Form and Fashion: Nineteenth-Century Montreal Dress

Terry A. Crowley is an associate professor of history at the University
of Guelph.

This book is not about dress, but about dresses, not about fashion, but
about the evolution of middle-class feminine costume in 19th-century
Montreal. Photographs of artifacts from the McCord Museum’s
outstanding collection of 19th-century women’s attire are so
exquisitely presented in the volume’s first section that the dresses
hardly need to be viewed in person to appreciate their finest qualities.


This catalogue for a museum exhibition highlights the strengths and
weaknesses of North American museology. The once held truism that the
best museums collected the best specimens has been found to be false.
The past has now broadened to include more than the upper-middle class
who once supported these institutions and directed their collections
policies. Nevertheless, curators have difficulties in adjusting to a
more balanced approach because they operate within a professional
international community of their own.

By choosing to align her study with art history, McCord textile curator
Jacqueline Beaudouin-Ross avoided confronting new realities. Her work
concentrates on the internal dynamic in bourgeois fashion changes in the
Atlantic world. Skilfully combining study of Notman photographs with
illustrated newspapers and magazines, Beaudouin-Ross contributes to
costume history in the narrower rather than the broader sense. By asking
questions outside the fashion tradition and positioning her inquiry
squarely within the history of the middle class, the author of this book
might have elucidated our understanding much more fully than she has
managed.