Images on the Page

A Fashion Iconography

Sanda Miller

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350115354
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Fashion imagery has existed for hundreds of years and yet the methods used by scholars to understand it have remained mostly historical and descriptive. The belief informing these approaches may be that fashion imagery is designed for one purpose: to depict a garment and how to wear it. In this interdisciplinary book, Sanda Miller suggests a radical alternative to these well-practiced approaches, proposing that fashion imagery has stories to tell and meanings to uncover. The methodology she has developed is an iconography of fashion imagery, based on the same theory which has been key to the History of Art for centuries. Applying Panofsky's theory of iconography to illustrations from books, magazines and fashion plates, as well as fashion photography and even live fashion events, Miller uncovers three levels of meaning: descriptive, secondary (or conventional) and tertiary or 'symbolic'. In doing so, she answers questions such as who is the model; what did people wear and why; and how did people live? She proves that fashion imagery, far from being purely descriptive, is ripe with meaning and can be used to shed light on society, class, culture and the history of dress.

1

Introduction

A new tool for the fashion image: Iconography

Rationale

The idea for this book originates from a desire to transcend the still dominant descriptive approach to analysing fashion images and replace it with a method used in art history: iconography. This useful tool enables art historians to uncover the layered meanings encoded in images from the visual arts, and there is no reason why iconography cannot be applied to fashion images. The question is: Do we really need to? And the answer is a resounding yes!

The academic study of fashion with all its ramifications – including history, theory, the aesthetics of dress and the fashion images which ‘translate’ them on the pages of books and magazines – is a relatively recent newcomer to the field of academia and that explains why the methodologies employed to analyse them were purloined from other disciplines, not least art history.

Moreover, it has repeatedly been argued that clothes have been marginalized in the context of art history only to be used for dating purposes, but a lot more can be gleaned from them besides their ubiquitous function of identifying ‘the message the sitter or artist wished to express’:

This iconological reading of dress has not been fully acknowledged by art historians on the one hand, nor developed by the dress historians on the other, with the result that at present, the way many art historians ‘read’ clothes often leads them to surprising observations and to conclusions that are all too frequently purely speculative and without foundations. (Winkel, 2006: 11)

Whilst iconography has successfully been applied to interpreting visual images in art history, Marieke de Winkel argued that with regard to its usefulness, fashion historians are lagging behind, and for that reason she decided to rectify the situation by providing such an iconographical analysis of dress. Selecting Rembrandt van Rijn’s paintings as case study, she was also able to address another lacuna, namely that ‘No modern comprehensive studies on seventeenth century Dutch dress exist’, with two exceptions: Frithjof van Thienen and Johanna der Kinderen-Besier, whose books published in 1930 and 1950, respectively, are outdated and not always accurate (Winkel, 2006: 12).

Acknowledging her debt to Stella Mary Newton and Aileen Ribeiro, regarding their use of ‘textual analysis and the knowledge of artistic conventions’, Winkel embarked on her own analysis of clothes as represented by Rembrandt in his paintings. She started from ‘the proper identification of a garment’, gradually moving ‘towards the understanding of the cultural context in which they were worn’ (Winkel, 2006: 18). But unlike Newton and Ribeiro, Winkel selected iconography in order to apply the three levels of interpretation proposed by Erwin Panofsky – as synthesized in his seminal book Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance first published in 1939 – in her own analysis of Rembrandt’s representations of dress.

The first level, equivalent to Panofsky’s ‘pre-iconographical description’, consists of just that – ‘a surface or literal reading of clothes’ followed at the secondary level by the ‘iconographical analysis’, which requires ‘a more specialized knowledge’ and ‘familiarity with certain connotations and attitudes towards clothing (if available) and information about the identity of the person’. Finally the third level, equivalent to Panofsky’s iconographical/iconological interpretations, consists in relating the dress to ‘artistic and literary traditions and ideas as well as symbolic conventions of the culture in which it was worn’ (Winkel, 2006: 18–19).

The book is structured in five chapters, each consisting of a case study, and starts with the tabard, which the author regarded as ‘one of the most dignified items of dress’ (Winkel, 2006: 22).

In order to transcend the first, descriptive level and proceed to the second and third levels, Winkel turned to Stella Mary Newton and Aileen Ribeiro, whom she considered ‘much more indebted to the method of reading highly nuanced sartorial messages in works of art using textual analysis and the knowledge of artistic conventions’ (Winkel, 2006: 13), tantamount with the second and third level of analysis proposed by Panofsky.

Indeed, a display of such a ‘reading of highly nuanced sartorial messages in works of art’ can be found in Aileen Ribeiro’s recent (2017) book Clothing Art: The Visual Culture of Fashion 1600–1914, which constitutes the definitive paradigm of how to read such ‘sartorial meanings’ in works of art. The book also constitutes a radical departure from standard histories of dress: instead of starting from the clothes the artists painted – as any self-respecting fashion historian would do – Ribeiro reversed the process by considering first the artists who painted the clothes and their intention behind the way they represented them in a particular way and not another, but with the danger of falling into the trap of the ‘intentional fallacy’ notwithstanding, Ribeiro outlined her intention as follows:

My intention is to look at dress mainly from the point of view of the artists who represent it, during a period that begins with the seventeenth century and ends with the First World War, although this time-frame is somewhat elastic and reference is made to art and clothing outside these boundaries. (Ribeiro, 2017: 30–1)

Ribeiro also selected Rembrandt as one of her case studies for Chapter I, titled ‘Portraying Dress’, in which she deals with portraits and self-portraits because ‘portraits represent personal encounters between a sitter and the person painting, his or her portrait’ (Ribeiro, 2017: 30). Starting from this premise, she ponders what are we to make of the way artists represent themselves?

In fact we can find a telling parallel with Instagram, which allows its users to manipulate their looks and post them in cyberspace for all to see, just as painters can manipulate their self-portraits and display them in a museum, a palace or a church, for all (or in some instances only for some) to see. What Instagram offers is a spec ial way of documenting personal life, not that different from Rembrandt who painted in excess of 100 self-portraits in different media, with the earliest documented dated 1626 and the last in 1669, the year of his death.

Ribeiro chose the Self-Portrait at the Age of 34 in the National Gallery, and – like Winkel – she pointed out that in Rembrandt’s representations of clothing, the boundaries between historical accuracy and what Winkel calls ‘fancy’ are fluid, rendering them difficult to interpret.

Several issues are addressed in Ribeiro’s lengthy analysis of Rembrandt’s self-portrait, which starts with the wider cultural context by linking it with Raphael’s portrait of Baltassare Castiglione which Rembrandt saw when it was auctioned in Amsterdam in 1639. In this respect I argue that Ribeiro used iconography starting with the third intrinsic meaning or content level and worked her way backwards to the first, primary or natural subject matter level by providing an impressive analysis of Rembrandt’s costume, of the kind only a costume historian can provide:

The clothing is – as often with Rembrandt – deliberately difficult to ‘read’ because it is the rich, strange theatricality of the dress that appeals to the artist, rather than any antiquarian accuracy; nor is it possible to decide whether the costume is northern European or Italian. It seems likely that the various layers comprise, from the innermost garments outwards, a fine pleated shirt with gold embroidery, a doublet with a high collar and square front, and then either a long gown called a tabard, or – and this is more likely – a fur trimmed coat with paned sleeves of sombre grey-green silk over dark gold tissue; a black velvet bonnet trimmed with a gold chain completes the outfit. (Ribeiro, 2017: 40)

If we turn to art history, we get a radically different analysis as proved in the following example coming from three authorities on seventeenth-century Dutch art history: Jakob Rosenberg, Seymour Slive and E. H. ter Kuile. Like Ribeiro, they put iconography to good use, but they start with the primary or natural subject matter level and move to the third, intrinsic meaning or content level, which reveals Rembrandt’s debt to classicism.

The artist still represents himself in precious attire, as he did formerly. He wears a richly embroidered shirt and a heavy fur-trimmed velvet coat. More important, however, is the seriousness, the reserved and critical glance of the man who has abandoned all signs of vanity and of sensational appeal to the spectator. . . .The arrangement of the figure is also changed. It is no longer close to the front lane, but recedes behind a stone sill. The figure has a firmer outline and can almost be inscribed into a triangle having the sill as a base. Instead of stressing the sweeping curvilinear silhouettes of the 1630s, here Rembrandt repeatedly emphasized the horizontal: in the sill, the position of the arm leaning on it, the main accents of the face, and even the position of the cap. These repeated horizontals lend the picture stability, firmness and calm. (Rosenberg, Slive and ter Kuile, 1972: 100)

And it is at the primary or natural subject matter level that the difference between the way dress and art historians describe the painting becomes apparent. Thus, Rosenberg, Slive and ter Kuile give clothes short shrift, emphasizing instead on how the painting ‘works’ by focusing on composition, balance, geometry and expression, which were in keeping with the requirements established by the synoptic tables published in 1680 by Henri Testelin for the newly founded French Academy in Paris. They proceeded next to the intrinsic meaning or content, focusing on aspects such as the influence of classicism and the Italian Renaissance – specifically Raphael – on Rembrandt’s self-portrait.

What links Winkel with Ribeiro is that both chose their examples from painters and analysed the way they represented dress in their paintings. They are also linked by their use of iconography, with the difference being that Winkel adopted a clear stance regarding her choice of iconography as her preferred methodology, whereas Ribeiro’s use of iconography could be described as pragmatic. Most important, both Ribeiro and Winkel use paintings as case studies, which further links them to the way art historians use iconography.

My book differs radically from both Marieke de Winkel’s and Aileen Ribeiro’s books, because it leaves art history behind altogether and turns to representations of costume and fashion.

Images on the Page: A Fashion Iconography starts with the poorly researched Renaissance tailors and costume books, based on the premise that Erwin Panofsky’s iconographical model can be successfully employed as a methodology for the analysis of fashion images, because they too tell a story. This has not been attempted before, or so I believed, until I discovered in the library of the Warburg Institute in London Il Libro del Sarto. Dated between the 1540s and the end of Cinquecento and published in Milan, it lay forgotten in the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice until it was ‘discovered’ in 1936 by none other than Fritz Saxl, who published his research in an essay titled ‘Costumi é feste della nobiltà Milanese negli anni della dominazione spagnola’.

My aims and objectives are to ‘borrow’ iconography from art history and put it to good use for analysing fashion images, because after all we are dealing with visual images, be they paintings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts or the fashion images themselves; they could come from a fashion plate, book, magazine, or photograph and even from a spatio-temporal event such as a fashion show, which also has a story to tell.

Iconography and its uses in the history of art

The use of iconography as a methodology to decode art historical images is associated with the name of Erwin Panofsky, but we can trace it further back to a book written in the aftermath of the Counter-Reformation in 1533 by Cesare Ripa titled Iconologia. In it he undertook to deal ‘solely – to the exclusion of all others – with such images as were meant to signify something different from what they offered to view (like the image of “Beauty”)’ (Damisch in Preziosi, 1998: 239).

In a book titled The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, its editor Donald Preziosi provided a glossary in which he makes a distinction between iconography and iconology:

Although the term ‘i...