"In these essays, ranging in period from the 1670s to the 1790s, and in place from England to Ireland, France, Germany, America, and Barbados, we can trace ways in which dress articulates, literally in material terms, transformations in the economic conditions, social relations, and ideological constructions of the culture of the eighteenth century. Throughout the collection, there is an emphasis on the ways in which clothing could function to appropriate, explore, subvert, and assert alternative identities and possibilities."--BOOK JACKET.