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'“Fashion is to France what the gold mines of Peru are to Spain,” declared Louis XIV’s minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The statement may be apocryphal, but already by the 1670s, fashion and luxury goods were a source of wealth and “soft power” for the French state. The splendor of the French royal court at Versailles contributed greatly to French fashion prestige — or what critics called “French fashion hegemony over Europe.”'

This quote is from the virtual exhibition, PARIS: Capital of Fashion, at The Museum at FIT, from the section titled, Splendor of the Royal Court. The exhibition concluded on January 4 of this year, which is utterly exciting to me, because after all this time—I mean, French fashion is timeless, so my decade long pause would not make my research obsolete—it is fascinating to find so many people interested in exploring the history of fashion. I light up finding any reference of Louis XIV and find it encouraging to stumble upon others who are exploring his life in regard to the start of fashion as we define it in western culture. We're still a fairly rare breed, those drawn to fashion history, as I just learned from Valerie Steele that fashion is still considered frivolous in academia, but still, there's a handful of us out here.