The Blossoming of a neo-Aesthete, Part Deux

First of all, let me apologize for the formatting in the first entry, it will hopefully be better this time, as I will not be messing with the line breaks.

So I left the story at my senior thesis for Marlboro. Well, that went through a few permutations, but eventually settled on being two papers, one on Victorian Bohemian history and one on artistic dress. I had two advisors, both wonderful men, who encouraged me mightily and were tremendously helpful in getting my mind organized, as was my dear spouse.

And so I went to Britain to do some research and was freshly acquainted every day with the Pre-Raphaelite collection at the Tate, the examples of aesthetic dress at the Victoria and Albert, as well as their excellent British Design Galleries, and the Library at the V&A which was one of the few places I was able to see the very rare Aesthetic Dress journal of Walter Crane, called Aglaia. I had them photocopy several pages of the journal for me, which I still have, and hope to scan in bits of for this journal, at a later date.

I also was assigned by my Theatre professor/advisor on the costume side of things that I should see 15 different performances of some kind and do an analysis of a costume from each performance. Of course I had a blast doing that, but it also was extremely beneficial to my understanding of how clothes signify and express the emotions and the personality of the wearer. A shawl can be just a shawl, or it can be a shield against the world, an emblem of class or status, or a tool of seduction, depending on who is wearing it, where it's being worn, and how it's being worn. And that is true of most pieces of clothing, in real life as well as in performance.

These analyses helped me greatly in my emerging understanding of the significance of the clothing worn in paintings and also by the women of the Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic and Bloomsbury cadres. And I think to this day, I am much more aware of the use of a particular piece of costuming or clothing, while watching either a play or a film, or even a TV show.

I finished the papers, and I designed three dresses that were to be modelled, accompanied by a Powerpoint presentation that explained the contrast between fashionable and artistic dress in these three different periods. For each of the periods, I chose one or two women on whom to focus my attention, though I also brought in others as examples. For the Pre-Raphaelites I chose Georgiana Burne-Jones, who as the wife of one of the later Pre-Raphaelite painters, Edward Burne-Jones, was an exemplar of a prosaic quiet woman, whose ideas of fashion were turned on their head by her involvement with her husband and his circle. Upon her marriage, according to the author Judith Flanders, she never again wore fashionable Victorian dress. Only the lightest of corsets, laced very gently, and no crinolines or bustles, were the foundations of her garments.

For the Aesthetes, two women stood out for me as being influential in both the Aesthetic and Dress Reform movements, Ellen Terry and Constance Wilde. Ellen Terry was one of Britain's finest actresses, known for her excellent Shakespearean roles, played opposite the great Sir Henry Irving. She was almost not an actress, however, even though she came from a theatrical family. She met and married the painter G.F. Watts, a sort of adjunct Pre-Raphaelite, at the tender age of sixteen. The marriage was not consummated and a few months later she fell in love with the Aesthetic designer E.W. Godwin, who'd been responsible for making a lovely costume for an earlier performance, before her marriage. He swept her off to Aesthetic wonderland, ensconcing her in a house decorated and designed by him, where she and the children she would bear him out of wedlock, dressed in Aesthetic fashions and lived an Aesthetic lifestyle, until he abandoned them all, leaving her financially insolvent. She went back on the stage and met Irving, and that was that. But Miss Terry hardly ever went back to wearing corsets, often lazing about and receiving visitors, wearing a Japanese kimono, badly tied, amidst decorations of Japanese fans and classical statuary.

Constance Wilde, the wife of Oscar Wilde, was of course influenced by her Aesthetically minded husband, but I think that she truly believed in the cause of Rational Dress, and the beauties of comfortable and hygienic clothing, wool next to the skin and gowns that hung from the shoulders rather than from the waist. She was a walking embodiment of these principals, according to the many descriptions to be found in contemporary ladies' magazines of her costumes at different events.

My choice of ladies to talk about for the Bloomsbury period was a little more tenuous and hard to pin down, strangely enough. Dorelia MacNeill John, first the mistress, later the second wife of the painter Augustus John, was not much written about. I had some information on her from a few websites and from Michael Holroyd's excellent biography of Augustus John, but it wasn't a whole lot. But basically, because of John's fascination with the gypsy culture, particularly those found in Britain, he took Dorelia and his then wife Ida and all their children off in a gypsy caravan, trying to live the gypsy life. He painted several portraits of Dorelia in loose skirts and Chinese Jackets and simple dresses with attached bodices and a few buttons down the front. This loose clothing was a favored attire for women artists in Bloomsbury, particularly Dora Carrington, who wore them with her blunt bobbed hair and sweaters and clogs. In fact, you can still see women wearing them in art departments and classrooms to this day.

So these are the women I based my clothing designs on. You can see photos of the finished dresses at www.renaissance-artist.com, the site of my dear friend Veda Crewe Joseph, without whom they would never have been made. Her experience with design and color were invaluable in putting together the right fabrics and colors. The Pre-Raphaelite gown was in fact an almost exact copy of a gown that Georgiana Burne-Jones wears in a photo of the Burne-Jones and Morris families. Veda helped me to find just the right material that would echo what we could see of the dress in the photo.

More in the next blog entry, it's late and I need to get to bed!