Mikael Alm, Sartorial Practices and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century Sweden: Fashioning Difference (New York & London: Routledge, 2022). 176 pp.

Mikael Alm’s book is a deep dive into the notions that characterised attitudes towards clothing in the late eighteenth century, a time when the established cor-relations between everyday dress and social order based on differentiation and regulations were challenged. Previous research on the period has shown a grow-ing tension between a traditional, highly regulated worldview, where social po-sition determined the individual’s sartorial choices, and an emerging modern consumer culture where wealth, wider access to fashion items, and the desire for personal expression through dress became increasingly prominent. People of the time acknowledged the inefficiency of sumptuary legislation and called for new, more drastic measures to maintain visible hierarchies. In 1773, the Swedish Royal Patriotic Society announced a prize competition in which answers were sought as to what advantages and possible disadvantages the introduction of a national dress would entail for Sweden. The responses, essays by approximately 65 writers, constitute the main source for Alm’s study. The essays illustrate widespread perceptions of how social order and sartorial practices were connected, and provide insight into a variety of individual imaginary worlds with personally coloured solutions to the clothing problem. The study is organised around the themes identified in the sources, resulting in three rich empirical chapters where the essay writers’ voices about social order, disorder in the sartorial world, and the importance of and means for maintaining visible differences in dress between groups in society are discussed in relation to each other and to current historical research. Although the source material is uniform, the content, which spans wide, sprawling fields, and presents contradictory, inconsistent arguments, requires deep insights into many aspects of the