The Lure of Perfection

Fashion and Ballet, 1780-1830

Judith Bennahum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135878306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

THE LURE OF PERFECTION: FASHION AND BALLET, 1780-1830 offers a unique look at how ballet influenced contemporary fashion and women's body image, and how street fashions in turn were reflected by the costumes worn by ballet dancers. Through years of research, the author has traced the interplay between fashion, social trends, and the development of dance. During the 18th century, women literally took up twice as much space as men; their billowing dresses ballooned out from their figures, sometimes a full 55 inches, to display costly jewelry and fine brocade work; similar costumes appeared on stage. But clothing also limited her movement; it literally disabled them, making the dances themselves little more than tableaux. Movement was further inhibited by high shoes and tight corsets; thus the image of the rigidly straight, long-lined dancer is as much a product of clothing as aesthetics. However, with changing times came new trends. An increased interest in natural movement and the common folk led to less-restrictive clothing. As viewers demanded more virtuosic dancers, women literally danced their way to freedom. THE LURE OF PERFECTION will interest students of dance and cultural history, and women's studies. It is a fascinating, well-researched look at the interplay of fashion, dance, and culture-still very much a part of our world today.

Chapter 1

Setting the Stage

Aristocratic Fashion and Baroque Body
Politics before the French Revolution

The Baroque period began with the era of Louis XIV’s reign (1661–1715) and extended beyond his death to the French Revolution in 1789. The period evoked images of great opulence, panoply, and sensuousness in which fashion and ballet followed a carefully coded vocabulary. The Baroque aesthetic had to change in order to yield to newer ways of conceiving women’s clothing.

For more than four hundred years, the chief purpose of decorative clothing in Western Europe and colonial countries had been the differentiation and division of people according to birth and wealth, which the nobility between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries had secured by numerous sumptuary laws and edicts. Fashion rules the world, but who rules fashion? At every age there have been a few men and women who have stood out as the dictators in manners of fashion, and occasionally these were not the most outstanding leaders in other phases of life. Sumptuary laws, or codes that regulated how people dressed, created a fashion system assuring that only rulers, clergy, and court lieges could dress in certain kinds of clothing. It is important to realize that although the aristocracy represented a tiny portion of the population, this privileged group reigned supreme over taste and manners.

In the late eighteenth century, the aristocracy fancied itself at the center of the world, reviving the image of Louis XIV’s Sun King, around whose glaring radiance everything revolved. The concept of the Sun King came from Louis XIV’s early foray into ballet, when he danced the role of the sun in Le Ballet de la Nuit (1653). After all, from the king’s bright light came financial and political support that fueled all activities in the country. Opera, ballet, and theater followed suit. The vivid colors and rich fabrics such as silks, velvets, and embroideries of court clothing reflected the importance of the aristocracy in their everyday lives. The French court deemed itself terribly advanced in style and presentation, but the courtiers often wore unwashed clothing; most materials were not washable but were occasionally spot-cleaned. Nor were their heads and hair clean under their extravagantly tall wigs which, on the eve of the Revolution, became increasingly massive, ready to tilt and fall into the guillotine’s La Lanterne basket. Headgear rose so high that women could not use ordinary sedan chairs for transport.

Diaries and novels of the period were revelatory about manners. An extremely insightful description of the quality of life at the high levels of French society may be found in the novel Letters from a Peruvian Woman, by Françoise de Graffigny: “The men and women wear finery so splendid and so covered with useless decorations . . . I cannot help but think that the French have chosen superfluousness as the object of their worship; they devote to it their arts, which are so far above nature.”¹ Graffigny makes it clear that the French desperately needed to appear wealthy:

The great pretense among the French is to appear lavishly wealthy. Genius, the arts, and perhaps even the sciences all relate back to ostentation and contribute to the destruction of fortunes . . . I have it on their own authority that they contemptuously turn their backs on those solid, pleasant objects produced in abundance by France itself, instead extracting from all parts of the world, and at great expense, the fragile, useless furnishings that decorate their houses, the dazzling garments with which they are covered, and even the very food and drink of which their meals are composed.²

Never before had Europe seen as magnificent a setting as the royal European court, and especially Versailles, for conspicuous leisure. But Versailles was a decidedly uncomfortable place, hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It was built not for ease but for glory, the life of unproductive labor in its purest form. The many levels of courtiers presupposed a complex pecking order through which one rose by wit, grace, and clever politics. The witty but earnest seventeenth-century précieuse and honnête homme would have been lost in the decadent Versailles of gambling, gossip, and ridicule. The court at Versailles was always referred to, by those who belonged to it, as “ce pays-ci,” this country, and it did have a climate—a manner of speech and body, as well as a moral code—all its own that penetrated all its activities. Why in this environment was fashion so decidedly important?

Fig. 1 Comtesse d’Artois, 1780s. This extravagant court costume began to lose favor toward the time of the Revolution. The Countess was a walking advertisement for outrageously conspicuous consumption. Courtesy of the Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale.

The courtly woman became a center of self-interest and self-importance. In looking back at the fashions of upper-class women just before the Revolution, one immediately notices that the clothing of the richest, most powerful, and influential symbolized an outré, excessive, nearly grotesque covering of the human figure, what Quentin Bell called “conspicuous outrage.” Court costumes were especially exaggerated, implying that courtiers performed for one another in a grizzly game of one-upmanship in opulence.

The eighteenth-century woman took up twice as much space as the man. “In the French fashion plates, the feminine figure is filled out with fichus (lacy shawls), ballooning skirts covered with ruffles and garlands, and mountains of frizzed and fluffed hair. The whole cloud-like ensemble is enhanced by the movement of thin veils and ribbons that catch the air as the lady walks. . . . ”³ Walking and especially dancing became treacherous feats, as wearing heels impeded all natural movement. “During Louis XIV’s reign, heeled shoes entered the ballroom for court dancing . . . heels were colored red in order to distinguish courtiers from other would-be aristocrats. This restriction implied the wearer’s elite status.”⁴

Women studied how to glide along with tiny steps when moving through the hallways, attempting to appear to float as they displaced volumes of space with their clothing’s width and decoration. Could these floating fortresses possibly be the ancestors of the nineteenth-century ball gowns that inspired the tutu design of the 1830s? Certainly, the male partner of the Romantic ballerina had to adjust constantly to the billowing skirts of the woman he lifted high into the air, just as the eighteenth-century courtier made way for his lady counterpart.

As Richard Martin revealed in his study The Ceaseless Century, cinematic and stage performances create stunning images of the French court by presenting the highly ornamented and hand-painted dresses that represent the authority of eighteenth-century style.⁵ The wide vertical and obstructional shape of the pannier served the purpose of exhibiting the rich, jeweled materials a woman wore, sometimes fifty-five inches of display. If two women bumped into one another in a narrow hall and one fell down on her back, like a turtle, she had to be raised to standing by several people.

There was a reason why aristocratic and upper-class women of the eighteenth century dressed in clothing that was so cumbersome it disabled them: they were not supposed to work. Fashion was a weapon of power for women, a way to demonstrate and hold authority. Women needed money and control of money; fashion and sex appeal gave them hegemony, or control of financial power. Novels and journals of the time faithfully recounted the sufferings, conquests, and greed of the French court at Versailles that reiterated the need to be powerful and rich.

Covered as she was, the mystery of the late eighteenth-century aristocratic woman symbolized a government that these women represented, one whose functions mystified the people but whose sensual grandeurs and festivities were deeply attractive. The eighteenth-century woman as an active participant in creative activities of the court is difficult to portray. Her role as a controlling person in terms of taste found its focus and center in the salon, where she wheedled, gossiped, and cajoled her favorite artist or writer into some sort of stardom. Jean François Marmontel, an encyclopedist, wrote in his Mémoires that Madame de Tencin advised him to befriend women, “for, it is through women, she used to say, that one obtains what one wishes from men.”⁶ Salon women patronized young artists and lobbied the intelligentsia to support their proteges.

Fashion and ballet fused when one was presented at court. The performance proved as important as any show in the ballet or theater. Hundreds of rules of etiquette, arbitrated by court dancing masters, framed the entrances, exits, and behaviors of the aristocracy. In her Memoirs, Madame de La Tour du Pin narrates a teenage visit to the queen. She made a special trip to Paris in advance in order to visit her dancing master, M. Huart, so that he could give her “two lessons in the curtsey”:

It is impossible to conceive of anything more ridiculous than those rehearsals of the presentation. M. Huart, a large man, his hair very well dressed and white with powder, wore a billowing underskirt and stood at the far end of the room to represent the Queen . . . he showed me just when to remove my glove and bow to kiss the hem of the Queen’s gown. He showed me the gesture she would make to prevent me. Nothing was forgotten or overlooked in these rehearsals which went on for three or four hours.⁷

Madame described her dress of wide panniers with a long train, the layers of lace on her sleeves, and the eight rows of diamonds that the queen lent her. “The day of one’s presentation was very embarrassing and exceedingly tiring. It meant being stared at by the whole Court and being torn to shreds by every critical tongue.”⁸ Madame de la Tour du Pin’s diaries remain as important commentaries during the late eighteenth century.

Sometimes a court rehearsal for presentation took several days because of the amount of training needed. A young woman had to adjust to the pain of a whale-boned bodice that cut into the upper arms. Her costume, to which a long cloth train was attached, had to be manipulated repeatedly with little kicks to move forward, and after curtsying low several times, the wearer had to retreat backwards from the royal presence without tripping. The length of the train was proportionate to the rank of the wearer. The presentation outfit was usually black, but if the courtier were in the later stages of mourning, white was the preferred color.⁹

As the eighteenth century came to a close, the middle classes began to assert themselves with greater force. Their increasingly opulent lifestyle nonplussed aristocrats who cultivated and retreated behind an invisible social barrier of manners rather than wealth. Elegant movement was an art that could not be purchased; it required time and practice. One could achieve it with three things: dancing masters, etiquette books, and fashionable attire. The look of status always outweighed one’s desire for physical comfort in order to become a work of art.

Fig. 2 Chapeau à l’Anglaise. Spencer à l’Anglaise, 1810. English influences pervaded French society despite political conflicts. From Horace Vernet’s collection of fashion illustrations, in his Incroyables et Merveilleuses Costumes et Modes d’Autrefois Paris 1810–1818. Courtesy of the Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

England’s Effect on the French Court

In England, the court wielded less influence, tempered by regular meetings of the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The rich and privileged in England remained on their rightful estates, creating, in theory, a greater sense of security for both lords and their ladies, while at Versailles, the king, mindful of the dangerous Fronde, or rebellion against Louis XIV in the mid-seventeenth century, took them from their lands and forced them to live in Versailles.

After the defeat of Cromwell, the radical Puritan leader (1599–1658), the English tradition of wearing austere clothing remained concomitant with its conservative values. The place of religion is significant. The British are Protestant and did not approve of frippery, while the French are Catholic and enjoyed flaunting their decorations and finery. The English associated popery with feminine sexuality and with France and Italy as centers of passion, sensuality, and superstition as well as decayed feudalism and diabolical Catholicism.

The tensions between England and France have an age-old history. But their geographic proximity, as well as similar philosophical interests in governmental freedoms and creative scientific thinking, brought the English and the French into an odd love–hate relationship. Parisian women read English novels and fashion magazines, while English women followed every twist and turn of Parisian styles.

French women differed from English women in the objects they owned and revered. In An Elegant Art: Fashion and Fantasy in the Eighteenth Century, which describes the life and manners of eighteenth-century aristocrats, we learn from personal diaries and novels that the two most important items in an English lady’s boudoir were her writing desk and her bed; in France, they were the bidet and the bed.¹⁰

By the 1780s, the English responded to the more practical, outdoorsy, relaxed look, and portrait painters placed their models in natural surroundings rather than in the stiff drawing rooms preferred by the French. The English penchant for living a more rural, country life was called à l’Anglaise by the French. For the high-minded French and English moralists, the blurring of class distinctions in dress created the problem of upstanding women looking l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Captions
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: Aristocratic Fashion and Baroque Body Politics before the French Revolution
• Chapter 2: Reformers and Philosophes as Forerunners of the Revolution in Fashion
• Chapter 3: The Moderate and the Outrageous
• Chapter 4: Neoclassicism: 1780–1820
• Chapter 5: The Consulate (1799–1804) and the Empire (1804–1815) of Napoléon: Imperial Designs Pervade Street and Stage Fashion
• Chapter 6: Restoration—One Bourbon Returns!: Louis XVIII and the Restoration (1815–1824)
• Chapter 7: Pale Goddesses on the Street during the Romantic Movement: Charles X Ruled France from 1824–1830
• Chapter 8: The Kingdom of the Opera: Pale Goddesses on the Stage (1824–1830)
• Chapter 9: The Turning Point: “The Ballet of the Nuns,” and La Sylphide
• Chapter 10: The Dark Side of White
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index