Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Kate Haulman, Tulane University

The title of Linda Baumgarten's learned and accessible book on early American dress contains an apparent contradiction: clothes generally cover, and disclose only selectively. Yet as Baumgarten demonstrates in a volume beautiful enough to be considered a precious artifact itself, clothes reveal quite a lot about both their wearer and the historical moment in which they are worn. Rich and contextual descriptions, full of sharp insights and curious questions, accompany the stunning full-color photographs. This is a scholar who knows her clothes.	1
Drawing from the impressive collection she helped to assemble in her role as curator of textiles and costumes for Colonial Williamsburg, Baumgarten places garments that span the social spectrum and often skirted the Atlantic rim "into the context of the human beings who made, purchased, wore, and saved" (p. viii) them. Informed by the work of theorists such as Alison Lurie and Grant McCracken, she considers clothing a "language"—albeit one less formal and rule-bound than written or spoken words—and "reads" items of dress individually and collectively. Treating dress as text allows her to translate eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sartorial codes that communicated position, occupation, sentiment, and many other messages not always easily understood, even at the time. Guiding the reader into this world of costume, the book's introduction and first chapter demonstrate a reflexive perspective about collecting and connoisseurship. Baumgarten displays a keen awareness of the ways her task is complicated by the halting and often tedious process through which costume collections are built, maintained, and assessed as well as by the varied and tangled paths items travel before coming to rest in places such as Colonial Williamsburg. Amid the sumptuous waistcoats and brocade gowns (items of elite dress that comprise the bulk of the collection) exist a barber's shaving apron and a slave's tax badge, as well as many examples of "fossilized fashion" (p. 31)—ceremonial garments that expressed dignity and formality through the incorporation of older elements of design.	2
Costume collecting gained momentum in the early American republic, when the garb of prominent members of the revolutionary generation acquired relic status. As Baumgarten recognizes, an artifact often illuminates the setting in which someone chose to preserve it more clearly than the one in which it originated. Still, historians should not forgo investigating a garment's original context and assessing the item's actual and symbolic value in its own time and thereafter. A host of written and visual sources, including portraits, engravings, history painting, newspaper accounts, novels, and such personal documents as letters and journals help to uncover the "myths and meanings of clothing" (p. 52) that are the focus of chapter 2. Anglo-American frontier garb that mimicked the amalgam called "Indian dress" (p. 69), characterized by hunting shirts and leather stockings, was seen as practical by Americans such as George Washington and James Fenimore Cooper and also conveyed ideals of masculinity such as expert marksmanship and rugged authenticity.	. . .