This week, we investigate the historical fashion trends written about in an 1884 Harper’s Bazar article entitled “The Follies of Fashion.” Covering everything from Ancient Roman curling irons to Cleopatra’s donkey milk baths to “barbarous” steel corsets, we decipher fashion fact from fashion fiction.

Primary Sources

• Box for rouge and patches, 1750-55
• Jean de la Bruyère’s translation of The Characters of Theophrastus 
• Memoirs of Madame de la Tour de Pin
• Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia

Secondary Sources:

• Sarah Bendall’s Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England
• Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell’s Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
• Donkey Milk article in Beverages 
• Micaela Higgs’s “The Entirely False History of Tricking Men with Makeup”
• Kelly Olson’s “Fashion and Adornment,” in A Cultural History of Hair in Antiquity
• Valerie Steele’s The Corset: A Cultural History
• Caroline Weber’s Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution

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