Fashion and freedom in the French Revolution

This article traces attempts to regulate dress during the French Revolution. It places them within a broader policy on consumption shaped by two contradictory notions: that consumers had a right to freedom of choice, and that goods had formative and didactic qualities - that is, that what you owned shaped what you were, and therefore consumers' purchases should be regulated for the good of society. The article traces the roots of these ideas to the eighteenth-century 'luxury debate', and shows how the Revolution's failure to regulate dress discredited the notion of the formative power of goods and allowed modern freedom of choice.