a synecdoche designating a female clothes horse. As Laver explains:
[I]t is hard for us to realize that, before the invention of the fashion plate, information concerning the latest fashion was so hard to come by that Marie-Antoinette's dressmaker found it worth while to travel the Continent every year in a huge berline containing dolls dressed in the latest modes de Paris.
Modern fashion trends associated with industry praxis--i.e., the tendency of the masses to duplicate upper-class haute couture--have been traced specifically to the court of Louis XIV of France, who "may rightly be said to have made and unmade France, and France the civilized world, so far as matters of art and fashion are concerned." This is completely consistent with the view that fashion continues to change cyclically according as elites' preferences and tastes change.
Throughout the eighteenth century, "in spite of wars, there was a continuous interchange of fashions" between France and England, Europe's leading military and fashion-conscious nation-states. It was in this period t
...