| Title: | Fashion Merchants |
| Original Title: | Mode, marchands et marchandes de |
| Volume and Page: | Vol. 10 (1765), pp. 598–599 |
| Author: | Unknown |
| Translator: | Courtney Wilder [University of Michigan] |
| Subject terms: |
Commerce
|
| Original Version (ARTFL): | Link |
| Rights/Permissions: |
This text is protected by copyright and may be linked to without seeking permission. Please see http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/terms.html for information on reproduction. |
| URL: | http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0003.128 |
| Citation (MLA): | "Fashion Merchants." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Courtney Wilder. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2015. Web. [fill in today's date in the form 18 Apr. 2009 and remove square brackets]. <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0003.128>. Trans. of "Mode, marchands et marchandes de," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 10. Paris, 1765. |
| Citation (Chicago): | "Fashion Merchants." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Courtney Wilder. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0003.128 (accessed [fill in today's date in the form April 18, 2009 and remove square brackets]). Originally published as "Mode, marchands et marchandes de," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 10:598–599 (Paris, 1765). |
Fashion merchants of both sexes are part of the mercers’ guild, who can participate in the same trade as they; but since this trade is quite extensive, the fashion merchants limit themselves to selling only all that which concerns men’s and women’s adornments and accessories, and what are called ornaments and embellishments . [1] Often they are the ones who position these things on clothing and invent the manner of doing so. They also make headdresses and attach them as hairdressers do. [2]
They take their names from their trade: because they only sell fashionable things, they are called fashion merchants .
These merchants became established and known by this title very recently, and only since they dispensed entirely with the mercers’ trade in order to take up that of fashions. [3]
Notes
1. The fashion merchants were also known as mercières en modes (fashion mercers) marchandes de frivolités (sellers of frivolities), faiseuses des modes (creators of fashion), or enjoliveuses (embellishers). See Jennifer M. Jones, Sexing La Mode : Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (New York: Berg, 2004), 91.
2. See the article for Mode (Fashion; 10:598), which ridicules the outlandish forms these headdresses often took.
3. The fashion merchants established their own independent guild in August 1776 through incorporation with the feather makers ( plumassières ) and artificial flower makers ( fleuristes ). See Jones, Sexing La Mode , 95, and Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675-1791 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 67-69. See also Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), in which she discusses at length the careers of several prominent marchandes de mode and their central role in eighteenth century economies of credit and fashion.