Fashion and Textile History

Publications

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Description: The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338
The Age of Undress explores the emergence and meaning of neoclassical dress in the 1790s, tracing its evolution from Naples to London and Paris over the course of a single decade. The neoclassical style of clothing—often referred to as robe à la grecque, empire style, or “undress”—is marked by a sheer, white, high-waisted muslin dress worn with minimal undergarments, often accessorized with a cashmere shawl. This style represented a dramatic departure from that of previous decades and was short lived: by the 1820s, corsets, silks, and hoop skirts were back in fashion.

Amelia Rauser investigates this sudden transformation and argues that women styled themselves as living statues, artworks come to life, an aesthetic and philosophical choice intertwined with the experiments and innovations of artists working in other media during the same period. Although neoclassicism is often considered a cold, rational, and masculine movement, Rauser’s analysis shows that it was actually deeply passionate, with women at its core—as ideals and allegories, as artistic agents, and as important patrons.

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Print publication date March 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300241204
EISBN 9780300272536
Illustrations 181
Print Status in print
Description: An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design,...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00254
In 1915 the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) embarked upon a mission to energize the American textile industry.  Curators sought to innovate a distinctly “American” design idiom drawing on a more universal “primitive” language. Ethnographic objects were included in study rooms; designers gained access to storage rooms; and museum artifacts were loaned to design houses and department stores. In order to attract designers and reluctant manufacturers, who quickly responded, collections were supplemented with specimens including fur garments from Siberia, Persian costumes, and Javanese textiles. This book positions the project at the AMNH in the broader narrative of early 20th-century design education in New York, which includes the roles of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Newark Museum.
Print publication date October 2013 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300199437
EISBN 9780300264562
Illustrations 111
Print Status in print
Description: The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750 to 1820
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00308
Dress is the most fleeting of the arts, subject to the arbitrary dictates of fashion. It is also, however, the art that relates most closely to our lives, both as a reflection of our self-image and, in the words of Louis XIV, as "the mirror of history." This book examines English and French fashion from 1750 to 1820 by studying the art of the period, and it shows how changes in dress reflected social, political, and cultural developments in the two countries.

Closely analyzing a wide range of visual sources—including portraits and history paintings, sculpture, drawings, caricatures, and fashion plates by such artists as Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, David, and Ingres—Aileen Ribeiro describes the development of fashion during this period. She investigates, for example, how English and French attitudes toward formality and informality were reflected in their dress; how revolution and war affected what was worn; how the concept of fashion was brought to a wider audience, partly because of technological advances in the production of textiles and partly because of a new ideology that linked dress and politics in a movement toward democratization; and why by the end of the era French styles dominated women's fashions and English tailoring dominated men's fashions. A large part of the book looks at the different ways that England and France appropriated the dress of the past for a variety of political, social, and cultural reasons, not only in fashion but also in social events, in art, and in official and ceremonial costumes.

This book—the first to cover the history of dress from the point of view of the artist—is essential reading for those interested in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century art or fashion.

Some editorial changes have been made by the author to this electronic version.

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Print publication date August 1995 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300062878
EISBN 9780300269598
Illustrations 241
Print Status out of print
Description: The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00264
By the end of the 16th century, Europe, Africa, and Asia were connected to North and South America via a vast network of complex trade routes. This led, in turn, to dynamic cultural exchanges between these continents and a proliferation of diverse art forms in Latin America. This monumental book transcends geographic boundaries and explores the history of the confluence of styles, materials, and techniques among Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas through the end of the colonial era—a period marked by the independence movements, the formation of national states, and the rise of academic art.

Written by distinguished international scholars, essays cover a full range of topics, including city planning, iconography in painting and sculpture, East-West connections, the power of images, and the role of the artist. Beautifully illustrated with some three hundred works—many published for the first time—this book presents a spectacular selection of decorative arts, textiles, silver, sculpture, painting, and furniture. Scholarly entries on each of the works highlight the various cultural influences and differences throughout this vast region. This groundbreaking book also includes an illustrated chronology, informative maps, and an exhaustive bibliography and is sure to set a new standard in the field of Latin American studies.
Author
Print publication date January 2006 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300120035
EISBN 9780300261028
Illustrations 511
Print Status out of print
Description: European Tapestries in the Art Institute of Chicago
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00351
This fascinating and enlightening book presents a rich variety of European tapestries from the Art Institute of Chicago's collection. These exquisite tapestries include medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque examples, manufactured at almost all the major centers of production in many of the foremost workshops. Among the works discussed are The Annunciation, a Renaissance masterpiece designed by an artist in the circle of Mantegna; Autumn and Winter, based on designs by Charles Le Brun; and The Elephant, woven after a design by Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer. An international team of scholars explain the history of this previously unpublished collection and offer new designer and workshop attributions, design and source identifications, and provenance information.

High-resolution images of these magnificent works are provided throughout the text and can easily be enlarged for careful study.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2008 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300119602
EISBN 9780300273823
Illustrations 331
Print Status in print
Description: Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830
John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00205
Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

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Author
John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)
Print publication date February 2007 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300116595
EISBN 9780300256710
Illustrations 89
Print Status out of print
Description: History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture 1400–2000
Pat Kirkham (Editor), Susan Weber (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00219
Spanning six centuries of global design, this far-reaching survey is the first to offer an account of the vast history of decorative arts and design produced in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and the Islamic world, from 1400 to the present. Meticulously documented and illustrated, the volume covers interiors, furniture, textiles and dress, glass, graphics, metalwork, ceramics, exhibitions, product design, landscape and garden design, and theater and film design. Divided into four chronological sections, each of which is subdivided geographically, the authors elucidate the evolution of style, form, materials, and techniques, and address vital issues such as gender, race, patronage, cultural appropriation, continuity versus innovation, and high versus low culture.

Leading authorities in design history and decorative arts studies present hundreds of objects in their contemporary contexts, demonstrating the overwhelming extent to which the applied arts have enriched customs, ceremony, and daily life worldwide over the past six hundred years. This ambitious, landmark publication is essential reading, contributing a definitive classic to the existing scholarship on design, decorative arts, and material culture, while also introducing these subjects to new readers in a comprehensive, erudite book with widespread appeal.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Pat Kirkham (Editor), Susan Weber (Editor)
Print publication date December 2013 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300196146
EISBN 9780300255973
Illustrations 817
Print Status in print
Description: Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity
Gloria Groom (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00356
This fascinating volume is the first to explore fashion as a critical aspect of modernity, one that paralleled and many times converged with the development of Impressionism, starting in the 1860s and continuing through the next two decades, when fashion attracted the foremost writers and artists of the day. Although they have depicted fashionable subjects throughout history, for many artists and writers, including Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Émile Zola, Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, fashion became integral to the search for new literary and visual expression.

In a series of essays that examine fashion and its social, cultural, and artistic context during some of the most important years of the Impressionist era—years that also gave birth to the modern fashion industry—a group of fifteen scholars, drawn from five interdisciplinary fields, examine approximately 140 Impressionist-era artworks, including those by dedicated fashion portraitists, in light of the rise of the department store, new working methods for designing clothing, and new social and technological changes that led to the democratization of fashion and, simultaneously, its ascendance as a vehicle for modernity.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Gloria Groom (Editor)
Print publication date November 2012 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300184518
EISBN 9780300275087
Illustrations 457
Print Status out of print
Description: Ingres in Fashion: Representations of Dress and Appearance in Ingres’s Images...
For more than half of the nineteenth century, French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) depicted the rapidly changing appearance of the fashionable woman with meticulous attention to detail and with rare perception and empathy. Working in a period that witnessed the development of a consumer society and the beginnings of couture, Ingres charted in his portraits how clothes were worn and what part they played in definitions of identity and status. This book explores for the first time the ways in which clothing, accessories, and fabrics define and display women in Ingres’s portraits. With more than 150 illustrations that include the artist’s portraits, fashion plates, portraits by contemporaries, and surviving items of costume, the book illuminates Ingres’s work and its relation to the social and artistic discourse of his time.

Eminent dress historian Aileen Ribeiro analyzes in detail Ingres’s attitudes, his skill in depicting clothing, and how he portrays the real and idealized woman in his paintings and drawings of the fashionable mainstream—the grandes dames of elite society, the newly opulent bourgeoisie, English visitors to Italy, and family and friends. Ribeiro also devotes a section of the book to the part played by textiles and accessories in Ingres’s images of bathers and odalisques.

Some editorial changes have been made by the author to this electronic version.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date March 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300079272
EISBN 9780300272369
Illustrations 173
Print Status out of print
Description: Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00323
This first book-length study on kanthas published outside of South Asia focuses on two premier collections, one assembled by the legendary historian of Indian art, Dr. Stella Kramrisch, the other by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, leading proponents of self-taught art. Created from worn-out garments imaginatively embroidered by women with motifs and tales drawn from a rich regional repertoire, kanthas traditionally were stitched as gifts for births, weddings, and other family occasions.

Innovative essays by leading scholars explore the domestic, ritual, and historical contexts of the fascinating quilts in these collections—made between the mid-19th and mid-20th century in what is today Bangladesh and West Bengal, India—and trace their reinterpretation as emblems of national identity and works of art.
Author
Print publication date December 2009 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300154429
EISBN 9780300270549
Illustrations 270
Print Status in print
Description: Mrs. Delany and Her Circle
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00085
At the age of seventy-two, Mary Delany, née Mary Granville (1700–1788), embarked upon a series of nearly a thousand botanical collages, or paper mosaics, which would prove to be the crowning achievement of her rich creative life. These delicate hand-cut floral designs, made by a method of Mrs. Delany’s own invention, vie with the finest botanical works of her time. More than two centuries later her extraordinary work continues to inspire.

Although best known for these collages, Mrs. Delany was also an amateur artist, woman of fashion, and commentator on life and society in 18th-century England and Ireland. Her prolific craft activities not only served to cement personal bonds of friendship, but also allowed her to negotiate the interconnecting artistic, aristocratic, and scientific networks that surrounded her. This ambitious and groundbreaking book, the first to survey the full range of Mrs. Delany’s creative endeavors, reveals the complexity of her engagement with natural science, fashion, and design.

The book includes a video demonstrating some of Mrs. Delany's "paper mosaick" techniques (see chapter 11).

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Print publication date December 2009 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300142792
EISBN 9780300252941
Illustrations 289
Print Status out of print
Description: Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00327
Twice imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre, French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) faced an artistic and personal crisis as the political and cultural values he had embraced crumbled in the mid-1790s. This strikingly original book examines the crucial period of David’s artistic career as he struggled both to "save his neck" and to recast his identity in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth examines David’s work in the context of the larger cultural and social formations emerging in France and offers a fascinating new perspective on his paintings and on French artistic culture at an important moment in its history.

The book begins with a close examination of the work David produced while in prison. Lajer-Burcharth first considers the artist’s self-representations, focusing on Self-Portrait and Abandoned Psyche, and addresses his crisis of individual identity. She goes on to look at David’s effort to redefine himself as a history painter after the Terror and at his engagement with the collective memory of the Revolution. In her analysis of the broader search for a new republican identity, the author frames her discussion around David’s Sabine Women, the sketches for which he had prepared in prison, and places special attention on the privileged role of women and femininity as signs that both David and other citizens employed to establish distance and difference from the Terror. The book concludes with a brilliant interpretation of David’s unfinished portrait of Juliette Récamier and its complex relation to the process of cultural reinvention of the self as a function of desire.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date October 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300074215
EISBN 9780300272314
Illustrations 172
Print Status out of print
Description: Small-Great Objects: Anni and Josef Albers in the Americas
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00113
Small-Great Objects presents a remarkable look into the art-collecting practices of two of modern art's most widely influential figures, Anni (1899–1994) and Josef (1888–1976) Albers. Their impressive collection of over 1,400 objects from Latin America, namely Mexico and Peru, represents a conscious endeavor that goes well beyond that of a casual hobby, displaying a deep appreciation for the art, textiles, and overall ingenuity of the ancient American world. This insightful book draws on primary-source materials such as the couple's letters, personal papers, and archival photographs—many never before published—and demonstrates their conviction that these Prehispanic objects displayed a formal sophistication and bold abstraction that defy the prevalent conception of the works as "primitive." Moreover, it shows how the Alberses spread their appreciation of the ancient world to others, through their teachings, their writings, and their own art practices.
Print publication date March 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300225693
EISBN 9780300232523
Illustrations 56 color + 18 b/w illus.
Print Status in print
Description: Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00331
Protest fashion from the Vietnam War years is widely familiar, but today few are aware that dramatic fashion and textile designs served as patriotic propaganda for the Japanese, British, and Americans during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945). This fascinating book presents hundreds of examples of how fashion was employed by those on all sides of the conflict to boost morale and fan patriotism.

From a kimono lined with images of U.S. planes blowing up to a British scarf emblazoned with hopeful anti-rationing slogans, Wearing Propaganda documents the development of the role of fashion as propaganda first in Japan and soon thereafter in Britain and the United States. The book discusses traditional and contemporary Japanese styles and what they revealed about Japanese domestic attitudes to war, and it shows how these attitudes echoed or contrasted with British and American fashions that were virulently anti-Japanese in some instances, humorously upbeat about wartime deprivations in others. With insights into style and design, fashion history, material culture, and the social history of Japan, the United States, and Britain, this book offers unexpected riches for every reader.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Print publication date December 2005 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300109252
EISBN 9780300272260
Illustrations 356
Print Status out of print
Description: Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry Between Paris and New York
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00269
With a revelatory analysis of how the postwar French tapestry revival provided a medium for modern art and a model for its discourse and marketing on both sides of the Atlantic, Weaving Modernism presents a fascinating reexamination of modernism’s relationship to decoration, reproducibility, and politics. Tapestry offered artists a historically grounded medium for distributing and marketing their work, helped expand the visibility and significance of abstraction at midcentury, and facilitated modernism’s entry into the dominant paradigm of the postwar period. K. L. H. Wells situates tapestry as part of a broader “marketplace modernism” in which artists participated, conjuring a lived experience of visual culture in corporate lobbies, churches, and even airplanes, as well as in galleries and private homes. This extensively researched study features previously unpublished illustrations and little-known works by such major artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, and Frank Stella.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date March 2019 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300232592
EISBN 9780300264289
Illustrations 105
Print Status in print
Description: Women Designers in the USA, 1900–2000: Diversity and Difference
Pat Kirkham (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00208
This stunning book celebrates the many contributions women designers have made to American culture over the past century in such fields as textiles, ceramics, graphics, furniture, interiors, metalwork, fashion, and jewelry. It includes designers from the arts and crafts and modernist movements, Native American and African American cultures, the post-World War II era, craft and “ethnic” revivals in the 1970s and 1980s, and the world of today. Many famous designers are discussed, including Eva Zeisel, Maria Martinez, Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, Edith Head, Clare McCardell, Bonnie Cashin, Elsa Peretti, and April Greiman, as well as less well-known designers.

The book features seventeen essays by such eminent scholars as Valerie Steele, Ellen Lupton, Cheryl Buckley, and Edward S. Cooke, Jr. A timeline offers readers a broader context within which to understand the developments discussed in the text, as does Eileen Boris’s chapter “Women in the United States, 1900–2000: Social Change and Changing Experience.” In addition, an essay by Pat Kirkham and Lynne Walker explores such fascinating issues as the differing gendered nature of the various areas of design, training, and education, support networks, “race,” class, cultural traditions, and the diverse ways in which women came to be, practiced as, and experienced being designers.
Author
Pat Kirkham (Editor)
Print publication date January 2002 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300093314
EISBN 9780300255980
Illustrations 454
Print Status out of print