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Description: The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
NEOCLASSICAL DRESS startled onlookers with its nakedness. Especially in the late 1790s and especially in Paris...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.155-163
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338.10
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LIGHTNESS
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Description: Manches lacées. Chaine en Or et Email by Unknown
Manches lacées. Chaine en Or et Email, from Journal des dames et des modes, An 9, 1800. Hand-colored engraving, 18.3 × 11.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
To the shame of morality, the nakedness of women is always increasing, and soon, perhaps, brazenly braving public honesty, they will show themselves in public in the state of pure nature. Several of these women offer us nothing but a gauzy nudity. —Gazette des Deux-Ponts (Paris), June 14, 17981“A la honte des mœurs, la nudité des femmes va toujours croissant, & bientôt, peut-être, bravant effrontément l’honnêteté publique, elles se montreront en public dans l’état de pure nature. Plusieurs de ces femmes n’offrent déjà plus à nos regards qu’une nudité gazée.” Gazette des Deux-Ponts (Paris), June 14, 1798, no. 169, n.p.; my translation.
Neoclassical dress startled onlookers with its nakedness. Especially in the late 1790s and especially in Paris, it employed minimal yardage with a tiny back bodice, a low-cut front, and few undergarments. Indeed, in a miniature by Jean-Urbain Guérin (fig. 138), the sitter combines the fashionable accessories of shawl and cameo hairpin with a dress that is hardly there at all. The lightness of neoclassical fashion contributed to its democratization; gowns were more affordable because they used less fabric, and their simple drape required minimal tailoring skill. Women could afford to have more dresses than previously, and to spend more money and attention on accessories like fans, gloves, and jewels.2Ribeiro 1995, p. 110. Yet the finest dresses remained expensive luxuries, as the filmy lightness of imported muslin wore quickly and spoiled easily.
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Description: Portrait of a Woman wearing White Transparent Drapery by Guerin, Jean-Urbain
Fig. 138. Jean-Urbain Guérin, Portrait of a Woman wearing White Transparent Drapery, n.d. Paint on ivory, 9.8 × 9.3 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris
Neoclassical dress grew progressively lighter over the 1790s, as women abandoned petticoats, sleeves, and even shoes. One visitor to Paris commented wonderingly:
At their balls, instead of the stocking and shoe, a silk pantaloons was adopted with toes, and to this the ancient sock was tied, being a mere sole without any thing on the upper part of the feet: in this dress . . . they wore diamonds on their toes.3Oracle and Public Advertiser, December 30, 1796, n.p.
But bare arms were the most shocking innovation. Although bosoms had frequently been at least partly revealed during the eighteenth century, arms had always been covered, usually to the elbow. The most extreme neoclassical dresses, however, featured tiny or even nonexistent sleeves—not only in Directoire Paris, but in London as well, as the Oracle and Public Advertiser reported in the spring of 1796:
A frail fair promenaded Bond street yesterday, shewing both her shoulders, neck, and bosom, a l’Evel Her robe was without sleeves! And her petticoats were short enough to show her purple stockings with silver clocks!4Oracle and Public Advertiser, April 13, 1796, n.p.
Despite responses like these, scandal and titillation were not the only goals for women who chose light, short, or sleeveless dresses in the 1790s. As dresses tended more and more toward a visual effect of nakedness, a cultural debate intensified over the signification and morality of the female nude. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had argued that nakedness was less dangerous to morality than the clothed body, and used the licentiousness of art as the proof:
Do we really believe that the skillful finery of our women is less dangerous than an absolute nakedness which, if habitual, would soon turn first impressions into indifference, maybe even into disgust! Don’t we know that statues and paintings offend our eyes only when the combination of clothes renders nakedness obscene? The greatest ravages occur when imagination steps in.5Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2003), p. 246; translation by Mara Dukats in Kofman 1989, p. 129.
Women’s “skillful finery” tempted the male observer to eroticize the female body via imagination. Absolute nakedness, by contrast, was abject: it would soon turn men’s reactions from interest to indifference to, finally, disgust. The writer and dramatist Louis-Sébastien Mercier agreed that women were learning from immodest statues how to drape their bodies:
O Rousseau! Thy enchanting and persuasive eloquence once convinced women that their most powerful and lasting charm was modesty: but Grecian statues have spoken more eloquently than you, and modesty has now-a-days become a problem. The Parisian females will soon come to thy Civic Fetes, dressed in the same scandalous manner as they appear in the Gardens, with slashed petticoats and without a cestus (the modest rampart of the nameless treasure of Nature), forgetting that by this excessive nakedness, they become offensive even to themselves.6As translated and published by London Oracle and Daily Advertiser, October 19, 1798, n.p.
These living statues’ “excessive nakedness” was most problematic for the way it demanded attention, asserting women’s visibility in the public sphere. Indeed, the sight of bare-armed ladies at the theatre in 1796 was a shock:
The coup d’oeil becomes singular. You see suspended out of the boxes, thousands of arms, uncovered, not merely to the elbow, but to the shoulder blade. These arms are ornamented with diamonds, pearls, and gold trinkets____It is not enough to make us admire the arm, we must judge of all their other attractions____ You can mark every lineament of the form, and you see that linen is absolutely proscribed. How is it possible to resist this enchanting spectacle?7Oracle and Public Advertiser, December 30, 1796, n.p., perhaps quoting Louis-Sébastien Mercier.
Women’s display of their bejeweled, nearly naked bodies is coercive; the (male) observer’s attention is stolen, and he is forced to admire, to judge.
The high waists and exposed breasts of neoclassical dress have often led scholars to conclude that this style was imitating maternity wear and thereby valorizing the pregnant body.8Cage 2009, p. 200, argues that men could overlook the excesses of neoclassical dress because it ultimately served the Directoire ideology of gender essentialism and difference. Indeed, the period of domestic prosperity following the Terror in France was suffused with an ideology of female privacy, chastity, and maternity that was both promoted by the Directory government and taken up by cultural producers both in France and abroad.9See Lajer-Burcharth 1999, Gutwirth 1992, Popiel 2008, Desan 2004, Grigsby 2002, and Freund 2014, chapter six. French artist Marguerite Gérard made a specialty of amusing and detailed genre scenes of fashionable mothers and children, as did British artist Adam Buck, whose designs were also featured on teacups and saucers (fig. 139).10See Musée Cognacq-Jay 2009, Jensen 2014, and Darvall 2015. In Gerard’s Motherhood (fig. 140), a woman in neoclassical dress sits at the center of a loving family unit. While her doting husband gazes at her in admiration, she gently drapes a bit of transparent muslin over the plump, sleeping baby nestled in her lap. The dark, bourgeois interior is furnished with screens, rich curtains, and a silver coffeepot, cocooning her with comforts and signs of her industrious domesticity: a ball of thread has rolled away from her darning basket on the floor. The woman is distinctly fashionable, wearing gold earrings, satin slippers, and lace trim on the hem of her dress. But like the chic interior, her fashion is naturalized as completely appropriate to the task of nurturing her baby. Indeed, in this dark room, contrasted with her husband wearing his outdoor coat, the happy mother radiates with light.
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Description: Saucer by Unknown
Fig. 139. After Adam Buck, Saucer, ca. 1810. Lead-glazed earthenware with transfer-printed decoration; made in Staffordshire, UK. Victoria and Albert Museum, London
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Description: Motherhood by Gérard, Marguerite
Fig. 140. Marguerite Gérard, Motherhood, late 18th century. Oil on canvas, 65 × 54.5 cm. Musée de Beaux-Arts, Lyon
By contrast, the public spectacle of an obviously maternal female body often provoked strong negative reactions. When she married Jean-Lambert Tallien on December 26, 1794, six months after Thermidor and her liberation from prison, Thérésa Tallien was visibly pregnant and openly displayed her fertile and unimprisoned, unfragmented body beneath a short, sleeveless, white muslin tunic.11Moore 2007, pp. 312–15. As a baby boom swept the capital in the aftermath of the Terror, fecund bodies, clad only in thin, transparent neoclassical dresses, were on public display as never before. One German visitor was shocked by the public appearance of pregnant women who no longer “hid the consequences of the most amiable weakness”:
[Decency and dignity] is what I have scarcely seen in this crowd of fertile beauties, whom one meets at all the spectacles and all the walks. The general license of opinions and morals, the law of divorce, domestic independence, so many reversed barriers, so many prejudices destroyed, could only greatly increase the number of precarious unions substituted for marriage, and thus favor the sudden increase of a new population.12“C’est ce que je n’ai guère apercu dans cette foule de beautés féconds, que l’on rencontre à tous les spectacles et dans toutes les promenades. La license générale des opinions et des mœurs, la loi du divorce, l’indépendance domestique, tant de barrières renversées, tant de prejudges détruits, n’ont pu qu’augmenter beaucoup le nombre des unions précaires, substituées au marriage, et favoriser ainsi l’accroissement subit d’une nouvelle population.” Meister 1910, pp. 96–7; my translation.
For this commentator at least, the visibly fertile and reproductive female body, daring to make a public spectacle of herself, was a troubling sign of social upheaval, female emancipation, and moral decay. Indeed, to the extent that women in high-waisted muslin did appropriate the chic negligence of dress associated with both pregnancy and exotic colonial climes, this served rather to diminish the visual distinctiveness of the pregnant body, dissolving the gaps between the fashionable body, the fertile body, and the ideal, sculptural body. This made the sexual status of women’s bodies less legible in public, contributing to reactions that recalled the moral panic of London’s pad fad of 1793.
A critical strain of visual culture thus placed fashion and motherhood at odds—at least when being fashionable drew a mother into the public sphere. In James Gillray’s The Fashionable Mamma, or The Convenience of Modern Dress (fig. 141), a plumed lady disinterestedly nurses her baby before heading out in a carriage for her evening’s entertainment, in a parody of the icon of “Maternal Love” hanging on the wall behind her. Using a two-panel format to make the point plainer, La mère à la mode/La mère telle que toutes devraient être (fig. 142) contrasts a glamorous, ball-going mother—oblivious to her child being beaten in the background—with an attentive but frumpy mother surrounded by four charming children. Even though neoclassical fashion was well suited to the pregnant or nursing body, allowing women, whether mothers or not, to participate freely in public life with little outward difference in their appearance, images like these argued that moral mothers should not be fashionable.
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Description: The fashionable mamma, or, The convenience of modern dress by Gillray, James
Fig. 141. James Gillray, The Fashionable Mamma, or The Convenience of Modern Dress, 1796. Hand-colored etching, 34.4 × 24.3 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
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Description: La mere a la mode/La mere telle que toutes devraient etre by Unknown
Fig. 142. Unknown, La mère à la mode/La mère telle que toutes devraient être, ca. 1800. Hand-colored etching, 23 × 33 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
Gerard’s Motherhood attempts to synthesize the potentially conflicting ideals of fashionable lady and doting mother: unlike the enthralling and immoral bare-armed beauties at the opera, Gerard’s fashionable mother is at home, using her exposed breasts not to entice men but to nurse her child. And in contrast to the unconstrained public and political body of Tallien or the fashion-plate mothers on their way to the ball, the fertile, nursing, near-naked female body of Gerard’s mother is managed by an overseeing husband, the pristine whiteness of her skin and garments, and the bounded, darkened setting that encloses her. The anxious threat of both her public presence and her fertile body are contained.
Scandalous and dubious stories about nearly naked fashionable women became legendary, and were repeated and embellished over the following decades. During a party at her home, Tallien bet a man that her whole ensemble would not weigh more than two six-franc pieces; she then stripped in front of the entire company and won the bet.13Williams 2014, p. 86. Variations on this tale have her repairing to a private room to strip, or weighing her muslin against her jewelry, betting that her jewels weighed more.14Lotus Magazine, vol. 7, no. 6 (March, 1916), p. 254. Other stories have women competing against one another for whose dress weighed least, wetting their drapery, or walking in the Champs-Elysées in a state of nudity that caused a riot.15Grigsby 1998, pp. 322–3, mentions a party game to see whose dress weighed least. Most of these stories are probably more the product of nineteenth-century fascination with this freewheeling era than accurate accounts of life in the 1790s. Yet even discounting some exaggeration, the overall picture was of a fashion vanguard that shocked observers—and delighted later narrators—with their willingness to be naked in public.
Yet if we look beyond the brouhaha and gossip, we can find ample evidence that the light, sleeveless late 1790s neoclassical dress in fact created a visual effect of sobriety and simplicity. A French dress from 1804–6 (fig. 143) is columnar and unadorned; it accentuates the effect of verticality created by its sleeveless bodice with the application of white-on-white embroidery running down the front of the gown. French artist Constance Mayer used an exceedingly simple sleeveless dress to portray herself as a serious thinker: in a self-portrait (fig. 144), her body forms a white zigzag that cuts across the sober gray and black rectilinear forms of the composition. While Mercier blamed statues for teaching women to wear bare arms and light dresses and thereby endanger men’s morality, Mayer deploys that same iconography to construct her self-image as artistic and authentic. As the influential fashion gazette Journal des dames et des modes argued in 1798, “Our beauties always preserve their taste for nudity. Truth is nude. Must we make it a crime to approach truth as closely as possible?”16“Nos belles conservent toujours leur gout pour la nudité. La vérité est nue. Doit-on leur faire un crime d’approcher le plus près possible de la vérité?” 25 Fructidor An VI (September 11, 1798). Mayer uses the prestige and moral purity of classical sculptural forms to undergird her identity and dignify her own practice. The bare, visible truth of her body signifies her virtue, not her licentiousness.
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Description: Muslin dress with train and cotton embroidery by Unknown
Fig. 143. Muslin dress with train and cotton embroidery, 1804–6. French. Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. UFAC Collection, inv. 61-14-19.AB
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Description: Self-Portrait by Mayer, Constance
Fig. 144. Constance Mayer, Self-Portrait, ca. 1799. Oil on canvas, 116.5 × 89.5 cm. Bibliothèque Paul-Marmottan, Ville de Boulogne-Billancourt, Académie des Beaux-Arts, France
The lightness of neoclassical dress, then, unveiled the body to claim the mantle of classical art and appropriate its prestige and truthfulness, to expose the skin as a sensate and cognitive organ, to liberate the body’s movement and increase its expression, and to showcase or problematize its whiteness. But it also unveiled the body in a bid for visibility—an issue especially fraught in France. As Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, E. Claire Cage, Susan Siegfried, and Darcy Grimaldi Grigsby have argued, Directoire women used fashionable dress to reclaim a public role after the suppression of women’s participation during the most radical years of the French Revolution.17Lajer-Burcharth 1999, Cage 2009, Siegfried 2015, and Grigsby 1998. While Rousseauians increasingly insisted on gender polarities that classed women as private, domestic, maternal and natural, many women found ways to deflect and resist, using fashionable dress as a tool for self-subjectification as they appropriated a form and aesthetic—the classical marble body—which had been invested by generations of art critics with virtue, liberty, and embodied integrity.
But the hints of revulsion in critics’ comments on these women’s unveiled, public bodies reminds us that especially in France, many bodies—including some of the fashionable Merveilleuses themselves—had undergone recent traumas of imprisonment and dismemberment. If the naked or pregnant body provoked disgust, so the fragmented and endangered body provoked fear and anxiety. As we shall see in Chapter Five, the nakedness of neoclassical dress both responded to and attempted to erase the darkness, fear, and fragmentation that stalked real bodies in the 1790s.
 
1     “A la honte des mœurs, la nudité des femmes va toujours croissant, & bientôt, peut-être, bravant effrontément l’honnêteté publique, elles se montreront en public dans l’état de pure nature. Plusieurs de ces femmes n’offrent déjà plus à nos regards qu’une nudité gazée.” Gazette des Deux-Ponts (Paris), June 14, 1798, no. 169, n.p.; my translation. »
3     Oracle and Public Advertiser, December 30, 1796, n.p. »
4     Oracle and Public Advertiser, April 13, 1796, n.p. »
5     Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à d’Alembert (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2003), p. 246; translation by Mara Dukats in Kofman 1989, p. 129. »
6     As translated and published by London Oracle and Daily Advertiser, October 19, 1798, n.p. »
7     Oracle and Public Advertiser, December 30, 1796, n.p., perhaps quoting Louis-Sébastien Mercier. »
8     Cage 2009, p. 200, argues that men could overlook the excesses of neoclassical dress because it ultimately served the Directoire ideology of gender essentialism and difference. »
9     See Lajer-Burcharth 1999, Gutwirth 1992, Popiel 2008, Desan 2004, Grigsby 2002, and Freund 2014, chapter six. »
10     See Musée Cognacq-Jay 2009, Jensen 2014, and Darvall 2015. »
11     Moore 2007, pp. 312–15. »
12     “C’est ce que je n’ai guère apercu dans cette foule de beautés féconds, que l’on rencontre à tous les spectacles et dans toutes les promenades. La license générale des opinions et des mœurs, la loi du divorce, l’indépendance domestique, tant de barrières renversées, tant de prejudges détruits, n’ont pu qu’augmenter beaucoup le nombre des unions précaires, substituées au marriage, et favoriser ainsi l’accroissement subit d’une nouvelle population.” Meister 1910, pp. 96–7; my translation. »
13     Williams 2014, p. 86. »
14     Lotus Magazine, vol. 7, no. 6 (March, 1916), p. 254. »
15     Grigsby 1998, pp. 322–3, mentions a party game to see whose dress weighed least. »
16     “Nos belles conservent toujours leur gout pour la nudité. La vérité est nue. Doit-on leur faire un crime d’approcher le plus près possible de la vérité?” 25 Fructidor An VI (September 11, 1798). »
17     Lajer-Burcharth 1999, Cage 2009, Siegfried 2015, and Grigsby 1998. »