George Sand and Fashion

The Musée de la Chemiserie examines George Sand through clothing, social codes and the circulation of fashion between Paris and Berry. Bourgeois styles associated with her metropolitan life are set against popular dress resembling that worn by characters in her country novels. Costumes preserved in Argenton-sur-Creuse show how influences from the capital reached feast days around Nohant while retaining distinctive regional features. Sand rarely followed fashion for its own sake, yet she understood when convention required her to adopt its forms. Her sociological, ethnological and historical interest in dress gives the exhibition a sharper purpose: garments reveal class, place and the ways individuals negotiated public identity within regional social history.