purchase their wigs, since wigs were produced in neighboring towns). ³⁴ Lest one think that the diffusion of wigs in the Norman countryside was exceptional, inventories from Savoy also attest to the spread of wigs among small town and village notables. ³⁵

By all accounts, the wig was an eminently successful consumer good in eighteenth-century France. Whether or not its diffusion lends credence to the concept of a consumer revolution depends largely on what is meant by the term "revolution." To be sure, there were real social limits to the dissemination of wigs. In urban France, day laborers and the majority of artisans went without wigs, as did the peasantry in the countryside. Only a fraction of the male population ever wore this accessory, a salutary reminder that the eighteenth century was hardly an age of mass consumption. ³⁶

Still, by early modern standards, the social diffusion of the wig was remarkable. While in the seventeenth century wigs adorned the heads of kings, great nobles, wealthy financiers, and high magistrates, wigs in the eighteenth century spread to provincial nobles, fermiers, professionals, merchants, shopkeepers, clerks, and wealthier master artisans—middling groups whose number and purchasing power grew substantially over the century. ³⁷ The breadth of the wig's geographic diffusion is also worth noting. In France, the wig's itinerary ran well beyond Versailles, Paris, and provincial capitals to reach towns and villages deep in the provinces. No peddlers were necessary for this kind of geographic diffusion, since wigmakers established shops and served clients in surprisingly small communities. The question of the wig's chronological development is the most difficult to assess. The wig certainly enjoyed a successful career during the age of Louis XIV, but the key decades for its diffusion appear to be those from the Regency (1715–1723), a period of great consumer vitality, to mid-century, when new and relatively inexpensive styles were widely available. ³⁸ Clearly, by the third quarter of the century, the wig had become a commonplace commodity among a range of middling groups.

The compelling demand for wigs also demonstrates that, in practice, fashion consumption was not always gendered feminine in this period, even if contemporary critics of consumption often characterized it that way. ³⁹ While Roche found that, below the level of nobility, eighteenth-century Parisian women spent twice as much on clothes as did men, it cannot be assumed that such sexual dimorphism extended to other objects of consumption, including hair products and services. ⁴⁰ Indeed, a study of male consumption in Hanoverian England suggests that men actively consumed goods that scholars have mistakenly coded as feminine. ⁴¹ The demand for men's wigs should alert historians to the dangers of conflating femininity and consumerism.

If the diffusion of the wig illuminates any large-scale transformation in consumption, that transformation was not a sudden, pervasive consumer revolution so much as a steady and unmistakable expansion in a particular type of commodity: the accessory. Economist Ben Fine has argued against the notion of consumer revolution by stressing limits on clothing production in eighteenth-century England, yet even he acknowledges the spectacular growth of the market in secondary accessories. ⁴² Although fine fabric and other luxury goods remained beyond the reach of the multitude, cheaper secondary accessories became widely available and, to the consternation of many a moralist, helped to change the appearance of the middling and to some extent the lower orders. In the universe of European goods, such accessories came to inhabit an intermediate zone of consumption wedged between aristocratic luxury and popular necessity. While luxury consumption showed no signs of abating in the eighteenth century, the intermediate zone of consumption expanded dramatically to become a prominent and permanent feature of late modern economy and society. ⁴³

Studies have demonstrated that this middle zone of consumption became increasingly crowded with clothing, furniture, and household furnishings. The example of the wig brings into focus two equally important constellations of intermediate goods: hygienic accessories (toiletries, or what are known today as "personal care products") and portable accessories such as snuffboxes, canes, fans, watches, and umbrellas. ⁴⁴ Relating to bodily function and appearance—and appealing to both sexes—such accessories became so much a part of the daily lives of eighteenth-century men and women that it would be difficult to write a history of the self in the Enlightenment without acknowledging their proliferation.

Having observed the rise of the wig as an object of consumption, it is important that we go on to explore the wig's sociocultural significance. How do we explain the demand for wigs in the eighteenth century? What meanings were attributed to wigs as they spread through the upper and middle sections of the social hierarchy? At first glance, it appears that the wig's diffusion can be explained in terms of consumer emulation. Formulated by Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen at the turn of the twentieth century, the emulation thesis holds that men and women's desire to consume stems principally from social rivalry, that is, from the desire to maintain or enhance social status through material display. In modern society, Veblen theorized, the upper class sets the standard of consumption for subordinate classes, which strive to imitate that standard in their pursuit of status.

In modern civilized communities the lines of demarcation between social classes have grown vague and transient, and wherever this happens the norm of reputability imposed by the upper class extends its coercive influence with but slight hindrance down through the social structure to the lowest strata. The result is that members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend their energies to live up to that ideal. ⁴⁵

Thanks to the work of sociologist Norbert Elias, the emulation thesis holds a particularly prominent place in the historiography of Old Regime France. Alluding directly to Veblen, Elias explained how "conspicuous consumption" was "an indispensable instrument in maintaining social position, especially when—as is actually the case in this court society—all members of the society are involved in a ceaseless struggle for status and privilege." For Elias, who considered France the quintessential court society, elite values and forms of consumption "constantly percolated downwards" to inferior groups who attempted to imitate their superiors. ⁴⁶

Deeply influential, Elias's trickle-down model for the diffusion of courtly norms and behavior has been used to explain patterns in clothing and furniture consumption in the Old Regime, ⁴⁷ and it may also help to account for the success of the wig. Indeed, given that during the reign of Louis XIV the fashion press itself underscored the influence of the court and the imitative process by which court fashion spread to successive social groups, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that emulation at least partially explains the wig's social trajectory. ⁴⁸ There was, after all, an ancient association between hair and status. In classical Greece and Rome, where hair symbolized supernatural power, rulers distinguished themselves by displaying abundant and flowing locks. This kind of symbolism continued to operate in the Middle Ages, when long-haired kings and chieftains disgraced political rivals and criminals alike by cropping their hair or shaving their heads. ⁴⁹ Such age-old understandings of hair were not lost on eighteenth-century men of letters. In a passage that would be paraphrased by other dictionaries and encyclopedias, the entry for hair in Diderot's Encyclopédie stated:

Long hair was a mark of honor and liberty among the ancient Gauls ... Among the first Franks, and in the beginning of our monarchy, it was a characteristic of princes of the blood ... Whereas long hair was the mark of royal blood, other subjects wore their hair cut short around their head. Some authors claim that haircuts were more or less short, depending on the degree of inferiority in the ranks; in such a way that the monarch's head of hair became, so to speak, the yardstick of social rank [l'étalon des conditions]. ⁵⁰

If length of hair was a marker of status, the rise of the wig seems easily explicable. In fact, at least one eighteenth-century fashion historian, Guillaume Molé, suggested that Louis XIII had tapped into this ancient association between hair and status when, as a young man, he let his natural hair grow long. As he grew older and began to suffer from premature balding, he resorted to wearing a wig, a practice that his courtiers were quick to emulate. ⁵¹ Once the wig became fashionable at court, the emulation thesis holds, it would have become an object of desire among lesser social groups—country nobles, merchants and professionals, and even well-off artisans—who sought to confer a degree of dignity upon themselves by imitating their superiors. To borrow the language of economists, the wig seems to have been a much-desired "positional good"—a good that positions its owner or user in a given social order.

There is doubtless much truth to this interpretation of the wig's meaning. In 1666, on the far side of the English Channel, Samuel Pepys, a man of middling background and great social ambition, bought an expensive wig and "made a great show of it" in church. ⁵² Pepys's diary makes it clear that showing off his new wig was part of a larger strategy by which he aimed to enter respectable society. Similarly, it appears that wealthier artisans in France wore wigs to bolster their social position with respect to other city dwellers. How else to interpret the fact that Parisian baker Jean-Baptiste Hornet donned his wig before making rounds to settle accounts with his customers? ⁵³ In all likelihood, he believed that his wig would enhance the cut of his figure and help him make a more imposing impression on his debtors. And how else to read the warning delivered by a disgruntled journeyman to a master baker that the journeymen "had had his hat during the past year, and now they wanted his wig"? ⁵⁴ In this verbal threat, the wig undoubtedly served as a symbol of status.

Pictorial evidence also suggests that the wig was a positional good. One 1776 fashion pamphlet depicts men of descending social and professional status wearing different kinds of wigs or no wigs at all. ⁵⁵ The seigneur, bishop, nobleman, magistrate, financier, abbé, bourgeois, and doctor all wear wig styles appropriate to their station. The artisan and gardener have natural hair under their hats. And the bald beggar exhibits an absence of hair altogether. Likewise, the 1783 engraving by J. L. Delignon titled Le Seigneur chez son fermier contrasts a bewigged landlord, dressed in fashionable attire, and a wigless tenant, bald and wearing an out-of-fashion coat. ⁵⁶ If, as these images suggest, the wig was principally a marker of social status, a positional good, then it is not unreasonable to conclude that its downward social diffusion was driven by a process of emulation.

We should be careful not to press the emulation thesis too far, however, for the thesis has taken a severe beating in recent years. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers alike have criticized status-oriented approaches to consumption for being too narrow. ⁵⁷ It is not so much that the emulation thesis is wrong per se, critics argue, but that in light of the plurality of meanings that consumers attribute to possessions, the thesis is insufficient. In addition to social identity, goods communicate messages about sexuality, nationalism, ethnicity, and individual identity; they trigger memory, mark stages in the life cycle, and bestow special meaning on particular rituals and ceremonies. Thus, in pursuing the meaning of the wig, it may be helpful to consider interpretations beyond simple status-based theses. Freeing the wig from the constraints of the emulation thesis opens up new possibilities of interpretation.

One way to get at additional meanings attributed to wigs is to consider how taste leaders characterized specific changes in wig fashion. By "taste leaders," I mean self-proclaimed experts who, participating in the century's flourishing public sphere, used the printed word to influence consumer practices or to shape understandings of changes in fashion. ⁵⁸ The taste leaders under consideration here fall into two groups, neither of which had strong ties to the court. The first group includes writers, from philosophes to fashion critics, who published on the subject of wigs in the second half of the eighteenth century. It does not include the small number of moralists who denounced wigs in categorical terms, completely dismissing them as a sign of mounting luxury and effeminacy. ⁵⁹ The focus here is on the many more writers who engaged with wig fashion, seeking to interpret and guide it even as they criticized it. Such writers implicitly legitimated the wig's diffusion as they offered a range of commentary on its meaning.

Embedded in the world of commercial practice, the second group of taste leaders—producers of wigs themselves—brings us closer to comprehending how ordinary consumers understood wigs. It is possible to learn how wigmakers shaped the meaning of their products by analyzing the advertisements they placed in the burgeoning corpus of provincial and Parisian newspapers. By the late eighteenth century, in addition to long-time Parisian newspapers such as the Mercure de France, France produced around forty provincial advertiser-newspapers, which according to one estimate reached a readership of between 50,000 and 200,000, "and maybe many more." ⁶⁰ In advertising their goods and services in provincial and Parisian newspapers, wigmakers articulated a particular set of consumer values that aimed to enhance the appeal of wigs.

How did taste leaders characterize wigs and wig fashion? Unlike their forebears in the fashion press of the late seventeenth century, taste leaders in the second half of the eighteenth century seldom spoke of wigs in terms of status or emulation. Instead, they distanced the wig from its courtly origins and from issues of social competition to set it in three alternative contexts: convenience, nature, and physiognomy. To discuss wigs in such contexts was to carve out a set of consumer values that evoked a new age of consumption.

The concept of "convenience" (la commodité) was central to the eighteenth-century luxury debates. ⁶¹ Defending luxury against traditional critiques, pro-luxury writers strategically linked luxury to the less threatening notion of convenience, which they defined as the quality by which an object provided ease and pleasantness or relieved one of physical burden. Associating luxury with its benign cousin convenience, apologists argued that luxury posed no moral threat to society.

Emphasis on convenience was not limited to the luxury debates, however. Indeed, a similar language of convenience was employed to define a host of new consumer goods, from novel forms of architecture and furniture to clothing and, yes, wigs. ⁶² In the case of wigs, eighteenth-century commentators asserted that wearing someone else's hair was far more convenient than caring for one's own. "The convenience of wigs has made wearing them a nearly universal custom," observed classicist and teacher Jean Deguerle. ⁶³ If Deguerle failed to mention why he thought wigs were so convenient, the Encyclopédie méthodique explained that wigs possessed several advantages over natural hair, "one of the greatest of which is to relieve men of daily cares." ⁶⁴ In an age when civility manuals prescribed the perpetual cleaning, combing, and styling of hair, it was easier to have your head shaved and don a wig than to groom your own hair, particularly when your local wigmaker could service your wig for a small fee. ⁶⁵

The concept of convenience inevitably arose whenever taste leaders contrasted the full-bottom wigs of Louis XIV's reign to the new styles introduced since the Regency. The dominant style from the 1 ⁶⁶ 0s to 1715, the full-bottom reached its height, literally, in the second half of the reign of Louis XIV. An impressively large and dramatic wig, it was marked by several distinguishing characteristics: a central part, high side peaks, and, most notably, long, flowing hair down the front, side, and back. (See Figure 1 .) Full-bottoms were so large that one wig could require up to ten heads of hair.66 From the Regency on, however, the wig diversified. Long wigs continued to be worn for courtly ceremonies, but they were joined by an array of shorter and neater styles, including perruques en bonnet, à bourse, à noueds, and à cadogan. ⁶⁷ The mid-century account book of the Rouen wigmaker Le Tellier lists several different models within a range of prices. ⁶⁸ The least expensive (12–20 livres) and most popular was the perruque en bonnet, the round wig that many gentleman farmers, bourgeois, doctors, surgeons, and guild masters wore; ⁶⁹ this was the wig that Rousseau adopted when he quit Parisian high society for the simple life of the countryside. The perruque à bourse or bagwig was also popular and relatively inexpensive, although the kingdom's elite were known to wear elegant versions of it as well. The most expensive wig that Le Tellier sold was the perruque à noueds (27–35 livres), which featured knotted hair hanging down the back. ⁷⁰ All of these models marked a general evolution in the wig away from the large and expensive full-bottom toward smaller and less expensive styles. Even when hair on the new wigs remained long, it was pulled back in tails or knots or stuffed into bags.

Figure 1: The full-bottom wig. Pierre Mignard, Portrait de Colbert de Villacerf, c. 1685. Reproduced by permission of La Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.

According to Diderot, who penned the article "perruque" for the Encyclopédie, the old full-bottom wigs of Louis XIV's reign were excessively puffy, ridiculously long in front and in back, and prohibitively expensive (up to a thousand écus). Nothing about them compared favorably to the "convenient" wigs of his own day. ⁷¹ Countless other fashion critics agreed, including the prolific observer of French customs Louis-Antoine Caraccioli: "the wigs of the last century had an immensity that covered at least half of the body: those of today have a much more elegant air." ⁷² Size no longer mattered; convenience and style were what distinguished contemporary wigs. ⁷³

To drive their point home, taste leaders drew an analogy between the wig and another consumer good that diversified after the reign of Louis XIV: the book. ⁷⁴ The full-bottom wigs of Louis XIV's reign were commonly called in-folios, in reference to the bulky, oversized tomes of the past. Louis-François Métra, for example, used this metaphor to describe the famous wig collection of Antoine-Gabriel de Sartine, navy minister and former lieutenant-general of the Paris police, a position that involved the regulation of the capital's book trade: "The collection of his wigs, in-folio as well as in-quarto and in-douze, large and small format, some more square than others, amount to sixty or eighty pieces of the most beautiful selection and highest quality." ⁷⁵ To fashion critics, in-folios—both the books and the wigs—seemed excessively formal, expensive, heavy, and unwieldy. By contrast, the smaller, lightweight, cheaper, and more portable models that were introduced after the reign of Louis XIV stood for a new age in which convenience had taken the place of excessive baroque display. One fashion editor portrayed this transformation in the following terms: "Men of the court, Merchants, and Financiers judged that it was time to abdicate great heads of hair. Louis XIV, who loved them so much, no longer existed: a young prince ascended the throne, and the in-folio wigs were disgraced. New editions were made, which were more convenient, more portable; hence the wigs à queue, à bourse, à l'Espagnole, à la Financière, & others whose names have not come down to us." ⁷⁶

The bagwig, which Diderot called "the most modern" of all, became emblematic of this transition. ⁷⁷ (See Figure 2 .) Describing the convenience of post-Regency wigs, fashion critic Guillaume Molé explained that the bagwig was at first worn only while traveling, running morning errands, or getting around in the rain—all informal activities that required a great deal of movement; it was considered "indecent" to appear in a bagwig before les Grands or in public ceremonies. ⁷⁸ But because "the invention appeared convenient," editor Conrad Walther explained, "men desired to make use of it." "With time, bagwigs acquired some consideration: they were allowed to appear in the best company" and eventually became the standard for fashionable dress. ⁷⁹ Thus, the wig that toppled the in-folio had its origins not in the stiff and conspicuous public ceremony of the royal court, but rather in the less formal hustle and bustle of daily life under the Regency. ⁸⁰ By mid-century, the bagwig had become one of the most popular wigs on the market, a sign for taste leaders of the material and aesthetic progress of their age. ⁸¹

Figure 2: The bagwig. Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704–1788), Autoportrait, pastel sur papier, Amiens, Musée de Picardie (cliché x). Reproduced by permission.

The idea of convenience was not simply a product of the fertile imaginations of fashion observers. Looking to attract customers, wigmakers themselves exploited the concept in advertisements. In growing numbers of provincial and Parisian newspapers, wigmakers touted the "convenience" that new designs and technical improvements afforded wig wearers. Echoing a medical literature that sought to free the body from constrictive attire, one type of convenience that wigmakers were particularly keen to underscore was the comfort and free movement of the head. ⁸² In typical fashion, the Parisian wigmaker Neuhaus announced the invention of a new "elastic skin that grips the wig" without any irritating loops or garters. "This skin has the softness of velvet, & does not at all inconvenience the head, of which it follows every movement." ⁸³ While Neuhaus's wigs were promoted as flexible and soft, other advertisements featured a range of design modifications that enhanced convenience: ointments that attached wigs to the head without melting or otherwise bothering clients, wigs stripped of ribbons that cut off the circulation of blood or irritated the skin, and wigs (à mouvement naturel) that were comfortable enough to sleep in.

In a similar vein, wigmakers designed wigs to withstand the inconveniences of bad weather. One master was reportedly working on a kind of sports wig that protected the wearer while keeping its shape in water and wind, the perfect accessory for "hunters, horse people, travelers, couriers, men of the sea, finally for all those who expose themselves to inclement weather." Likewise, "economical wigs" made of iron thread were designed to withstand rain, wind, and hail, all without causing the wearer any pain or discomfort. ⁸⁴

Far from an object of Veblen-style conspicuous consumption, then, the post–Louis Quatorze wig was, according to taste leaders, an accessory of convenience. Rather than casting the wig as a positional good, taste leaders highlighted the physical ease and personal utility that present-day wigs afforded. While fashion critics argued that the convenience of wigs signaled the coming of a healthy, utilitarian aesthetic of consumption, wigmakers exploited the concept of convenience to market wigs to what had become a relatively broad customer base. Indeed, the emphasis that taste leaders placed on convenience suggests that utility should not be understood, as many economists today understand it, as an innate quality that inheres in certain goods, but rather as a consumer value that has its own history. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the value of utility was represented as one of the principal goals of consumption, even consumption well above the level of subsistence.

It is tempting to interpret this shift toward convenience in wigs as an early sign of what J. C. Flügel famously dubbed "the great masculine renunciation." ⁸⁵ According to Flügel, after the French Revolution, bourgeois men rejected extravagant dress in favor of simple, dark, sober costume that symbolized the denial of beauty and pleasure and the acceptance of duty, self-control, and work. Women, by contrast, continued to wear colorful and ostentatious clothing, becoming the principal agents of conspicuous consumption. Elaborating on Flügel's theory, historians of dress and gender have extended its reach deeper into the eighteenth century, relating it to prerevolutionary prescriptions for greater sexual differentiation and for a sharper division between a male public and female private sphere. ⁸⁶

Although the wigs of the eighteenth century did indeed stand in marked contrast to the extravagant full-bottoms of the past, their evolution challenges variations on the Flügel thesis. First, taste leaders who applauded the convenience of new wigs did not aim to renounce pleasure and embrace sobriety. On the contrary, convenience was meant to enhance pleasure and beauty, setting newly designed wigs apart from their clumsy, hulking forebears. The explicit renunciation of an older courtly aesthetic in the name of convenience preceded and was qualitatively different from the more austere renunciation that would occur in the nineteenth century. Further, convenience was not a strictly gendered concept, since women as well as men were expected to participate in the new aesthetic. Little in the language of taste leaders suggests that convenience was a distinctively masculine attribute. ⁸⁷ Current research on the French Revolution provides additional reasons to avoid projecting nineteenth-century gender ideology back onto the prerevolutionary period. The consensus that the Revolution by its very nature excluded women from politics and the public sphere, relegating them to a separate private realm, has been fatally challenged. ⁸⁸ The most exclusive forms of masculine citizenship, it now appears, developed only very late in the Revolution (during the Directory, but especially during the Consulate and Empire) in reaction to women's civil gains. Work on masculinity and dress also reveals that the deepest transformations in masculinity occurred when French society was militarized under Napoleon. ⁸⁹ This historiographical shift has important implications for gender and consumption in the prerevolutionary period, because it makes it difficult to speak of a monolithic "Age of Revolution," spanning from Rousseau to the 1804 civil code, that founded the ideology and practice of separate spheres. Indeed, in terms of consumer culture, the emphasis on convenience suggests that the period from the Regency to the Revolution should be treated as a distinct epoch, one that was moving beyond courtly forms of consumption but was not necessarily dominated by the rigid understandings of gender that would prevail in the next century.

Convenience was not the only value stressed by eighteenth-century taste leaders. They also described the evolution of the wig in the context of nature. Historians have noted that from the 1770s into the Revolution, the concept of nature, which was central to Enlightenment philosophy, spilled into the commercial domain, where new clothing fashions were taking on a simpler, natural look. ⁹⁰ Even wigs, which we might expect to have been associated with Old Regime artifice and frivolity, were cast in this discourse of nature. François-Antoine de Garsault, for example, began his manual on the craft of wigmaking with the usual disparaging remarks about full-bottom wigs. In the infancy of the craft, he wrote, "people were so enamored [of wigs] that they could never have enough hair on their heads. The wigs were immense in width & in length, & sooner depicted the face of a bear or lion than the form of a human head." By the 1760s, however, the art of wigmaking had completely changed. To make a wig today, Garsault explained, "is to construct a kind of skin, through which one attaches and arranges curly or straight hair so artistically that, when placed on the head, it appears to be real. It is a matter here of imitating la belle nature." ⁹¹ The phrase la belle nature invoked an eighteenth-century aesthetic principle by which the arts were understood to represent the reality of nature. For Garsault, wigmakers were imitating artists who were depicting nature.

Hardly dabblers in aesthetic theory, wigmakers characterized their work in similar if simpler terms: they claimed that they were imitating nature directly. In fact, more than any other single theme, the theme of nature dominated wig advertisements. As early as 1754, well before the shift to more natural dress, a wigmaker named Sarriere claimed that his wigs "perfectly imitate natural hair"—a claim that would become a formula for wig advertising in the final decades of the Old Regime. ⁹² This trend was exemplified by the entrepreneurial efforts of a master wigmaker named Chaumont, the guild's most active advertiser, who moved his shop to the fashionable St. Honoré quarter. In a series of advertisements from the 1760s to the 1780s, Chaumont promoted several technical innovations that allowed him "to imitate nature perfectly in all wigs, notably those with bags." ⁹³ Most of these innovations involved making the front piece of the wig, the toupet, meet the forehead and temples in such a seamless manner that the bewigged man's hair would look entirely natural. By reducing the thickness of the toupet (using a technique that, Chaumont claimed, had won the approval of the Royal Academy of Science) and artfully effacing its front edge, Chaumont produced wigs that "make allusion to the best planted head of hair." ⁹⁴ By 1788, Chaumont had discovered a way to eliminate all edging and fabric from his toupets so that "one could not distinguish any difference between the uniformity of Nature and the perfection of the Craft." ⁹⁵

Wigmakers' ubiquitous appeal to nature points to two conclusions. First, it suggests a modification of the argument put forward by Jennifer Jones, that the fashion press of the late eighteenth century assuaged moral concerns about the excesses of fashion by relegating fashion to a circumscribed feminine domain. ⁹⁶ The case of the wig suggests that fashion was tamed not so much by turning it into a purely feminine affair but by rooting consumer goods—masculine as well as feminine—in nature. In a world that was changing with worrisome speed, the idea that goods were somehow natural may have provided consumers with a degree of ontological security. Second, the appeal to the natural suggests a connection between consumerism and authenticity, a connection that goes to the very heart of contemporary Western consumer culture. ⁹⁷ Although in the eighteenth century, moralists such as Rousseau criticized the growth of consumption by positing the existence of a natural authentic self that was increasingly vulnerable to corruption and luxury, the concept of natural authenticity did not necessarily undercut the century's consumption. On the contrary, in the case of wigs, taste leaders actively appropriated the idea. Equating authenticity with bodily verisimilitude, they asserted that new techniques of production not only repaired nature's defects or enhanced her endowments, but made such improvements look genuinely natural. False hair now looked authentic. In this respect, the wig came to be considered as much a prosthesis as an article of fashion. As one critic put it, "Our way of dressing ourselves, of styling our hair, & of wearing our shoes, is more analogous to the construction of our body than it has ever been." ⁹⁸ Authenticity was to be grounded in the body, including its hair. In an age when the literati sought natural forms of religion, history, law, and philosophy, taste leaders promoted a similar turn in the commercial domain, establishing an odd yet enduring link between modern consumption and the pursuit of authenticity.

If the new wigs of the eighteenth century were deemed more convenient and natural than the old in-folios, they were also understood to be more suitable for expressing individual character. Indeed, when framing the meaning of wigs, taste leaders consistently alluded to physiognomy, "the art of knowing the moeurs, the inclinations of people through inspection of the face." ⁹⁹ It has been claimed that after receiving much attention in the seventeenth century, physiognomy fell out of favor until the 1770s, when Lavater and others turned the art into a science. ¹⁰⁰ Yet, far from stagnating earlier in the eighteenth century, the physiognomical belief that facial features expressed one's moral and psychological essence thrived in works of literature and in the domain of commerce. ¹⁰¹ Well before Lavater's works appeared, taste leaders emphasized that instead of burying men's faces, as had the old in-folios, the wigs of their day expressed individual character by accenting one's facial "air." ¹⁰²

Ambitious wigmakers seized on this idea, publicizing how particular techniques of production enhanced their customers' physiognomies. In a series of advertisements in the Mercure de France and Annonces, affiches et avis divers, the Parisian wigmaker Rochefort announced that after many years of research, he had invented a new kind of mannequin for the head that allowed him to size wigs "with Mathematical precision, following different individual tastes; so that they naturally follow the contours of the face." The new mannequin not only helped Rochefort make wigs that were comfortable and natural-looking but allowed him as well to tailor his wigs to the individual faces of his clients. ¹⁰³ Rochefort was not the only wigmaker to publicize the physiognomical advantages of his wigs. Chaumont claimed that by allowing his clients to choose a hairstyle from among several that "varied according to different tastes," he was better able to capture the particular "air" of his clients' faces. The editors of the newspaper L'Avant-Coureur acclaimed his technique: "If hair is styled to go with physiognomy & bring it out, one must commend the method of Sr Chaumont, Wigmaker, which we have already advertised in our pages. The Sr Chaumont never sizes any wig for which he has not designed the facial contour. In the presence & following the choice of individuals, he then sketches the hairstyle which suits their physiognomy the best." ¹⁰⁴ Claiming to highlight the faces of their clients, wigmakers exploited the individualistic thrust of physiognomy for commercial purposes. ¹⁰⁵

The physiognomic attributes of wigs were taken to satiric extremes by Jean-Henri Marchand, a Parisian lawyer and fashion advocate known for his wit. Stung by the decision of the editors of the Encyclopédie not to assign him the entry on wigs, Marchand published his own L'Enciclopédie perruquiere in 1757. The purpose of this short treatise was to observe "every physiognomy and the relationship it should have to a type of hairstyle that is proper to it. People who are happy, sad, crazy, serious, bilious, the young, the old, the healthy, the sick, the pimply, the fat, the skinny, the large-foreheaded, the small-foreheaded ... should not be styled in a uniform way." Accordingly, Marchand illustrated forty-five different styles of bag- and tiewigs designed for particular faces and personalities. (See Figure 3 .) Matching each style with a face was intended to help the individual reader select the right wig for himself: "Every man eager to turn himself out will have this work within reach, and will choose the form which most flatters the air of his face." ¹⁰⁶

Figure 3: Physiognomic wigs. J. H. Marchand, L'Enciclopédie perruquiere, nos. 4, 12, 44. Reproduced courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

By attaching personalized names to the bewigged men whom he illustrated, furthermore, Marchand seems to have been playing satirically with the world of feminine fashion. Just as women's hairstyles and accessories were marketed with fanciful names that expressed individual character traits ("gentle smile," "honest composition," "restlessness"—indeed, the front of a women's hairdo was even called the "physiognomy"), ¹⁰⁷ Marchand labeled his illustrations ("M. A Ladorable," "M. A Laparesseuse," "M. A Linconstance," and so on) to match particular styles of side curls with the personalities of the men who wore them. The joke lay in the fact that such curls were male, not female, but the concept of physiognomy had so infused wig fashion that the implicit comparison was not too far off the mark.

There is no doubt that among the stars of the Enlightenment, hairstyle as well as dress became a medium for the expression of self. Rousseau, as we know, stepped down to a round wig to reflect his social independence; Jean-Baptiste Greuze sported idiosyncratic side curls (pigeon wings with spirals) to signal his creative genius; Benjamin Franklin, upon arriving in France in 1776, abandoned ornamental dress and wig in favor of plain clothes and a cap of marten fur; Diderot preferred to be portrayed without a wig; and Marie-Antoinette caused a stir when she allowed herself to be painted as an individual woman without any signs of royal station. ¹⁰⁸ The social and cultural life of the wig reminds us that while the period's greatest personalities created identities through the flagrant use of fashion and hair, countless ordinary men were routinely encouraged to accentuate their selves on a less conspicuous level by wearing a wig that was tailored to their face and personality. ¹⁰⁹

By organizing the meaning of wigs around the idea of character, taste leaders shifted public attention from social identity to individual identity. In theoretical terms, they downplayed the notion of the social or relational self, which orients itself to the external values around it, and emphasized instead the idea of the reflective self, which consciously pursues the project of its own construction. ¹¹⁰ If the self of the royal court had primarily been relational, insofar as courtiers tailored their behavior to meet imperatives of social decorum, that invoked by eighteenth-century taste leaders was primarily reflective. Hence consumer guides such as the Manuel de la toilette et de la mode contrasted old luxury goods that merely "announced" the consumer's "rank" with present-day goods that signaled the consumer's own aesthetic "genius." ¹¹¹ Developed and publicized by Enlightenment taste leaders, the concept of the reflective self would go on to become an integral part of late modern consumer culture. ¹¹²

The wig straddled two overlapping forms of consumption in Old Regime France. The first form, courtly consumption, expanded dramatically in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whereas feudal modes of consumption had been directed toward domestic service and hospitality, courtly consumption involved greater spending on durable and semidurable consumer goods. ¹¹³ At court, where gatherings of nobles made consumption more visible, aristocrats used luxury goods to signal their rank to one another and to express their collective elevation above the rest of society. Indeed, it was the capacity of luxury goods to communicate high rank that justified them. As Pierre Nicole observed, "The splendor that goes with the position of the great ... is what makes them honored by most people. And since it is good that they be honored, it is just that grandeur be allied to external magnificence." ¹¹⁴ The large, expensive full-bottom wig was part of this world of socially instrumental magnificence.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, wigs had spread beyond elite circles to enter an intermediate zone of consumption between aristocratic luxury and popular necessity. This pattern of social diffusion may partially be explained in the familiar terms of Veblen and Elias, as an emulation-driven extension of courtly consumption. Yet a closer look at the meanings attributed to wigs suggests that there was more going on than the Veblen-Elias model indicates—that taste leaders formulated new understandings of consumption as they responded to an expanding intermediate zone of goods. ¹¹⁵ Remaining curiously silent about social status and rank—matters treated explicitly in earlier commentary on dress—eighteenth-century fashion critics and wigmakers used the printed word to shift public attention to an alternative set of consumer values based on convenience, nature, and physiognomy. By linking the wig to such values, taste leaders distanced the accessory from its aristocratic origins, to place it in a strikingly modern context.

Such a context can be called modern because the values forged by taste leaders have become basic features of contemporary consumer culture. But it was also modern insofar as it contributed to the construction of a new form of historical consciousness that valorized present over past. Taste leaders publicized the idea that the French were living through a turning point in history, a moment in which society was liberating itself from an archaic material culture and embracing a new consumer aesthetic. ¹¹⁶ Even the once courtly wig was recast as an agreeable product of a distinctively new and better age. Superseding conspicuous display, the concept of convenience endowed post–Louis Quatorze wigs with a utilitarian purpose that signified the material and moral advances of the present day. Perfecting the natural appearance of wigs distinguished them from the artificial styles of the past and rendered them suitable for an epoch that placed a premium on authenticity. And attention to physiognomy personalized wigs, accentuating the individual (rather than the social) character of the faces they framed. The wig, therefore, was not simply an aristocratic luxury good brought low. As its reach extended deeper into eighteenth-century society, it took on meanings that evoked a new age of consumption.

This is not to suggest a Whig history of the wig. It is important to treat the language of taste leaders critically. Despite the rhetorical claims of fashion commentators and wigmakers, the evolution of the wig did not conform to a linear history of progress, individualism, and liberty. First, it should not be inferred from the absence of class in taste leaders' language that consumers were somehow freed from long-standing imperatives of social status. Nobles continued to wear ceremonial wigs at Versailles, where etiquette kept courtly notions of rank and status alive. ¹¹⁷ Wealthier urban men, meanwhile, purchased wig models that best suited their particular profession, social station, and financial capacity. And everywhere the bewigged minority established a sharp visual distinction between its respectable self and the wigless majority. Convenience, nature, and individuality were values that most French men could not afford to express. Thus, in practice, wigs continued to mark social status even if taste leaders were reluctant to characterize wigs of their day as positional goods. ¹¹⁸

Further, a hierarchy did exist within the seemingly classless language of taste leaders. Although they rejected an older, allegedly unsophisticated consumer culture in which goods directly signaled social rank, taste leaders implicitly constructed a new model of distinction in which the status meanings of consumption would be mediated by principles of utility, authenticity, individuality, and, one could add, cleanliness, taste, and health. ¹¹⁹ Goods would continue to indicate status, but they wou