The political and industrial revolutions in Europe and America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and their restructuring of society created profound changes in the style, production, consumption and representation of fashion. Our exploration of the resulting modern practices and attitudes towards dress and the body addresses in particular new definitions of gender and race, including masculine dandy style, the Cult of True Womanhood and celebrity courtesan, struggles for representation in art and media and garments of resistance, and the creation of a designer-centered fashion system. Though we focus on Paris as the model modern city of spectacle and shopping, we also consider the spaces of New York City (Ladies’ Mile, Merchant’s House, Tenement Museum) and the US in general, particularly in relation to enslaved and immigrant labor in the production of cotton and clothes. Readings include Steele’s Fashion & Eroticism, Hollander’s Sex & Suits, Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, Murrell’s Posting Modernity and Sorisio’s The Body in the Body Politic, as well as excerpts from the novels of Balzac and Zola.