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DRAPE
Amelia Rauser
Description: The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
NEOCLASSICAL DRESS is modern and formalist: its approach to the body is to swathe it in a thin textile that both constructs and reveals the form beneath...
Author
Amelia Rauser
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2020 The Author
Related print edition pages: pp.25-31
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338.2
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23219
Chapter subject tags:Dress, NeoclassicalCostume--History--18th centuryVigée-Lebrun, Louise-Elisabeth, 1755-1842
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DRAPE
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Description: Chapeau de Velours. Fichu quadrillé by Unknown
Chapeau de Velours. Fichu quadrillé, from Journal des dames et des modes, Costume Parisien, An 9, 1 décembre 1800. Hand-colored engraving, 18.1 × 11 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Neoclassical dress is modern and formalist: its approach to the body is to swathe it in a thin textile that both constructs and reveals the form beneath. Earlier gowns, with their figured silks and elaborate embellishments, created sumptuous and scintillating surfaces, and bodies were bolstered by stiffened stays and wide panniers in order to provide flat expanses to be decorated. By contrast, neoclassical dress is made of matte, cotton textile with an open, plain weave, and the dress easily falls into soft folds and drapes around the contour of the form beneath it (detail of fig. 56). This characteristic of muslin was sometimes the occasion for satire, as in James Gillray’s The Graces in a High Wind (fig. 16), which poses three elegant women as the Three Graces. Although they are clothed, these modern Graces are nearly as naked as their classical exemplars; the strong wind has blown their thin muslin into and around every nook and contour of their bodies. Women looped their dress over their elbows (fig. 17) or pushed it back with their arms or pulled it taut across their knees. It wrinkled and fell easily into folds that caught the light and created shadow. Its neutral color and subdued decoration encouraged the eye to read past the surface of the garment to the body beneath.
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Description: The Graces in a high wind: a scene taken from nature, in Kensington Gardens by...
Fig. 16. James Gillray, The Graces in a High Wind. A Scene taken from Nature, in Kensington Gardens, 1810. Hand-colored etching, 25.7 × 35 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
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Description: Bonnet à la jardinière by Unknown
Fig. 17. Bonnet à la jardinière, orné de Rubans et d’une branche de Lilas. Centure à la Victime, from Journal des dames et des modes, Costume Parisien, An 6, 17 novembre 1797. Hand-colored engraving, 18 × 11.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
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Description: Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes (1786–1868), detail by Villers,...
Detail of fig. 56. Marie-Denise Villers, Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, 1801. Oil on canvas, 161.3 × 128.6 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Cotton muslin, the textile usually used for neoclassical dress, is a plain weave cloth in which the warp and weft threads are identical. The fineness of the cloth was determined by the thinness of the thread and the openness of the weave. Not until the 1790s did British industrial spinning machines begin to rival the gossamer quality of Indian hand-spun thread; even then, no human or machine in Europe could compete with the skill of Bengali weavers, who were able to make muslin so fine that a sari made from the textile (typically 6 to 9 yards long) could be folded up into a matchbox. When the flat, open, fine weave of muslin is draped on the bias, as it often was for the dress’s bodice, the warp and weft threads are able to slide into those open spaces in the matrix, giving the textile fluidity and elasticity. The fabric can then conform to the shape beneath, accentuating the curve of the body by clinging to the figure. In addition, the dresses were designed to exploit the fabric’s ability to drape—for example, by cutting a dress with extra-long sleeves that draped into bunched folds at the wrist (fig. 18). Such folds and bunches formed patterns of highlight and shadow, subtly articulating the shapes they molded.
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Description: Gown by Unknown
Fig. 18. Cotton muslin dress with cotton embroidery, ca. 1800. Indian textile; dress fabricated in England. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
By the late 1790s, most neoclassical dresses were constructed with a narrow back panel that gave the appearance of thin shoulder blades drawn tightly together (fig. 19). Fabric was gathered at the high center-back waist and released into a train at the rear. This train was important to the range of bodily expressions provided by the dress: when seated, the train pooled elegantly around the figure, while when standing it was often looped over the arm or clasped in the hand of the wearer, which pulled the fabric taut around her rear, raised the hem above her ankles, and provided continual variety in the patterns of pleating and draping. Neoclassical drapery, then, is essentially sculptural and formalist; it defines the body as an integrated mass, rather than decorating its surface.
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Description: Gown by Unknown
Fig. 19. Cotton muslin dress with cotton embroidery, ca. 1800. Indian textile; dress fabricated in England. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Painters and sculptors had been concerned with the use of form-creating drapery for generations, of course, but fashionable dress had, in the past, usually valued surface over form, flattening the body with expensive patterned textiles and glittering embellishments, and marking in time its currency and fashionability. Neoclassical dress, by contrast, was artistic dress, in at least three ways: it was derived from the artistic practice of draping models; it emerged from the studios and theatrical stages, which were the first locations to align this style of dress with ideals of naturalism and authenticity; and it treated the body like a work of art, sculpting it in three dimensions.
Painters Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Angelica Kauffman not only frequently painted their sitters in a kind of generalized classical drapery, but also adopted versions of such dress themselves, both as studio dress and in their numerous self-portraits.1Not all female artists took this approach; for example, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s magisterial self-portrait with her students, exhibited to great acclaim at the Salon of 1785, depicts her in an elaborately fashionable silk mantua. See Auricchio 2003. Kauffman’s Self-Portrait as the Muse of Painting (fig. 20), made for the Duke of Tuscany’s famous gallery of artists’ self-portraits in 1787, uses classicizing dress to facilitate the painting’s dual signification as self-portrait and allegory.2For a more detailed analysis of Kauffman’s dress in this painting, see Rauser 2017a. For Kauffman’s life, work, and influence, see Rosenthal 2006 and Roworth 1993. Kauffman’s dress is similar to those deployed in many of her portraits and self-portraits over the years: a loose drape of white, matte textile that crosses over the bust, drapes over the shoulders, and is gathered high under the breasts, falling in folds across her legs. It reveals glimpses of an underdress with gathered, elbow-length sleeves and a modest neckline. Kauffman’s hair is loose and unpowdered; her only ornament is a sash with a cameo featuring Minerva. Neoclassical dress marks Kauffman’s body as outside the quotidian world of ordinary female roles and responsibilities, belonging instead to the realm of art. Allegory traditionally construed female bodies as empty vessels to be filled with abstract meaning; Kauffman here seizes on this tradition and turns it to her advantage by using classical drapery to align her physical body with the allegorical body of painting itself.
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Description: Self-Portrait as the Muse of Painting by Kauffman, Angelica
Fig. 20. Angelica Kauffman, Self-Portrait as the Muse of Painting, 1787. Oil on canvas, 128 × 93.5 cm. Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Vigée-Lebrun was vocal about her embrace of artistic or “picturesque” dress; her Memoirs are filled with discussions of how she rejected the frivolous fashion of her time in favor of the neoclassical-style white dress.3Mary Sheriff (Sheriff 1996, p. 145) notes that such fine white muslin was extremely expensive in the 1780s and says that Vigée-Lebrun was unlikely to have actually worn fine muslin dresses to paint in, despite her claims in her Memoirs. I agree that Vigée-Lebrun unduly attributes much fashion innovation to herself retrospectively, and that she may well not have adopted this costume as early as she claims. Nonetheless, by the mid-1790s, the white, informal drape was thoroughly and publicly associated with Vigée-Lebrun’s practice via her portraiture, her self-presentation in public, and her written self-presentation. For a representation of a female artist wearing a white muslin smock for painting, see the 1796 portrait of Adélaïde Binart by Marie-Geneviève Bouliard in the collection of the Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Of the 1780s, she writes: “As I detested the female style of dress then in fashion, I bent all my efforts upon rendering it a little more picturesque, and was delighted when, after getting the confidence of my models, I was able to drape them according to my fancy____Besides, I could not endure [hair] powder.”4Vigée-Lebrun 1989, p. 22. For herself, she affected a kind of chic nonchalance, saying: “I spent very little on dress; I was even reproached for neglecting it, for I wore none but white dresses of muslin or lawn, and never wore elaborate gowns excepting for my sittings at Versailles. My head-dress cost me nothing, because I did my hair myself, and most of the time I wore a muslin cap on my head, as may be seen from my portraits.”5Vigée-Lebrun 1989, p. 42. Directing readers to her self-portraits as indices of her typical working attire, she testifies to their spontaneity and authenticity; indeed, by the time she wrote these memoirs at the end of her life, her image as an artist was indivisible from her characteristic white dress, muslin cap, and natural curls, as seen for example in a depiction of her by Marie-Victoire Lemoine exhibited in 1796 (fig. 21).6For a fuller analysis of the cultural charge of Lemoine’s painting as an homage to female artistic agency and its connection to neoclassical dress, see Rauser 2017a. All of these sartorial choices were quite distant from the pads and hoops, rich silks, and frizzed coiffures that were fashionable in the 1780s.
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Description: The Interior of an Atelier of a Woman Painter by Lemoine, Marie Victoire
Fig. 21. Marie-Victoire Lemoine, The Interior of an Atelier of a Woman Painter (detail), 1789/96. Oil on canvas, 116.5 × 88.9 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
In fact, many artists and performers were interested in reforming dress during the second half of the eighteenth century. Over the course of several decades, actors and dancers in London, Paris, Naples, Vienna, and several German cultural centers grew increasingly attentive to movement, gesture, expression, and realism, and developed new norms for costume to support these ambitions.7See Holmström 1967, West 1991, Nussbaum 2010, and Barnett 1987. Older theatrical styles had stressed perfect postures and conventional gestures in performers who wore formal courtly dress. The new, more pantomimic style called for actors to move their bodies with larger and more angular and emphatic gestures, as well as to use more eloquent facial expressions. In tandem with these expressive innovations, actors experimented with altering their costumes, even though strict rules of propriety and formality made such changes controversial at first. In 1775, two different theatrical productions each claimed to be the first to introduce a truly classical costume for antique characters. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s monodrama, Pygmalion, was staged in Paris with the actor Larive costumed in a tunic and sandals; his more conventional Galatea, however, wore panniers and a large powdered wig.8Holmström 1967, p. 45. The same year in Germany, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe staged a legendary production of Ariadne auf Naxos in Gotha. Actress Esther Charlotte Brandes wore a white silk dress with a red sash and sandals (fig. 22). A contemporary reviewer lauded the archaeological accuracy of the costume:
In 1775, the German stage is observing the laws of the costume brought back from a very long time ago. At the presentation of Ariadne at Gotha, the first genuinely ancient Greek dress appeared on the stage, after the drawings of ancient monuments and manufactured according to Winckelmann’s description and the headdress was also made after an old gem of Ariadne.9Theater-Kalendar (Gotha), 1776, p. 104; see Holmström 1967, p. 47.
The costume made a new type of truth claim by linking itself to the accurate study of antique art. In turn, it supported the theatrical production’s modern disdain for artifice and embrace of authenticity.
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Description: Esther Charlotte Brandes as Ariadne by Berger, Daniel
Fig. 22. Daniel Berger after Anton Graff, Esther Charlotte Brandes as Ariadne, 1782. Etching, 16.5 × 10 cm. Heidelberg University Library
But the chic of artistic drapery could be double-edged: its austere simplicity signified artistic purity, timelessness, and truth, yet its immodesty and heedlessness of hierarchy and formality could be seen as representing decadence and potential licentiousness. Vigée-Lebrun experienced this backlash in the reaction to her infamous “Greek supper” of 1788. She described the dinner party as the spontaneous fancy of an elegant and artistic household, inspired by passages about an ancient Greek banquet that her brother was reading aloud from the celebrated new imaginary travelogue The Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece.10Vigée-Lebrun 1989, pp. 38–9. For the influence of Anacharsis on eighteenth-century political thought, see Sheehan 2009, pp. 157–70. She instructed her cook to make some special sauces, borrowed some antique Etruscan pottery from a neighbor, and then set about contriving Greek costumes for her guests. “My studio, full of things I used for draping my models, would furnish me with enough material for garments,” she wrote, and with them she transformed her guests into “veritable Athenians.”11Vigée-Lebrun, 1989, p. 39. Envious tales of this chic entertainment spread rapidly. Vigée-Lebrun claimed the whole thing cost her no more than 15 francs, but rumors of the luxurious decadence of the party soon reached Versailles and other European courts, where the reported cost soared into the thousands.12Vigée-Lebrun, 1989, pp. 40–41. Artistic life, where one might lounge about drinking wine out of Etruscan vessels while dressed like a “veritable Athenian,” was both evocative of classical learning and also retained an aura of barely restrained license. Perhaps most importantly and controversially, it could function as a sphere of female agency and visibility.
Vigée-Lebrun’s party made a splash, but these same elements of female artistic agency, lack of hierarchy, neoclassical drapery, living antiquity, and a general air of decadence were present year after year for the most influential audiences in Europe in the performances of Emma Hart, mistress and then wife to the British ambassador to Naples, who performed “attitudes” in her Neapolitan parlor wearing neoclassical dress. A 1791 etching after Pietro Novelli (fig. 23) shows Hart in various poses derived from classical exemplars, and in each it is mainly her simple dress and shawl that sculpt her body into artistic attitudes. Bunched between her knees as she kneels, draping across her thigh as she steps forward and leans on a plinth, or pulled taut across the back of her legs as she stands in profile, Hart’s drapery defines her body as a living statue.
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Description: The Attitudes of Lady Hamilton by Novelli, Francesco
Fig. 23. Francesco Novelli after Pietro Novelli, The Attitudes of Lady Hamilton, after 1791. Etching, 20.4 × 32.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
By the late 1780s, then, the thin white dress, belted with a high waist, baring the arms and accessorized with a shawl, had become associated with innovative artistic experiments. Audiences were used to seeing it depicted in oil paint or worn in the studio, and they were increasingly comfortable seeing it on bodies in motion on the stage. Often connected with allegories, goddesses, or muses, or the legend of works of art miraculously coming to life as in the Pygmalion story, the dress stood for an artistic commitment to authenticity and a naturalism that found its wellspring in antiquity. But as we shall see in Chapter One, it took the special environment of Naples for such experiments to move from art to life—from the studio to the street.
Neoclassical dress was born as artistic drapery and carried connotations of the stage and studio into its role as fashionable clothing for modern women, emphasizing women’s self-presentation as artistic subjects and objects by allowing them to drape themselves. Treating the body as a shape to be sculpted rather than a surface to be decorated, neoclassical drapery took a formalist approach and dignified the physicality of the woman who wore it. It highlighted not her wealth or status but her aesthetic refinement, her embodied subjectivity, and her participation in a vanguard discourse of enlightened learning and artistic experimentation. Thus it is no surprise that women artists and aesthetes embraced neoclassical dress. While Vigée-Lebrun and others promoted its comfort, ease, and lack of fuss, neoclassical drapery was not only light and comfortable for a woman who was working at art—it also opened a space for women to participate in artistic life.
 
1     Not all female artists took this approach; for example, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s magisterial self-portrait with her students, exhibited to great acclaim at the Salon of 1785, depicts her in an elaborately fashionable silk mantua. See Auricchio 2003. »
2     For a more detailed analysis of Kauffman’s dress in this painting, see Rauser 2017a. For Kauffman’s life, work, and influence, see Rosenthal 2006 and Roworth 1993. »
3     Mary Sheriff (Sheriff 1996, p. 145) notes that such fine white muslin was extremely expensive in the 1780s and says that Vigée-Lebrun was unlikely to have actually worn fine muslin dresses to paint in, despite her claims in her Memoirs. I agree that Vigée-Lebrun unduly attributes much fashion innovation to herself retrospectively, and that she may well not have adopted this costume as early as she claims. Nonetheless, by the mid-1790s, the white, informal drape was thoroughly and publicly associated with Vigée-Lebrun’s practice via her portraiture, her self-presentation in public, and her written self-presentation. For a representation of a female artist wearing a white muslin smock for painting, see the 1796 portrait of Adélaïde Binart by Marie-Geneviève Bouliard in the collection of the Musée Carnavalet, Paris. »
4     Vigée-Lebrun 1989, p. 22. »
5     Vigée-Lebrun 1989, p. 42. »
6     For a fuller analysis of the cultural charge of Lemoine’s painting as an homage to female artistic agency and its connection to neoclassical dress, see Rauser 2017a. »
7     See Holmström 1967, West 1991, Nussbaum 2010, and Barnett 1987. »
8     Holmström 1967, p. 45. »
9     Theater-Kalendar (Gotha), 1776, p. 104; see Holmström 1967, p. 47. »
10     Vigée-Lebrun 1989, pp. 38–9. For the influence of Anacharsis on eighteenth-century political thought, see Sheehan 2009, pp. 157–70. »
11     Vigée-Lebrun, 1989, p. 39. »
12     Vigée-Lebrun, 1989, pp. 40–41. »