The Discreet Power of Nineteenth-Century Gloves

ABSTRACT Grenoble’s presentation of 300 pairs of embroidered leather gloves to Empress Eugénie in 1860 exemplifies the traditional use of gloves as soft power. But the huge increase in glove-manufacturing and glove-wearing in nineteenth-century France gave gloves greater influence than ever before. As a powerful tool of social discrimination, they could reveal much about the wearer’s class, character, habits and morals. Novelists and playwrights soon recognized gloves’ potent symbolism: many literary examples portray gloves as agents of seduction, corruption, deceit or humiliation. For some writers, gloves had the power to disturb. For others, they were emblematic of France itself.