Fashion Forges the Nation: Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe with Dr. Alicia Weisberg-Roberts

Fashion constitutes an important part of culture in every nation throughout history, and dressing is a vital expression of one’s individual personality in this modern world. Most people in Hong Kong wear western clothing, and looking into its roots of development is an interesting subject to explore.

In this lecture, Dr. Alicia Weisberg-Roberts will trace the development of dress in Western Europe, particularly in France and Britain, during the eighteenth century. She will examine the role of clothing and the textile trades in developing and defining national manufactures, political allegiances, and religious identity. Using garments, prints, drawings, painting and tracts from the period between 1660 and 1812, we will explore the impact of protectionism, industrialization and dissent in a period of burgeoning global exchange and international ferment.

Speaker
Dr. Alicia Weisberg-Roberts is an Honorary Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong where she teaches courses on European art and culture, including the history of fashion. Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, and a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Yale Center for British Art. Her research focuses on the intersections of art, science and sociability in early-modern visual and material culture. She was co-editor and co-curator of "Mrs. Delany and Her Circle" (Yale, 2009) and has also contributed essays to "Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill" (Yale, 2009); "Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740 to 1840" (Yale, 2011), and "Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge" (University of Michigan Press, 2014). She is currently working on a book on cultural value of drawing in eighteenth-century France, as well as a project on the representation of non-European diplomats in seventeenth-century
Rome.