Mutton Dressed as Lamb? Fashioning Age in Georgian England

Abstract

Abstract Despite an established literature on gender, consumerism, and dress, there is almost no research on fashion and the life cycle. Meanwhile, the historiography on aging has addressed stigma, physicality, and sexuality, though only tangentially the manufacture of femininity through clothes. This article links the two separate historiographies. It is concerned with the ongoing fabrication of mature femininity through fashionable clothes, and the paradoxes inherent in that performance. The misogynist attack on dressy older women was pungent, but mature women still had to clothe themselves. Accusations of frolicking in a lamb fashion were mortifying, but keeping up appearances was vital too. This article examines the interplay of age and fashion, re-creating the distinctive way women of the middling ranks and lesser gentry negotiated the pitfalls of dressing past their prime, charting a perilous course between indignity and scorn on the one hand and invisibility on the other. Perceptions of age and aging bore unevenly on women and men. Nevertheless, conviction about the decorum of female sartorial retirement once the blush was off the peach and savage portrayals of hideous physical decline were counterbalanced by the blandishments of the market itself. Cumulatively, the Georgian marketplace tended to endorse the public profiles of older women, suggesting a galaxy of imagined performances that overwhelmed the misogynist discourse arguing for their obliteration.

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