Illustrations and Tables  ix

Money and Measurements  xi

Acknowledgments  xiii

Introduction  1

1. Credit and Old Regime Economies of Regard  21

2. Critiques and Crises of the Credit System  56

3. Incredible Style: Intertwined Circuits of Credit, Fashion, and Sex  96

4. Credit in the Fashion Trades of Eighteenth-Century Paris  139

5. Fashion Merchants: Managing Credit, Narrating Collapse  195

6. Madame Déficit and Her Minister of Fashion: Self-Fashioning and the Politics of Credit  246

7. Family Affairs: Consumption, Credit, and the Marriage Bond  283

Conclusion. Credit is Dead. Long Live Credit!  316

Notes  329

Bibliography  383

Index  407

"If you want to understand how things really worked in the world of French Queen Marie Antoinette, then read this book. Behind the glitter and the glowing beauty stood the fashion designer who provided style and most important, credit, for the rich rarely settled their debts. With this masterful and fascinating study, Clare Haru Crowston lays bare a whole cultural system in which economics, fashion, marriage, and social distinction were intertwined in brilliant and ultimately fatal ways."—Lynn Hunt, author of Inventing Human Rights: A History

"Credit, Fashion, Sex is one of the most remarkable books that I have read in the past decade. It is a virtuoso performance that marshals interest in a staggering array of interconnected themes, among them gender and sex, capitalism and nonmaterial levers of power, the role of information and the pretensions of absolutism, the consumer revolution and stark inequality, fashion and anxiety, confidence and deceit. It shows us how understanding credit systems inflects the way we fathom everything else."—Steven L. Kaplan, author of Le pain maudit: Retour sur la France des années oubliées, 1945–1958

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