George Washington, Slavery, and the New Politics of Style, 1743-1789 (Fashion: Visual & Material Interconnections)

This innovative study offers the first full-length account of George Washington as a figure shaped through dress, appearance, and the material politics of the 18th-century Atlantic world. Drawing on extensive archival, visual and material evidence-ledgers, tailors’ invoices, military orders, correspondence, and plantation records as well as portraits and surviving items of dress-Ballard demonstrates how clothing structured Washington’s self-presentation as planter, soldier, and emerging national leader. Foregrounding the labor and expertise of enslaved and indentured valets, spinners, weavers, hairdressers, and artisans, the book reveals how Washington’s sartorial life depended on systems of coercion and global trade.Ballard combines interdisciplinary methods from material culture studies, art history, Black studies, and fashion theory to reconstruct how Washington used clothing to navigate rank, authority, racial hierarchy, diplomacy, and reputation. George Washington, Slavery, and th