Contrary to the social and political impetus of the bourgeois toward increased privacy, the consumption of fashion in particular ran as part of a wide social current-being à la mode became a highly publicized statement in art as well as in clothing. To view art and to buy gowns one had to venture out into the public, into a commercial setting. Paintings were no longer exclusive to collections in haute bourgeois drawing rooms, and clothing was no longer individually commissioned from the comfort of one's own home. Therefore, art and fashion together began to leave the confines of private spaces and made the consumption of commodities public. It was also the time when the art market expanded significantly due to technical advances in the reproduction of artworks, the establishment of museums such as le Louvre (which became property of the French state in 1848), and the opening of commercial galleries by the Durand-Ruels and Bernheim-Jeune (late 1850s, early 1860s) in the French capital. The year 1868 saw "La Chambre syndicale de la confection de la couture pour dames et fillettes" establish the guidelines for the production and promotion of high fashion and the popularization of complex new fabrics through weavers such as Joseph Marie Jacquard and through the development of the sewing machine by men such as Thimonnier Barthélemy. Although fashion was produced elsewhere, too, it was this "Western" concept that eventually determined its global idiom and reception. Thus, there exists a shared point of origin due to socioeconomic foundations in western Europe. Correspondingly, art as an autonomous production of subjective expression not bound directly to ecclesiastical or monarchist decrees emerged through the foundation of a bourgeois culture after the European revolutions between 18, when artistic education, independent structures of display, and expanded commercial possibilities allowed for a new creation and distribution of art. The timing qualifies the term as denoting clothing that is produced according to a certain seasonal rhythm, in quantities large enough to have an effect on sartorial appearances within a society, that can be exported as a "style," and that is consumed according to a prescribed agenda. This is not to say that the notion of fashion did not exist previously. Fashion came into being with the advent of the couture industry in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a bourgeois audience began to demand constant change as an intellectual, aesthetic, and, above all, economic stimulus for modern times. This was not accidental, since the institution of fashion, as clothing that adheres to particular modes of production, representation, and consumption, was connected to the emergence of similar structures in the creation and dissemination of works of art. The concept of fashion's point of origin in the mid-nineteenth century is contemporary with a fundamental change in the market for works of art. When one considers "fashion," as distinct from "clothing," "costume," or "dress," it is as a socially shared concept of what is to be worn at a particular point in time rather than an esoteric, ritualistic, or utilitarian cover or decoration of the body.
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