This book conceives the role of the modern town as a crucial place for material and cultural circulations of luxury. It concentrates on a critical period of historical change, the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was marked by the passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional aristocratic luxury to a new bourgeois and even democratic form of luxury. This volume recognizes the notion that luxury operated as a mechanism of social separation, but also that all classes aspired to engage in consumption at some level, thus extending the idea of what constituted luxury and blurring the boundaries of class and status, often in unsettling ways. It moves beyond the moral aspects of luxury and the luxury debates to analyze how the production, distribution, purchase or display of luxury goods could participate in the creation of autonomous selves and thus challenge gender roles.

Content
1. Luxury, Gender and the Urban Experience Marjo Kaartinen, Anne Montenach and Deborah Simonton Part I : Markets and Opportunities 2. Milliners and Marchandes de Modes : Gender, Creativity and Skill in the Workplace Deborah Simonton 3. Gender and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century Grenoble : From Legal Exchanges to Shadow Economy Anne Montenach 4. Women in the Late-Eighteenth-Century-Copenhagen Luxury Trades Carol Gold 5. Feminisation and the Luxury of Visual Art in London’s West End, 1860-1890 Kemille Moore Part II : Metropole and Province 6. Men, Women and the Supply of Luxury Goods in Eighteenth-Century England : The Purchasing Patterns of Edward and Mary Leigh Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery 7. The Luxury Shopping Experience of the Swedish Aristocracy in Eighteenth-Century Paris Johanna Ilmakunnas 8. Gender and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century Catalonia : Town and Countryside Belén Moreno Claverías 9. Gender, Craftwork and the Exotic in International Exhibitions c. 1880-1910 Stana Nenadic Part III : Class and Status 10. A Feminine Luxury in Paris : Marie-Fortunée d’Este, Princesse de Conti (1731-1803) Aurélie Chatenet-Calyste 11. Favourites of Fortune : The Luxury Consumption of the Hackmans of Vyborg, 1790-1825 Ulla Ijäs 12. The "Díszmagyar" as Representation in the Andrássy Family in Late Nineteenth-Century Budapest Zsuzsa Sidó 13. The Luxury They Could Not Afford ? : Households of Workers in the Industrial Town of Drammen, Norway c. 1900 Hanne Marie Johansen Afterword : Gender, Luxury and Towns Revisited Anne Montenach, Marjo Kaartinen and Deborah Simonton