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!

The Blossoming of a neo-Aesthete

The Bride of Bethlehem by William Holman Hunt

Where to begin? Well, welcome, first of all to a blog I hope to keep up with fairly regularly, hopefully at least once a week, if not more.

First of all, why this subject? The late 19th century has held a fascination for me ever since I was 14. The gateway into this wondrous world was the viewing of two television series, both airing in 1978 (to the best of my memory) here in the States. The first was Edward the King, starring the great actor Timothy West (father to the brilliant young actor Sam West). I was fascinated by the royal family and all their doings and scandals and tragedies. Amidst it all, the beautiful Mrs. Lillie Langtry appeared -- played by the beautiful Francesca Annis -- and I was captivated by her, just as the king was.

Then came the series Lillie, also starring Ms. Annis, and I was again drawn into the world of riches and beautiful dresses and costumes. Just as my dazzled eyes were beginning to be accustomed to the beauty and scandal of Mrs. Langtry's burgeoning life in London, they were shown a new god, a tall poetical youth in a loose white shirt illuminated by a window and coming forward to salute his new worshipper, though he professed to worship at her feet instead. Oscar Wilde it was who was my new deity, speaking such words of fire and passion to ignite the hungrily passionate soul of a fairly lonely teenager. I immediately went to my nearest library and, checking out Wilde's complete works, I devoured it cover to cover, writing down poems and aphorisms and epigrams and witticisms that caught my eye. Everything he said seemed to resonate deep inside my soul. He became my obsession and he still is.

I learned more and more about Wilde and his times and found more people to be interested in. My first trip to Britain in 1984 was responsible for my complete conversion to the Pre-Raphaelite Movement and its successors. Living in Cambridge, I spent a lot of time in the Fitzwilliam Museum gazing at Pre-Raphaelite paintings there. One, The Bride of Bethlehem by William Holman Hunt, hung on the tiny mezzanine in the museum's front room. The narrow walkway enforced a close perusal of the work and it was an education in color and beauty, as I had never experienced before. I bought a book of Pre-Raphaelite paintings while I was there, and I became fascinated by their work.

Over the years of university, work, then back to university again, I always had this driving fascination with the lives and works of the painters and writers of the late 19th century. Finally in my second and successful attempt to get a bachelors degree, I took this long-standing passion and turned it into my two-year Plan at Marlboro College in Vermont. I narrowed and winnowed my ideas and my interests down to two things, Victorian Bohemian history and artistic and aesthetic dress.

I'll continue this introduction in my next blog entry.