The Ceaseless Century

The full-page details and multiple views of costumes that appear throughout this elegantly designed volume truly highlight the luxuriousness, charm, and craftsmanship of the fashions in The Ceaseless Century. They also complement the history as told in the text of the ongoing and important influence of the eighteenth century on fashion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to the present moment. In the words of Richard Martin, “Without the possibility of an eighteenth-century persistence, we would be immersed headlong in an ordinary world of minimalism, austerity, and unmitigated reason in dress.” At the end of the twentieth century, when scruffy can hold sway over swagger, this tour through the past three hundred years declares an opulent option in taste that provides a pleasurable experience for both the historicist and the futurist.