Affordable Luxury and the 18th-Century Fan

The article "Luxe," or Luxury, in Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie asserts that "[w]ithout an abundance of luxuries, men of all ranks believe themselves to be poor." If this appears a mere truism to us today, it was to 18th -century observers a sign of radical change overtaking their society. Luxury itself was nothing new, of course. It had long been a crucial mode of social differentiation, enforced by sumptuary laws and the marketplace. Access to luxury goods was the prerogative of the aristocracy, as was the possession of the requisite knowledge to use these goods; the elusive rules of fashion. The fan, for instance, was surrounded by a code of genteel use that gavei rse both to deportment manuals instructing young women in the "Six Positions of the Fan" and to satires, such as Joseph Addison's mock advertisement in The Spectator for a "Fan Academy" to train "young women in the exercise of the fan, according to the most fashionable airs and motions that are now practiced at court.[1]

During the 16th and 17th centuries, new and exotic goods being imported to Europe--silk and porcelain from China, calico fabrics and tea from India, coffee from Africa--became enormously fashionable in the courts of Europe. Over the course of the following century, these same wares gradually became accessible, and then quickly indispensable, to customers at lower social echelons. Louis Sébastian Mercier, the great chronicler of daily life in Paris at the end of the ancien régime, recorded his astonishment at the unprecedented expansion of luxury in his time. "The Parisian who does not have an income of ten thousand livres, " he wrote, "ordinarily has neither bedsheets, nor towels nor undershirts; but he has a repeater watch, mirrors, silk stockings, lace."[2] Mercier could have added fans to the list of small extravagances that had recently been adopted by working-class consumers. Cissie Fairchilds, in her research on "populuxe" goods in the 18th century, tracked the growing market for fans. In 1725 only about five percent of lower-class households in Paris owned a fan; by 1785 that number had increased more than sixfold, to nearly thirty-five percent. Similar patterns of spectacular growth can be seen in the ownership of umbrellas, snuff boxes, and gold watches, the kind of accessible luxuries that were the visible markers of gentility.[3]

 

The fan had completed its conquest of polite society, but the very existence of published deportment manuals teaching its proper use invites the question of whether the fan sill retained its aristocratic associations. Mercier's professed amazement at the finery of working-class Parisians in no way implies that he was deceived as to their actual social position. Like their watches, silk stockings, and lace, fans had become the kind of "aspirational purchase" that defined upward mobility for -lower-class consumers. Given this market trajectory, it is not surprising to note that fans began to lose their cultural caché at the end of the 18th century. The large, elaborately worked and delicately painted fans of the mid-century period gradually gave way to smaller fans with more restrained decoration, in keeping with the prevailing neoclassical taste, and painted fans fell entirely out of favor at the end of the century. New accessories such as the cashmere shawl replaced fans as the markers of fashion and luxury, as can be appreciated by a survey of female portraiture of the time. When painted fans eventually came back into vogue in the mid-19th century, it was under the banner of ancien régime revivalism. In both style and subject matter, the fan makers of the 19th century closely followed 18th-century Watteau and François Boucher. Though nostalgia for the aristocratic tastes of the past lingers even today in the appreciation of 18th-century fans, our richer understanding of the social and material conditions under which they were produced gives us a broader appreciation of their place in an economy of taste, fashion, and luxury that closely resembles our own. 

[1] The Spectator 102 (June 27, 1711).

[2] Louis Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, ed. Jean-Claude Bonnet, 2 vols. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 1088.

[3] Cissie Fairchilds, "The production and marketing of populuxe goods in eighteenth-century Paris," in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York; Routledge, 1993), 230. Fairchilds' statistics are based on household inventories. 

Heather MacDonald, A Painting in the Palm of Your Hand, Brochure, 2007.

VIDEO ASSETS  

Dallas Museum of Art~Read more about the 2007 DMA exhibition A Painting in the Palm of Your Hand.