Calls for a national costume arose in various countries, often in the decades around 1800 as part of a growing nationalization of public opinion, but also earlier, as Enrico Wagner demonstrates. Sweden, somewhat surprisingly, seems to have led the nations of Europe in calling for a type of dress that would suit the nation’s identity, climate, and textile production, and not just follow French fashions, which were considered uncongenial and needlessly expensive. That argument, largely economic in nature, fits the ideology of Enlightenment Patriotism, with economic thinkers habitually denouncing expensive and frivolous imports and advocating economic self-reliance. There were also considerations of comfort, climate, health and hygiene, and a critique of the wasteful and fickle vanity of annual fashion changes. Yet, accompanying all this high-minded pragmatism, even at this early stage some symbolical value was expressed in the design: a national historicism that used historical chivalric designs, with slashed sleeves, narrow smocks and high collars.

Wagner traces such developments, not just in Sweden, but in Denmark and the German lands as well. In all these countries we notice, in shifting emphases, considerations of a national-economic or otherwise pragmatic nature, a certain creeping historicism in the design, and an initial tendency to see national dress also as a symbolic affirmation of the nation’s separate cultural identity.

The strongest evolution towards symbolical, culture-political identity-affirmation aspect can be observed in the German lands. Here it was not just court dress or formal dress for festive occasions that was at issue, but everyday garb also for the city-based middle classes. German sartorial politics were, much more than in Sweden and Denmark, overshadowed by the legacy of the sumptuary laws of earlier times, which proscribed certain textiles, colours or ornaments along lines of class and estate. The usual historical view is that public intellectuals like Ernst Moritz Arndt and Caroline Pichler advocated an “Old German costume” (loosely based on the iconography of portraits from the Dürer period) as part of a general nationalist turn that set in around the Befreiungskriege. Tight-waisted smock, open collar, soft beret, all that went along with the long hair parted in the middle that was sported by the likes of Turnvater Jahn, Hoffmann von Fallersleben or Hans Ferdinand Maßmann, and that earned German painters in Rome the nickname of “Nazarenes”. It was a deliberately nationalist signal in the fervent anti-Napoleonic agitation of the years post-1810, sported both by the young Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria and by the students at the Wartburg Feast in 1817. As such it has been analysed memorably by Eva Maria Schneider in her Bonn thesis of 2002, Herkunft und Verbreitungsformen der “Deutschen Nationaltracht der Befreiungskriege” als Ausdruck politischer Gesinnung – a benchmark also acknowledged by Wagner. What Wagner adds to this is a sense of the continuity linking Arndt back to an earlier agenda, evinced by the likes of Justus Möser, with pragmatic and egalitarian Enlightenment values: sensible and wholesome clothing without vain distinction-by-ornament. In tracing these continuities, the author profits from the comparative frame encompassing the Swedish and Danish neighbours. In his painstaking source research (periodicals feature prominently), Wagner felicitously applies an imagological analysis to the ambient, diffuse but strongly operative force of national stereotyping. The later eighteenth century increasingly defined national identities in terms of their (stereotyped, imputed) characters, temperaments and moral proclivities – of which dress ought to be a reflection. Thus, the virtuous traditional simplicity which is a guiding principle for German fashions operates by opposing itself to the frippery and vanity imputed to the French. It was not for nothing that the students at the Wartburg in 1817 burned not only books, but also corsets and wigs.

There were nonetheless moments when I felt that Wagner’s emphasis on the German-Danish-Swedish triangle and the developments from the eighteenth into the (very early) nineteenth century left certain meaningful and relevant things out of the picture. Wagner points out that his is the first comparatist, multinational study on the topic; but much of the European fashion debate was shaped in France, and France is only glimpsed as that other country from which Swedes, Danes and Germans begged to differ. A standard work like Alexander Maxwell’s Patriots against Fashion. Clothing and Nationalism in Europe’s Age of Revolutions has not made it onto the radar screen, possibly because it only appeared in 2014: Wagner’s book was originally a thesis defended in 2013.

A wider European contextualization would certainly have added resonance to Wagner’s survey. It was in Jacobin, Republican France, that the notion of a national uniform was seriously put forward as a means to establish a corporate identity, abolishing regional and social differences. Against that Jacobin background, Arndt’s tracts stand out as a form of hostile counterreaction. And with its style troubadour, post-1800 France had its own fashion of historicist nostalgia, slashed sleeves and all.

Also, while Wagner does reflect on the concept and Begriffsgeschichte of what the word “national” meant when applied to dress, I would have wished for a slightly more sustained probe. The “nation” has three semantic axes: synchronic, diachronic and social; the word stands for the separate specificity, for the historical permanence, and for the class-transcending community of that self-defining group. How the Sattelzeit realigned the equilibrium between these three dimensions is a complex process. An important part of it involved a folk-traditionalist return to vernacular (rather than chivalric) roots. By 1800 there was already a nascent tradition of plates and albums displaying the picturesque and romantic dress of common people, especially countryfolk. The Nordmandsdalen statue group depicting Icelandic, Faroese and Norwegian rustics in the grounds of Fredensborg palace goes back to the 1760s. Plates depicting shepherds in the Spanish mountains and peasants in the Dutch polders were increasingly popular after 1800; and in 1822 Felix Joseph von Lipowksy published a Sammlung Bayerischer National-Costüme. This entire vernacular turn is missing from Wagner’s analysis. His coverage of the nineteenth century does not reach very far beyond 1815, thus missing out on what would become the definitive paradigm in national dress codes, starting with George IV wearing a kilt when visiting Edinburgh in 1822 and culminating in the display of traditional costumes, as a national “brand”, in all the World Fairs of the second half of the century. A truly national dress for the southern German lands emerged in the form of Dirndl and Lederhosen, which had their counterparts in the Scandinavian lands in the various folkedrakt revivals there.

I regretted the absence of that wider context: post-1817, beyond the Northern Triangle, and including rustic traditionalism. Nonetheless Wagner’s argument is valuable and admirable in what it chooses to do. The social and political history of dress codes is developing into an exciting field of research, and Wagner’s book offers a major consolidation for it. Future scholars will be grateful to him.