Fashion's Double

Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film

Adam Geczy, Vicki Karaminas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781472519283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Mere clothing is transformed into desirable fashion by the way it is represented in imagery. Fashion's Double examines how meanings are projected onto garments through their representation, whether in painting, photography, cinema or online fashion film, conveying identity and status, eliciting fascination and desire. With in-depth case studies including the work of Nick Knight and Helmut Newton, film examples such as The Hunger Games, music video Girl Panic by Duran Duran, and much more, this book analyses the interrelationship between clothing, identity, embodiment, representation and self-representation. Written for students and scholars alike, Fashion's Double will appeal to anyone studying fashion, cultural studies, art theory and history, photography, sociology, and film.

1

PAINTING FASHION

The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture, ‘I shall stay with the real Dorian,’ he said, sadly.

‘Is it the real Dorian?’ cried the original of the portrait, strolling across to him. ‘Am I really like that?’

‘Yes you are just like that.’

‘How wonderful, Basil!’

‘At least you are like it in appearance. But it will never alter,’ sighed Hallward. ‘That is something’

‘What a fuss people make about fidelity!’ exclaimed Lord Henry.

OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray¹

It is well known that the invention of oil paint concurred with the rise of the imperial age. Trafficking goods was, and is, inseparable from trafficking rank and personality. These symmetries help to explain one of the highpoints in the history of the medium in sixteenth-century Venice, then a small superpower, the mercantile artery for silks, spices and exotic valuables between Occident and Orient. It is perhaps a commonplace to observe that grandees would dress up when they had their portrait painted, but it is a point that needs to be made when the focus is on fashion’s representation. But it is with the birth of couture with Charles Frederick Worth that this simple relationship is added several more layers. For Worth not only plundered indiscriminately from historical paintings, but many of his gowns were expressly destined to return to the painterly form that had inspired them. Photography served as a go-between in this dynamic, in depicting the models or ‘mannequins’ who gave stylized life to the garment before it was worn by its ‘patron’ who would then commission a painting. Worth’s foremost colluder in the passage from garment to its saccharine immortalization was the court painter to Napoleon III, Franz-Xaver Winterhalter.

Winterhalter and Worth

The word ‘patron’ is used above because Worth considered himself an artist and his designs creations; he was an independent mind and his ‘works’ were supposed to resonate as beautiful objects more than just decorate and clothe the body. Before him, women had seamstresses who would work from widely available style and pattern books of the latest fashions. Aside from the skills in sewing and the appropriateness of the fit, the prized aspect of a gown was the fabric. Seamstresses were typically inundated on two occasions: before a major social event like a marriage or ball, or when the latest shipment arrived from China or India, although by this time Britain had begun to rival the Orient in its ability to reinvent its designs. Unconventionally for a man – he was called the ‘man-milliner’ – Worth not only placed fabric at a premium but the manner of design itself. Whereas a woman could once encounter another with almost the same design but in a different cloth pattern, for the right price Worth could give assurance that a woman would never be embarrassed like this again. He thereby ushered in a new level of commodity to the codes of fashion and dress, in which desire, money and image were comingled more densely than ever before. A woman not only dressed well, she was the purveyor of a look that emulated, if not competed, with a painting, and preferably a great one. Since the proliferation of the masque in the 1500s, dressing up had always been a popular practice in court life. It was also a useful measure by which women could express themselves, either publicly or in their portraits (Joshua Reynolds frequently painted subjects dressed as a character, which was for surreptitious self-expression where the overt would have been unseemly). Now dressing up was more a matter of being, as it were, ‘more than oneself’, where a woman in a dress was not only an echo of a work of art, but also where art served their own ends. With Worth, it was typical for women to choose their dresses in anticipation of a portrait.

Before Worth’s rise in the 1860s, art appreciation was something left to specialists. While the availability of photographs continued to increase, those reproducing paintings were still not so plentiful. It was primarily Worth who ushered in a literacy of art to the upper and upper middle classes that was normally the province of collectors, historians and connoisseurs. Since his ‘inspiration’ was interpolated onto the body and correlated to the person who wore the garment, the references he used were demystified and made more accessible. Worth was also promiscuous in his derivations, his criteria being according to whim rather than according to any academic or historical schema. Certain favourites were van Dyck, Velasquez, Watteau and Vigée-Lebrun, but he also drew from the deep Renaissance well, especially Venice: from Veronese to Titian and Carpaccio. Thus the sumptuous representations of cloths and stuffs resurfaced anew. (A little later the designer Mariano Fortuny would draw heavily from Venetian artists, especially Carpaccio – immortalized in the famous sequences toward the end of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, when the narrator dresses his lover Albertine in Sumptuous Fortuny robes.) This is what leads Diana de Marly to remark, ‘The history of art and the history of costume were the twin foundations upon which modern dress design would rise, and from which it should draw its strength.’² So much so that it is safe to say that Worth’s dresses were an intricate but arbitrary register of the history of Western art from the Renaissance to this day. Fashion was able to combine stylistic references that were both rhetorical and substantial in the literal sense of material habitation – and it did so well before this stylistic pastiche became the norm for art in the late twentieth century. Thus the notion of inspiration as it is used commonly within contemporary fashion parlance is synonymous with the birth of modern fashion, as is the arbitrary and constant repositioning of influences from season to season. It was Worth who made the marriage of clothing and representation decisive.

Like anything subject to the vicissitudes of taste and perception, Worth’s success was catapulted with the patronage of Empress Eugénie shortly after he set up his fashion house in 1858 thanks to the backing of a generous Swede, Otto Bobergh. Worth soon became the couturier who clothed the most famous and fashionable women of the day: Pauline von Metternich, Countess Castiglione, Sarah Bernhardt and the opera diva Dame Nellie Melba. Many of these women are now remembered in paintings and photographs wearing Worth’s dresses, something taken relatively for granted until fairly recently. Castiglioni (Virginia Oldoïni) was one of the most famous beauties of the day, and also a peripheral but not insignificant figure in the history of photography. From 1856 to the years leading to her death in 1899, she had the photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson take photographs of her in all manner of poses and outfits acting out theatricalized images symbolic of key moments of her life. Several images prefigure the avant-garde photography of Man Ray, especially those figuring only parts of her body, such as one of her crossed legs enframed by a miniaturized mock stage (c. 1861/67).

Worth’s close association with the royal family inevitably brought him in close contact with the court painter Franz-Xaver Winterhalter, with whom he formed something akin to a de facto collaboration. Initially accepted into court of the ‘bourgeois king’ Louis-Philippe after the deposition of Charles X in 1830, Winterhalter was introduced to some of the most distinguished people of the day, including Queen Victoria who is said to have pronounced him the equal of van Dyck,³ then considered one of the greatest portraitists in history. Victoria was perhaps a little overexcited in her judgment. Winterhalter was a consummate technician, and while some of his earlier works sing with some empathy and insight, dignity soon gives way to pomposity, and he quickly developed a love for doe-eyed womanhood swamped in finery. Very early in his career, clothing and fabric assume dominant roles in paintings; he clearly prided himself in the facility with which fabric texture, lustre and density could be replicated. It is an observation more than echoed by Aileen Ribeiro:

Winterhalter depicts textiles with virtuosic skill, whether it is the pleats and open-work on the shift seen in the Young Italian Girl by the Well, or the rich Brussels lace and embroidered net which dominate the costume worn by Queen Marie-Amélie. He dwells with pleasure on the tactile surfaces of velvet, fur, lace, foaming tulle, and on glossy wings of hair, decorated with flowers.⁴

Worth became introduced to the royal family in 1860 after Princess Pauline Metternich came dressed to court in an evening dress of white tulle woven in with silver thread; it had a daisy trim that had been finished with pink hearts. It immediately drew the attention of Empress Eugénie who summoned him to the Tuileries whereupon Worth began his sartorial monopoly. He was enlisted to design all the best clothing at court, including masquerade. Worth quickly lifted the standard of dress at court, something to which Winterhalter was eager to respond. In Ribeiro’s words, ‘At times, it seems as if Worth and Winterhalter were working as a team.’ They were both also promiscuous appropriators. Like Worth, Winterhalter was a zealous plunderer of art history, as evidenced for instance in his pastiche of Raphael in his portrait of the Comte de Niewerkerke (1852), or of van Dyck (again) in his group portrait of the Royal Family (1846). He was also attentive to the work of great portraitists such as Lawrence and Ingres, as well as the facility with texture of Watteau, Fragonard and Boucher.⁵ In 1854, before Worth’s entry into court, Winterhalter had already painted Eugénie ‘à la Marie Antoinette’, standing in profile against a benignly saccharine, artificial, theatre-style ground or a tended garden in bloom, her hair whitened, with a sumptuously bulging dress of yellow silk giving way to a blue-trimmed white underdress. The lavishness of Napoleon III’s court – including the work of writers such as the Goncourt brothers who wrote a history of eighteenth-century art – made a revival of the eighteenth century seem inevitable. Eugénie had her personal apartments decorated in the Rococo style as well. This trend meant that the stylistic references were like a multi-panelled chamber of mirrors: Worth borrowed from artists like van Loo, Nattier, Boucher, Lancret as well as others already mentioned, which were then translated into garments that were then retransposed to painting in which eighteenth-century pastiche was writ large.

One of the more famous portraits of the Worth era is the stately but coyly informal portrait of Barbe Dmitrievna Mergassov, Madame Rimsky-Korsakov (Figure 1). Wearing a robe de chambre of richly flowing tulle finished with blue facing and ribbons, she poses holding her hair, face askance, and in typical boudoir désabille, redolent not only of Boucher and Vigée-Lebrun, but van Dyck. It is also possible that Winterhalter drew from Courbet’s erotic female figures of the 1850s and 1860s.⁶ It is precisely the relaxed nature of the pose that masks its myriad references. She is at once in the moment and embedded in iconographic history. While not expressly about this painting, the words of James Laver on Winterhalter are strikingly apt:

Figure 1 Madame Rimsky Korsakov, Franz-Xaver Winterhalter. Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Paris. RMN – Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt.

A head or at most a head and a pair of bare shoulders were all that emerged from the mountains of organdie, tarlatan, barege, grenadine and gauze with which the dressmakers of the ’sixties loved to envelop their clients. It is interesting to note the eagerness with which Winterhalter seized upon the bare shoulders. They were all he was allowed to show of the female figure, and he made them as expressive as possible.⁷

Academicians and Impressionists

Needless to say, depictions of Worth’s dresses were not exclusive to Winterhalter. And it was not only that women wished to be wearing Worth gowns, but artists wanted to be seen painting them also. Worth gowns are immortalized in what is the roll-call of some of the technically brilliant painters of the time: Elven, Baron, Boldini, Compte-Calix, Carpeaux and the arch-academician Gérôme.

It...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Doubling
• 1 Painting fashion
• 2 The model image: From illustration to photograph
• 3 The Little Black Dress and Capitol Couture
• 4 Perverse utopias: Helmut Newton
• 5 Music video, pornochic and retro-elegance
• 6 Fashion film, or the disappearing catwalk
• Conclusion: Conditions of impossibility
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright