The Fashion Historian

Is anyone a fan of the eighteenth century? Fans have been an important luxury item, status symbol, and practical object throughout history. Fans survive from cultures all over the world, many showcasing incredible artistic virtuosity. While working at the Chicago History Museum in 2014 I was lucky enough to study some of the fans in the collection. This post will highlight two of the eighteenth-century fans in their collection-- just a small sampling of the museum's treasures!

"Women are armed with Fans as Men with Swordes, and sometimes do more Execution with them."

~ The Spectator, 1711

A fan was one of the most coveted accessories in the eighteenth century. Often incredibly elaborate and extremely expensive, fans were not only a fashion statement but also a show of wealth and status. Fans have two main components: the leaf and the sticks. In the eighteenth century, the leaf could be made from silk, paper, lace, or a delicate type of vellum (skin taken from young animals). The sticks are the skeletal structure of the fan, and higher-quality fans had sticks made of luxurious materials such as ivory or mother-of-pearl. Some of the most expensive fans had sticks inlaid with gold, silver, and precious jewels.

This fan, attributed to the late eighteenth century, is extremely ornate. The leaf is painted silk decorated with metal spangles and silver-thread embroidery. The sticks are made from ivory overlaid with silver.

The central scene painted on the leaf shows well-dressed nobility leisurely playing a flute, a psaltery, and a musette (a type of bagpipe) in an idyllic natural setting.

Flanking the central scene are pedestals surrounded by musical instruments and flowers. On top of each pedestal is a pair of flaming hearts, symbolizing love and desire. Perhaps this fan was a wedding gift or a present from a lover?

The back of this fan tells an equally intriguing story. Fans were often double-sided, featuring beautiful images on both the front and back. The back of this fan has a basic sketch of a design similar to that on the front, but it is left unfinished. This provides excellent insight into the artistic process of fan artists in the eighteenth century-- the back of the fans hows the beginning of the design process while the front shows the finished product. It also raises a few questions: Why did the artist leave the back unfinished? Did he or she run out of time? Was the client unable or unwilling to pay for the extra work? Perhaps the love affair ended halfway through the production of the fan, and the client did not wish for it to be finished? 

This printed fan is much less meticulously crafted than the painted fan above. The main image, of a mother an her two children, is off-center and does not quite fit into the circular blank space left in the background. The sticks are made of wood and painted with a simple design. Silver spangles decorate the leaf.

As can be seen in this image of the back of the fan, the spangles are sewn through the paper, leavig the stitches visible on the back. Perhaps the owner of this fan added the spangles herself to bring a little sparkle and personality to her mass-produced accessory. Or maybe a merchant bought several printed fans, customized them with spangles, and resold them.

We will probably never know the full story of these fans. Why was one left unfinished? Who added the spangles on the other? But it is in these intriguing details and questions that we find a connection to the people of the past, allowing us the briefest glimpse into their lives and stories.

The Dress Detective: A Practical Guide to Object-Based Research in Fashion

by Ingrid Mida and Alexandra Kim

Bloomsbury

"Unlocking the personal and cultural narratives hidden in the folds of a garment is a little bit like being Sherlock Holmes. A dress detective looks for and interprets the clues..."

- Ingrid Mida and Alexandra Kim

I love this quote which begins the Introduction to The Dress Detective, a new book focusing on the methodology of object-based fashion research. As a longtime fan of Sherlock Holmes I love that I get to don his mythical deerstalker myself and search for the small details that might reveal a person, a place, a time. Detective work is integral to fashion history research, yet very little has been written on how to go about it. Ingrid Mida and Alexandra Kim fill that gap in the bookshelf with The Dress Detective. This book provides an excellent guide that is sure to be extremely useful for students and professionals alike.

The Dress Detective has two main sections. The first (chapters 1 through 5) details the steps one should take to read an object. The second (chapters 6 through 12) puts this theory into practice, providing case studies of a wide assortment of different extant garments which utilize the methods laid out in previous chapters. There are also two extremely helpful appendices, providing a "Checklist for Observation" and a "Checklist for Reflection"; two blank forms the researcher can use to guide their study. Each chapter is accompanied by multiple color images to illustrate every step of the process, a must-have for a book like this. The organization of this book is fantastic, providing not only the theory of fashion research but multiple examples of how to actually do it. The case studies cover both men's and women's fashion from the early 19th century to the present, demonstrating how to approach researching a variety of garments. The "Checklist for Observation" and "Checklist for Reflection" are extremely detailed, pointing the researcher in directions they may not have considered.

I particularly appreciated chapter 1, "A Brief History of Object-based Research with Dress Artifacts". This chapter considers some of the pioneers of the field of fashion history such as Doris Langley Moore, Anne Buck, Janet Arnold, and Jules David Prown, as well as important historians working today such as Valerie Steele, Alexandra Palmer, and Lou Taylor. As a historian I, of course, appreciate the history of historians and was happy to see Mida and Kim acknowledge those who came before. On a practical level, this chapter also directs the curious reader to other sources of methodology and research (I highly recommend Jules David Prown's 1982 article, "Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method", which is briefly summarized in this chapter).

There are many boring, jargon-filled texts about history methodology. The Dress Detective is not one of them. This is a concise, well organized, and extremely accessible book that deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in fashion research.

 

Many thanks to Bloomsbury for the review copy of this book!

We're finishing up Textile Month after some technical difficulties! This week we bring you the long awaited Part 2 of our Art Deco textiles series. Catch up with Part 1 at the link below, and then read all about how American history and contemporary life influenced new textile design in the 1920s!

Nautical Chic

by Amber Jane Butchart

Abrams (USA); Thames & Hudson Ltd. (UK)

"It is France, the United States, and Britain whose naval uniforms and maritime clothing have had a lasting legacy around the globe. From tailoring to sportswear, and from haute couture to the high street, these countries are the key producers and exporters of nautical style. Intertwined with politics, imperialism, war, leisure, trade and sport, marine passions and seafaring endeavours have made the journey from lifeblood to lifestyle."

~ Amber Jane Butchart

Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette

by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

Yale University Press

"Fashion, which its detractors have called slight, inconstant, fickle, and frivolous, is, however, fixed in its principles... We see how constant it is in seizing all remarkable events, adapting them, recording them in its annals, IMMORTALIZING them in memory."

~ Cabinet des modes, ou Les Modes nouvelles, 1786

"The dissemination of fashions follows the dissemination of ideas, and sometimes drives it."

~ Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

Cinderella from Cinderella (1950)