CAA (Feb. 2014), Re-examining Fashion in Western Art, 1775–1975

[Addressing Fashion In Art (AFIA)]

Re-examining Fashion in Western Art, 1775–1975

Time: 2/14/2014, 2:30 PM—5:00 PM

Location: Hilton Chicago, 2nd Floor, Boulevard C

Chair: Justine R. De Young, Harvard University

The Historical Imaginary in Fashion and Art of the 1820s and 1830s 

Susan L. Siegfried, University of Michigan

A fascination with historical costume pervaded fashionable dress and the image culture that supported it in Europe during the 1820s and 1830s. The heightened awareness of historicity that this portends was accompanied by a new styling of dress, which artificially shaped the body and moved toward (standardized) geometric forms.  Modern fashion combined a continuous updating and a constant picking up of bits and pieces of the past (and of other cultures).  This phenomenon, often seen  as mere eclecticism, involved a mixing of disparate styles from a newly wide range of sources that needs to be examined in its own right, both as consumerist fantasy and an imaginary distinctive to the time.   The omnivorous proliferation and recycling of past times and distant places was particularly evident in serial costume lithographs, while painted images, themselves subject to the rhythms of the fashion trade, registered an inventive, even obsessive reworking of historical detail.   

The Mannequin de mode and the Monkey in Seurat's Grande Jatte

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Princeton University

Examining the initial critical reception of Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte 1884, this paper specifies how the term "mannequin," by now a customary designation for Seurat's figures in art historical writing, first emerged in response to this painting. The outrageous, offensive, or even obscene qualities many of the earliest viewers recognized in Grande Jatte derive in part from the way Seurat's static, graphic, underarticulated presentation of figures formally identified the endimanchés in the painting with a newly ubiquitous class of industrial object, the mannequin de mode. In particular, the life-size female standing in the painting's bottom right corner, leading her pet Capuchin, appeared as a vivid impersonation of a commercial display mannequin. Probing Seurat's infamous, if still little understood, decision to accessorize this figure with a monkey, I suggest that this incendiary pairing formalized a notion of imitation recognized simultaneously in evolutionary biology and an emerging sociology of fashion. 

Defying Fashion: Dress, Eroticism and Female Agency in Victorian Painting

Julie Codell, Arizona State University

While nineteenth-century French artists largely endorsed contemporary fashion, British artists took a different approach. Whistler designed his portrait subjects' clothes; Frederic Leighton and Albert Moore invented a classical dress suggesting a new eroticism of the unsegmented body antithetical to commercial fashion. Dante Gabriel Rossetti defied fashion without resorting to classical allusions. He bricolaged secondhand clothes and jewelry, rejected Victorian fashion principles of the ensemble and dress protocol and challenged the social symbolism of dress.  His female figures' "dis-ensembled" dress from no single period and or place suggested new fluid, deraciné identities tied to his working-class models. His mixtures of cheap and exotic goods paralleled and parodied displays in international exhibitions, museums and shops in a critique of the world of goods. His figures, wearing dress without legible social meanings, were not the femmes fatales often described by scholars, but rather agents of their own "eroticism of the unclassifiable."

Silencing Fashion in Early Twentieth-Century Feminism: The Sartorial Story of Suffrage

Kimberly Wahl, Ryerson University

At the end of the nineteenth century, fashion, art and feminism intersected in complex ways as 'New Women', Suffragettes, and Bohemians emerged as identifiable social categories. Ongoing debates  regarding the ‘feminine’ centered on these individuals and groups who challenged hegemonic gender roles for women; indeed, fashion often implicitly informed the public discourse surrounding them as each group established its own fashion identity/philosophy. By the turn of the century, ‘Artistic’ and bohemian expressions of female empowerment through the donning of loose, experimental garments stood in stark contrast to the conventionally fashionable and trim figure of the Suffragette.  This paper interrogates the complex and productive role of fashion in the artistic, literary and visual framing of the campaigns for suffrage—a phenomenon which has often been elided or trivialized in earlier accounts of Feminism.

Patterns of Masculinities: Fashion, Tailoring and the Male Body in New Objectivity Painting

Änne Söll, Universität Potsdam

The rapid development of ready-to-wear clothing around 1900—made possible by new measurement-systems—produced new conceptions of the body as a standardized object and prompted questioning of the idea of bourgeois male individuality. By examining 1920s men's fashion magazines and fashion manuals I will examine how this ambivalence is discussed and what solutions are offered. Further I will show how the idea of a measured male body is reflected in the work of Anton Räderscheidt, Max Ernst, Raoul Hausmann and Carlo Carra and will address the following questions: How do the industrialized cut and pattern of men's clothes appear in and affect images of men? What role does the male mannequin play? What is the relationship between the modern male body and modern clothes in depictions of men in the 1920s male avant-garde?