RECOMMENDED READING: Catherine Lanoë, “Les ateliers de la parure. Savoirs et pratiques des artisans en France XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles” 16 09 2024

Based on the study of gloves, fans, and wigs, this work articulates the history of body adornment and the history of craftmanship to shed light on the technical bases of the “culture of appearance” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through the exploitation of a corpus of archives and manuscript collectibles, the material diversity of the articles and that of their social appropriations, guided by the inventiveness of the artisans, is revealed. They are not exclusively manual workers; they develop abstract thoughts about products and are entrepreneurs. Given the Industrial Revolution, they thus promoted a sequential, segmented, and delocalized production organization based mainly on female labor use.