A Cultural History of Western Fashion

From Haute Couture to Virtual Couture

Bonnie English, Nazanin Hedayat Munroe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781350150898
• eBook ISBN: 9781350150911
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Just as the clothes we wear can communicate our personality and how we want to be perceived, so fashion can reflect the politics and preoccupations of the society that produced it. A Cultural History of Western Fashion guides you through the relationships between haute couture and ready-to-wear designer fashions, popular culture, big business, high-tech production, as well as traditional and social media. Exploring fashion's interdisciplinary nature, English and Munroe also highlight the parallel evolution of clothing design and the other visual arts over the last 150 years. This new edition includes expanded coverage of the build up to the First World War and brings this classic text up to date. There is also a new chapter on smart textiles and technology, exploring the work of Hussein Chalayan and Iris Van Herpen among others, and expanded coverage of the role of sustainability in the contemporary fashion industry, including biosynthetic textile production and Stella McCartney's use of vegan leather.

1

The Commercialization of Fashion

Introduction

This chapter will look at shifts within clothing production and purchasing that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century. These shifts were instigated by many factors, from technology and economics to music and art, laying the groundwork for the contemporary fashion industry. As textile technology sped up the process of cloth-making, overall costs were lowered, making wardrobes available to the middle- and lower-middle classes. This sudden availability of new clothing increased rather than met the demand, becoming the arena in which artists and designers found a fresh audience willing to indulge their creations both elaborate and mundane for the sake of appearance.

As the middle class continued to grow, the upper classes distinguished themselves by association with a new professional: the couturier, who created ensembles to be custom fitted for an exclusive clientele. Middle-class patrons found a way to participate in this display of wealth by buying imitations of these creations, either made by their dressmakers and tailors, or manufactured in factories and sold in department stores. As soon as the upper classes set a trend that the middle classes followed, the wealthy elite adopted a new style to differentiate themselves, starting the cycle anew.

Dress and society in Europe before the twentieth century

Dress has always functioned as a marker of social status and wealth. Prior to the nineteenth century, changes in fashion were gradual, and social class was represented by high quality textiles, rather than garment styles. The development of ‘fashion’ as we know it now – a specific style of dress prone to frequent changes – is in many ways the result of a marked increase in manufacturing and distribution during the nineteenth century. Textile and garment-making are slow, labour-intensive processes, which made clothing a precious commodity. Only the very wealthy could afford whole wardrobes; the working class, who were often responsible for textile and garment production, generally had a few sets of everyday clothes and one set of ‘Sunday best’. Clothing was often repaired and reused, and handed down from one generation to the next. Much of what differentiated everyday and special occasion garments was the fabric: historically, the more colour and pattern in one’s clothing, the more expensive it was to produce. Much of this expense was material as well as technical, requiring expensive dyestuffs and skilled labour to produce woven patterns in materials such as silk, or colourful prints on fine cotton, which until the eighteenth century were primarily exported from India to Europe.¹

Technological advances during the previous century in fibre spinning – from the Spinning Jenny to the Water Frame, and finally to the Spinning Mule perfected by Samuel Crompton in 1779 – meant that cotton and wool yarns were readily available for weaving textiles. The invention of the fly shuttle in 1733 by John Kay sped up the weaving process, decreasing the number of workers needed per loom. The Jacquard loom, invented in 1801 by Joseph Marie Jacquard, functioned on an automated system of punched cards that made the creation of pictorial woven textiles faster and easier to produce than the centuries-old draw loom. Finally, the mechanical sewing machine, patented originally by Elias Howe in 1846 and reengineered by Isaac Merritt Singer in 1851, hastened the rate at which all these textiles could be fashioned into garments. As this technology increased the rate at which apparel fabric could be produced, and the expansion of railroads across Europe and North America made the transportation of goods faster and more reliable, fashion became an important commodity, particularly for those who could afford expensive clothing as a marker of social standing.

As clothing production increased in speed, so did changes in fashion. New styles were historically determined by royalty and aristocracy, with the middle classes of society emulating their dress. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, elaborate dress styles for the elite emulated French court dress, which then became popular among royalty and aristocrats across Europe through travel and diplomacy. These styles were further popularized through descriptions in travelogues, letters and illustrations in fashion plates. Once new styles became popular, expensive fabrics and trims were distributed through textile merchants anxious to increase sales to the lower gentry and upper middle class, whose dressmakers and tailors copied the styles. By the 1840s, the desired silhouette for women had become a fitted bodice accentuating an impossibly tiny waist with a floor-length spherical skirt. This silhouette employed a tightly fastened corset and up to six separate layers of stiffened fabric called crinoline to create the desired fullness of the skirt. The bodice and overskirt required several metres of expensive luxury fabric, making each gown a rather expensive investment. Upper-class husbands and fathers were driven into debt outfitting young wives and daughters, who tried to avoid wearing the same dress too often for fear of appearing middle class (even if they were).²

FIGURE 1.1 Lewis Wickes Hine. Fourteen-year-old spinner in a Brazos Valley Cotton Mill. West, Texas, November 1913. Child labour in the textile industry was common, though much debated by social reformers, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress.)

The use of both corsets and petticoats created health problems for women, from back pain to breathing problems, a point with which nineteenth-century feminists and physicians took issue (Mitchell, ed. 2018).³ In the 1850s, the development and widespread use of steel as a new material lent itself to the invention of the cage crinoline. An armature of steel hoops linked by cloth tapes creating a semi-spherical frame, the cage created the desired silhouette of a full skirt by suspending the outer layer of fabric, eliminating the need for multiple petticoats. This style was adopted by both Empress Eugénie of France and Queen Victoria of Britain, and soon became the mark of a fashionable woman. The cage had a telescoping effect, so women could sit while wearing it.

Although this was a relief from the weight of the underskirts previously worn, the exaggerated shape of the cage was fodder for great criticism in its time. Punch magazine, a satirical publication based in London, dubbed the period of 1857 to 1867 ‘Crinolinemania’ and published cartoons with humorous depictions of the style. More significantly, the sociological implications of placing a woman in such a restrictive ensemble reduced them to objects of decoration, meant solely to be admired by men (Pomeroy [1882] in Mitchell, ed. 2018: 82–3). Male and female critics alike took issue with the fashion. In 1863, journalist Harriet Martineau wrote an intentionally shocking column entitled ‘A Wilful kind of Murder’ listing multiple instances of women wearing crinoline cages who had been burned alive when they got too close to the fire grate or a lit candle (reprinted in Mitchell, ed. 2018: 103–9). Martineau‘s article cited coroners‘ inquests throughout West Middlesex, including London, where the oversized gowns were custom-made for wealthy patrons. The enduring popularity of these full-skirted creations, still known as the ‘ball gown’ silhouette named after its ideal setting, perpetuated the lower-class work of the needlewoman, a skilled worker spending up to fifteen hours a day in a poorly lit room sewing garments for the upper classes. The demand for clothing was particularly high during the Season, a period lasting approximately six months from January to June, when Parliament was in session and wealthy estate owners came to London.

By the mid- to late 1860s, the cage was abandoned for a new contraption: the bustle, an armature or padding that protruded backwards at a right angle from the waistline of the woman, creating a prop on which to drape a large pouf of fabric. Although the width of this style was more manageable than the spherical cage, women now had a rather large protrusion in the back supporting the fabric, placing considerable weight on the waist and lower back. Also worn with a corset, the hourglass-shaped bustle silhouette would remain the dominant fashion until the turn of the twentieth century.

Menswear in Europe also underwent a dramatic change, from colourful and ostentatious court dress to a more subdued style during the nineteenth century. Based on the court attire of Louis XIV (r. 1643–1713) and fashioned from mainly French, Spanish or Italian patterned silk textiles, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dress for aristocratic men consisted of a knee-length coat, fitted waistcoat and matching breeches in colours such as rose pink, emerald green or rust orange. Accessories included coiffed white powdered wigs, a silk scarf tied into a floppy bow at the neck, lace cuffs, silk stockings and satin shoes. Tiny triangular hats or feathers were fixed to the wig for the finishing touch, an overall look that became popular among aristocracy throughout Europe. Despite the French origins of this style, during the French Revolution (1789–99) the style for silk satin suits with knee-length breeches was rejected by the masses for its association with the ruling class. Working men and their sympathizers from the upper classes preferred striped plain weave cotton or wool fashioned into ankle-length pantalons. These social revolutionaries were referred to as sans-culottes (French, without knee-breeches), signifying the Proletariat class’ break with aristocratic ideals and their fight for social justice (Takeda et al., 2015: 24). These changes in menswear would prevail from the early nineteenth century onwards.

FIGURE 1.2 John Tenniel. ‘The Haunted Lady.’ Cartoon from Punch Magazine, 1863. Dressmaker enthusing over the wonderful gown that has been made for an aristocratic client. In the mirror, we see a vision of the exhausted, wasted needlewoman, whose underpaid labours have created the exquisite gown. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.)

From the latter half of the eighteenth century, fashionable Englishmen who travelled through Europe on Grand Tour returned wearing these elaborate ensembles, earning them the derisive nickname ‘macaroni’ (after the cuisine they would have eaten while in Italy). The appearance of these young men included a spyglass and feathered ornament in a curled, oversized wig; mocked in contemporary theatre works such as David Garrick’s play The Male-Coquette (1757), the ‘macaroni’ was noted as having exclusive and elitist attitudes toward fashion (Takeda et al., 2015: 15–16).

FIGURE 1.3 ‘Laceing [sic] a Dandy.’ Published by Thomas Tagg, 26 January 1819. This illustration by an anonymous British artist shows a Dandy being laced up by his French hairdresser (right) and an assistant. The central figure identified as the ‘dandy’ derides the men for not lacing his corset tightly enough, while the hairdresser protests the bulge of his Lord’s ‘John Bull Belly’. The dandy desires to have the idealized male physique: a narrow waist offset by broad shoulders and thighs, which are achieved by padding, complementing the hourglass look for men. (Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY [69.524.35]. Rogers Fund and The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1969.)

From the early decades of the nineteenth century, a revised vision for menswear developed. Credited to an influential social climber named George ‘Beau’ Brummell (1778–1840), court circles gave preference to a new style: a fitted three-piece ensemble made of dark woollen cloth. The desired appearance for men thereafter shifted from ostentation to subtlety, with an emphasis on tailoring and fit exacted by experts on Savile Row, where London tailors had grouped their establishments (Takeda et al., 2015: 173). As in France, these elements changed throughout the century, with breeches rejected in favour of full-length trousers or pantaloons. The tail coat, a double or single-breasted jacket cut short in the front with a long solid or split panel hanging to the knees in the back, remained an essential element of formal dress. Day dress by the second half of the century for men included a morning suit, or trousers paired with a frock coat, a skirted jacket to the mid-thigh that had evolved from British hunting attire into an element of formal day wear. Even this more austere style of dress could become very costly, as each suit was custom-made from worsted wool and other high-end materials. Despite the changes in cloth and cut from the more conspicuous styles of the eighteenth century, English men still paid con-spicuously close attention to their appearance (Takeda et al., 2015: 173). Some even went so far as to wear boned corsets at the waist, emulating their female counterparts (Takeda et al., 2015: 168). These more extreme practices earned these men the reputation of being dandies, who were mocked in print publications and criticized by intellectuals for being profligate and vain.

For the working classes, clothing had little to do with ‘dress’ or signalling one’s position in life, but purely served a functional purpose. Everyday clothing for the working class shifted with the rise of factory jobs in textile and other mills. Factory workers were expected to provide their own clothing, and banned immediately from wearing cage crinolines or other voluminous styles in which the cloth was likely to get stuck in the grinding machinery. Men and boys soon adopted trousers over breeches for practical and health reasons. For those in service at a large manor house, the uniform was provided for them, but considered property of the estate: dresses, caps and aprons for housemaids, livery for footmen, and formalwear for high level employees such as the butler. In most cases, garment styles indicated the extent of physical labour involved in the job; tight-fitting clothes were not practical for excessive movement, and therefore represe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Commercialization of Fashion
• 2 The Artistry of Fashion
• 3 The Democratization of Fashion
• 4 The Americanization of Fashion
• 5 The Popularization of Fashion
• 6 The Postmodernization of Fashion
• 7 The Deviance of Fashion
• 8 The Lifestyle of Fashion
• 9 The Corporatization of Fashion
• 10 The Sustainability of Fashion
• 11 The Digitization of Fashion
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright