Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform

[Addressing Fashion In Art (AFIA)]

Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform
Kimberly Wahl

Becoming Modern/Reading Dress

University of New Hampshire Press
2013 • 240 pp. 51 illus. 6 x 9 1/4"
Fashion / History - 19th Century

$40.00 Paperback, 978-1-61168-438-4
$85.00 Hardcover, 978-1-61168-425-4

The impact of the Aesthetic movement on women and women’s fashion

In Dressed as in a Painting, Kimberly Wahl provides a lucid exploration of the interrelations between fashion, art, and Aestheticism during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although artistic forms of dress have been the subject of short studies before, no book has focused exclusively on Aesthetic dress and its various expressions in the visual cultures of Victorian Britain. More important, no book has attempted to investigate the gap between the material facts of artistic clothing as it was embodied on the wearer, and its presence as an idealized sartorial trope in the visual and textual print culture of the period.

• INTRODUCTION Origins and Issues
• Dress Reform and the Authority of Art in Victorian Aesthetic Culture
• Aesthetic Dress in the Work of James McNeill Whistler
• The Grosvenor Gallery: Context and Climate for Artistic Dressing
• Popular Culture and the Fashioning of Aestheticism
• The Artful Containment of the Aesthetic Female Body

Endorsements:

“If Aesthetic dress could stand simultaneously for sensibility and objectification, historical nostalgia and modernist reform, commodity culture and the rarefied realm of high art, Wahl demonstrates that as worn by women artists, patrons, and art viewers at the Grosvenor Gallery and beyond, it ultimately represented and enabled both cultural critique and a ‘flowering of female creativity.’ Dressed as in a Painting offers a vital foray into the creative acts of Victorian women.”
—Alison Syme, author of A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art

“Illustrated with images ranging from Rossetti and Whistler to the Lady’s Pictorial, Dressed as in a Painting reveals new insights into the complexities of Aesthetic dress in the late nineteenth century. Wahl shows how this art and design movement had a powerful social and cultural impact on feminine beauty, fashion, and mass consumption and how it ignited contemporary debates on health and feminism. This book is an elegant exploration of these artful fashions designed for individual expression and female authority.” —Alexandra Palmer, senior curator, Royal Ontario Museum