Fashion in bloom: exploring the presence of artificial flowers in the credit records of an 18th-century French fashion merchant

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• Zara Kesterton (Faculty of History)
• Monday 05 February 2024, 13:00-14:00
• Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

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In recent decades, historians have acknowledged the role that women played in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Current scholarship also suggests that fashion was a means through which haptic, economic, and practical knowledge was shared among women. This paper focuses on one particular fashion accessory – the artificial flower – to explore its contribution to our understanding of women’s knowledge of botany in 18th-century France. An analysis of the receipts preserved in the credit records of France’s most famous fashion merchant, Marie-Jeanne [Rose] Bertin (1747–1813), demonstrates high levels of specificity in the flowers that women chose to adorn their outfits. Seventy-five different types of flowers are mentioned using their vernacular names, suggesting that knowledge about a wide variety of flowers was exchanged between fashion merchants and their clients during conversations about clothing. This paper therefore casts the fashion merchant’s shop as a site of botanical knowledge generation and exchange.

This talk is part of the Cabinet of Natural History series.

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