Taste and Textiles: Selling Fashion in Eighteenth-Century Provincial England

Abstract

Much has been written in recent years about the changing material culture of textiles in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, especially the rise of cotton textiles from India.¹ Imports varied greatly year on year, but they rose some 30 per cent in volume and over 150 per cent in value between the 1670s and 1740s.² Some have emphasised the part which this played in a broader transformation of domestic material culture: the early use of chintz and calico as furnishing fabrics coinciding with a growing emphasis on domestic comfort and decoration.³ Their impact was profound, Defoe famously complaining that they ‘crept into our houses, our closets, and bedchambers; curtains, cushions, chairs, and at last beds themselves, were nothing but calicos and Indian stuffs’. But he also noted the spread of cottons from ‘their floors to their backs; from the foot-cloth to the petticoat’.⁴ Both rich and poor followed the craze for printed cottons, which were increasingly used in petticoats, gowns, handkerchiefs and so on.⁵ Alongside imported silks, they were markers of status and fashionability. Such was their popularity that the government moved to ban the import (1700) and subsequently the wearing of printed calicos (1720). Whilst subverted by widespread smuggling of re-exported fabrics, these prohibitions are often seen as stimulating the British cotton industry by encouraging the development of mixed fabrics that acted as substitute status commodities.⁶