Earth Potter Costume – Habit de Pottier de Terre

This amusing costume engraving is from Nicolas Ier de Larmessin’s Les Costumes grotesques et les métiers or Suite of Fanciful Costumes. The work was published in Paris circa 1690. Most of the engravings offered from the work will be from the first printing (with later editions reversed or without backgrounds).

The images features a person composed or dressed in the tools and features of their trade. The images drew inspiration from the portraits done by Giuseppe Arcimboldo and popular prints of the time known as “Cries.”

Barthes noted that work was a product of “a society which was starkly hierarchical, in which fashion was part of a real social ritual. … A creation which is both poetic and intelligible, in which the profession is represented by its imaginary essence[;] in this fantasy, clothing ends up absorbing Man completely, the worker is anatomically assimilated to the respective instruments and in the end it is an alienation which here is described poetically: Larmessin’s workers are robots avant la lettre” (Barthes, The Language of Fashion, p. 20).

Provenance: Gilles Auguste Petit, Parisian milliner and hatmaker; Louis Becker ex-libris