Block's Dressing Up offers us a look into the love affair between American women and French fashion. The book begins with the rise of French fashion as a pan-European phenomenon in the eighteenth century before diving into the American/French fashion market. Beginning in the eighteenth century when emulating and consuming French fashion was a way of articulating a stance against British control, this connection continued throughout the nineteenth century and virtually defined the fashion of the Gilded Age in America.
Dressing Up is a consumer history, focusing on what American women were buying and how French fashion helped them articulate their space in American and international society. This was a period when suddenly American industrialists had money to burn and who looked to Europe, particularly France, as the epitome of taste and class. But this isn't just a story about Americans trying to emulate the French, it's also a story of how the tastes of American consumers influenced the production of French fashion houses, especially as American industrialist money became more and more tempting.
Block's writing is refreshingly clear and unpretentious. The book is full of gorgeous pictures of advertisements and photographs of extant garments from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's amazing costume institute, making it as much a pleasure to look through as it is to read. Block also proves very strong at connecting the history of fashion to the history of art—John Singer Sargent fans rejoice, he makes an appearance here, as he should.
The book does not connect as much to the material history of this fashion—who made it, where the materials came from, etc., which could have been a benefit, but otherwise I think it's a great insight into this period of fashion history.