This essay centers around the Journal of Luxury and Fashion, one of the most popular journals around 1800 in Germany. The focus lies on the modes of representation it currently uses – establishing a cluster of typification – and on the underlying models from art history: in three distinctive exemplary discussions, the author analyzes the Journal’s aesthetic schemes orientated on the genre of Interior/Room Pictures, on costume books like the Habiti antichi et moderni from Cesare Vecellio, and on „technical“ drawings commonly used in architectural sketches. Giving various examples from the Journal’s high quality copperplate engravings, and analyzing the interrelations of images and text paragraphs, the author’s aim is to put emphasis on how the Journal presents living as tactics of measurement and comparing/ normalization. Hence, it takes part in overall normalization and optimization processes that (gendered) subjects are confronted with in their everyday lives.
