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Rauser, Amelia

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Conclusion

Amelia Rauser

The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s

In 1819, as the fashionableness of neoclassical dress neared the end of its arc, a waggish pamphlet called Dress and Address looked back at the style that had dominated the previous 25 years...

Author

Amelia Rauser

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.187-189

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338.12

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23229

Chapter subject tags:Dress, NeoclassicalCostume--History--18th centuryFeminine beauty (Aesthetics)

Conclusion

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Description: L'Imitation de l'antique by Lingée, Thérèse Eléonore

Thérèse Éléonore Lingée after Dutailly, L’Imitation de l’Antique, ca. 1800. Hand-colored etching, 36.8 × 28.4 cm. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

In 1819, as the fashionableness of neoclassical dress neared the end of its arc, a waggish pamphlet called Dress and Address looked back at the style that had dominated the previous 25 years and saw that its essential mistake had been in making women into living statues:

One of our first British belles . . . to whom we owe the close imitation of statuary, was Lady C—C— [Charlotte Campbell]. In her younger years she used to spend whole days and nights examining the most beautiful statues from those celebrated schools. The turn of the limbs, the fall of the shoulders, the swell of the bosom, the style of the hair, the zone, the cestus, the tiara or diadem, were all examined and studied by her Ladyship with the most minute attention. . . . She asserted, that a lady’s dress ought to be so constructed as to hang upon her like wet drapery. . . . The exposure of the neck and of arms, of the epaule naissante [shoulder blade], and other little indelicacies of that kind, were then, in a great measure, due to her. . . . Then the sun and air, not the son and heir, used to play sad tricks with these animated statues à la Grecque and Romaine. Such transparencies. . . . In this general gusto for the fine statues of antiquity, Lady C. C. forgot that stone and marble to do not hang like muslin, crape and gauze; . . . many of our native fine statues of antiquity forgot that those of Greece and Rome were not subject to wear and tear, like delicate complexions and delicate constitutions, and that the same works of antiquity represented youth and beauty, symmetry and perfection; whilst our modern antiquities only copied juvenile grace and comeliness; but were faithful and special originals of age and of deformity, of the “wreck of matter” and the devastation of time, of past pleasure and of past and present excess.1Dress and Address (London), 1819, pp. 30–33.

Sun, age, bodily pleasures: all took their toll on the flesh-and-blood body, eventually making the fashionable “modern antiquity” merely a haggard monster in a flimsy dress. Indeed, time had wrecked more than the once-comely young living statues; Enlightenment idealism had suffered under the strains of social and political change in the 1790s. To the extent that women’s unveiled bodies had stood for artistic agency, bodily liberty and the hope for a new golden age, the return of corsets, layered petticoats, and an explosion of whimsical ornament in the 1820s in turn aligned with a growing cultural conservatism and Romantic eclecticism.

But for more than two decades, neoclassical dress operated significantly in the symbolic realm of the late eighteenth century. Sculpture was a powerful and prestigious cultural form. The contemplation of sculpture drove new aesthetic theories and structured philosophical thought-experiments ranging from Winckelmann, Lessing, and Herder on the lifelikeness of statues, to Condillac’s “statue-man” and Diderot’s speculations on turning marble to flesh. When a woman presented herself as a living statue, she appropriated to her body the reverence and scrutiny then applied to the classical and neoclassical marble body. In doing so, women both embraced the objectified and essentialized role with which they were increasingly attributed, and turned it to their advantage. Drawing on the vogue for classical taste and the potency of classical models of liberty, political organization, and artistic vitality, neoclassical dress aimed to gloss the contemporary body with the veneer of both antique freedom and modern imperial achievement. In tune with its emphasis on pristinely white, smooth, coherent bodies—whether sculptural, dressed, or painted—and its assertion of transparency and visibility, neoclassical dress helped assuage the anxieties of the abject female body, leaky and reproductive, as well as the abject enslaved body, creator of the very textile it pressed into service.

In a colored etching from 1801–4 (fig. 167), the Creole fashion leader and first lady of France, Joséphine, sits in a fenced garden and draws a bust of her husband, Napoleon. She is fully decked out in neoclassical dress and its fashionable accessories, from a gold necklace, arm bands, and hoop earrings to a turban and aigrette. It is a curious double portrait of the sovereign and his wife in which the man himself is represented only distantly, by works of art. His white marble bust sits on a high plinth and is crowned by a living laurel tree, heroized and abstracted, sharing an intent exchange of glances with his wife, who is nearly as marmoreal and white—only her dark hair and gold jewelry differentiates her body from statuary. Marble Napoleon and “real” Joséphine are more similar than different: both gain dignity and stature via a portrayal as statuesque. Yet Joséphine is also an active creator here, even a kind of Pygmalion, in love with a statue. Both sculptural and an artist, Joséphine in neoclassical dress is a fitting companion for the leader of the new France. Yet her presence in the world is also circumscribed: unlike her flesh-and-blood husband, whose fully animated presence we are reminded of by the colored drawing in her lap, she, like the bust, remains in the fenced garden, her animation only partial.

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Description: Madame Bonaparte drawing the Portrait of the First Consul by Unknown

Fig. 167. Unknown, Madame Bonaparte drawing the Portrait of the First Consul, 1801–4. Hand-colored etching, 24 × 17 cm. Châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau, Rueil-Malmaison, France

The imitation of statues was a limited aesthetic gesture because it glossed women with abstraction and idealism, valorized youth and beauty over age and experience, contributed to racialized white supremacy, and reinforced women’s relentless embodiment. But it also provided an arena within which women could create, express an authentic communion with the past, and light a path toward a new golden age. As living statues, women decentered the phallic, homosocial, and patriarchal meanings of classicism. Thus, fashionable dress was not merely derivative of larger, deeper, or purer aesthetic gestures in traditional artistic media. Rather, dress provided a means for women to participate in shaping the aesthetic meaning of their time.

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Description: The art of fainting in company by Woodward, George Moutard

George Moutard Woodward, The Art of Fainting in Company, 1797. Hand-colored etching, 21.2 × 15.1 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

1 Dress and Address (London), 1819, pp. 30–33. »

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