‘Instructive types’ or mere ‘fancies’: assessing French fashion prints in the library of Samuel Pepys

Abstract

Within the library of the famed diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) at Magdalene College, Cambridge sits one of the largest surviving bound collections of seventeenth-century French fashion prints. Containing nearly one hundred illustrations of named and anonymous figures spanning from 1670 though the 1690s, the Pepys fashion prints remain an underutilised resource for seventeenth-century dress history. Using Pepys’s Habits de France and ‘Modes de Paris’, this article argues that these engravings served a dual purpose to Pepys and his contemporaries. In addition to reflecting long-standing trends in collecting images of historical and global fashions, the prints were considered in some capacity to accurately depict the current French modes. As such, they provided vital sartorial guidance to fashionable elites seeking to mimic Continental styles, cementing their importance in the visualisation and dissemination of dress in late seventeenth-century England.