Fashion and Historical Artistic Styles

Current fashion and is interlaced with popular media: over 100 years of movie film.

Post Modern Art: appropriation

Schiaparelli: hat 1937

Terry Gilliam: Brazil 1985

The internet.

Costume Design in the Movies, Elizabeth Leese, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. 1976

Artists and fashion

Pop Art: beauty in mass culture

Andy Warhol: fashion illustrations, "blotted ink" style, many shoes, 1958

Andy Warhol Fashion, forwarded by Linan Dosran, Chronicle Books LLC, San Francisco, 2004

Women's Fashion

1920's and 1970's fashion and illustration of sexual revolution and changing role for women.

Art Deco: exoticism, stylized motifs, influenced by the Fauves, Cubists, and Futurists.

Paul Poiret, stencil technique of pochoir prints: 1922

Flappers enjoy the simplified silhouette of their functional clothes.

Liberation and post modernism: new sensibilities

Diane Von Furstenberg: wrap dress 1975

Disco dancers get out of their hippie jeans and into Qiana dresses.

French Art Deco Fashions in pochoir prints from the 1920's, Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., Atglen, PA 1998

Art Deco Fashion, Suzanne Lussier, Bulfinch Press, Boston, 2003

100 Years of Style by Decade and Designer, Vol 5 N-Z, Linda Watson, Chelsea House Publishers, Philidelphia 1999 

Post War Fashions

1950's and 1980's design  and fashion is influenced by post war optimism and economic prosperity -  end of WW II and Cold War.

Round forms in mid-century design are intended to project generosity.

Russel Wright: ceramic pitcher

Dior introduces the New Look 1947

Marilyn Monroe 

Bright colors, big hair, big mobile phones 1982

Modonna

Crosscurrents: Art, Fashion, Design 1890-1989, Tony and Claes Lewenhaupt, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.  NY 1989

The New Look: Design in the Fifties, Lesley Jackson, Thames and Hudson, NY 1991

Romantic Art and Crinoline Fashion

After the Neoclassical period that followed the French Revolution, the mood is set with the colors that evoke an emotional understanding of the picturesque Romantic landscape. 

 A View of Fort Putnam, Thomas Cole 1825.

Crinoline fashion alters the feminine form with ballooning sleeves and big skirts. 

Fashion Design

Fashion Design in the form of dolls, engraved fashion plates, sketches, renderings, illustrations, draped forms on mannequins, photography, digital imagery, and film reflect historical styles in art. Social and cultural events, values and knowledge is reflected in art. Art and Fashion exist together and define history in a visual way. Tangible articles of clothing may or may not exist, however fashion is documented. The intangible qualities of fashion are expressed by the illustrator, draper and photographer and interpreted by the viewer. Auxiliary sources (literature, written and recorded verbal accounts) can be used to corroborate information and determine the link between fashion, art and culture in a given time period or place.

THE CORSET

Garments that cover and support the bust, wrap and bind the breasts include variations of leather bands, strips of cloth ( ancient Crete, Rome), the bassiere (Old French braciere: arm protector), the bra and

the corset

This first example, I made from cotton duck and calico. The center row of clasps (the busk) is made of steel. Within narrow vertical pockets steel corsetry (bones) support the garment and make it rigid. The lacing up the back runs through two rows of metal grommets. I used a commercial pattern (such as the Fashion Historian Martha McCain) for this corset designed to emulate nineteenth century fashion.

www. merriam-webster.com www.richardthethread.com

Today the corset exist in an undergarment form in styles of dress as well as structured and boned bodice forms such as evening gowns.

There are corset forms in many cultures. With figures and artifacts, art and article the corset and variation forms are found in ancient history. Fashion historians agree that the padding, lacing and close fit of the cote (cotte) or kirtle worn over looser chemise or underneath the cotehardie during the Middle Ages (500 to 1500) is the beginning of the corset in western fashion.

Support and Seduction A History of Corsets and Bras by Beatrice Fontanel, Harry N Abrams, Inc. New York 1992

The Corset A Cultural History, by Valerie Steele, Yale University Press, London 2001

Corsets and Crinolines by Norah Waugh, Theatre Arts Books, New York 1954, 1970