"In nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, fashion--once the province of the well-to-do--began to make its way across class lines. At once a democratizing influence and a means of maintaining distinctions, gaps in time remained between what the upper classes wore and what the lower classes later copied. And toward the end of the century, style also moved from the streets to the parlor. The third in a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress, and accessories, Fashioning the Nineteenth Century focuses on this transformative period in an effort to show how certain items of apparel acquired the status of fashion and how fashion shifted from the realm of the elites into the emerging middle and working classes--and back." The essay, specifically, addresses the idealistic theory of clothes as invented by Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s as a dense and fascinating conflation of Romantic Life-Philosophy and Nature-Philosophy, and charts the influence of his "Sartor Resartus" on Emerson's first book "Nature", New England Transcendentalism, and New World democratic culture at large.
Garment of the Unseen: The Philosophy of Clothes in Carlyle and Emerson
NORI, Giuseppe
2014-01-01
Abstract
"In nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, fashion--once the province of the well-to-do--began to make its way across class lines. At once a democratizing influence and a means of maintaining distinctions, gaps in time remained between what the upper classes wore and what the lower classes later copied. And toward the end of the century, style also moved from the streets to the parlor. The third in a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress, and accessories, Fashioning the Nineteenth Century focuses on this transformative period in an effort to show how certain items of apparel acquired the status of fashion and how fashion shifted from the realm of the elites into the emerging middle and working classes--and back." The essay, specifically, addresses the idealistic theory of clothes as invented by Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s as a dense and fascinating conflation of Romantic Life-Philosophy and Nature-Philosophy, and charts the influence of his "Sartor Resartus" on Emerson's first book "Nature", New England Transcendentalism, and New World democratic culture at large.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
