Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930 Diana Crane Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930. Radu Stern. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Pp. ix + 205. $42.95 (cloth). Much has been written about the influence of the arts upon fashion designers and whether fashion designers should be considered artists, but relatively little has been written about avant-garde artists who created designs for clothing. Radu Stern has assembled an interesting set of materials about European artists (Austrian, English, French, German, Italian, and Russian) who designed clothing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book consists of Stern's summaries of these artists' ideas and activities in the realm of fashion design and of several artist-designers' statements about their work in this area. The book also includes numerous reproductions of these artists' fashion sketches, as well as photographs of clothing they designed. In most cases, these artists' ventures into fashion design were motivated by an enormous antipathy toward commercial fashion. Many of the artists depicted commercial fashion as ugly, unhealthy, and over-ornamented. They also claimed that it mandated change to stimulate sales. Like dress reformers who were active during this period, some of them tended to moralize in their writing, declaiming against frivolity and waste in commercial fashion and the way in which fashion corrupted women's taste. Since commercial fashion was inspired by French haute couture, there was also an element of nationalism in their attacks, a desire to create competing centers of fashion in other countries. In general, these artists believed that their designs would improve the aesthetic level of everyday life. Some hoped to elevate clothing to the status of an applied art, complete with museum exhibitions. While these artists' views of commercial fashion were quite similar, their conceptions of alternatives to commercial fashion differed considerably, depending upon their national backgrounds. English, German and Austrian artists in the late nineteenth century were concerned with creating clothing that would be simpler, more comfortable, and more aesthetic than the fashionable clothing of the period. Curiously, in their designs, these artists retained the floor-length skirt, which dress reformers criticized as unhealthy and impractical. [End Page 183] In the pre- and postwar period, the French artist, Sonia Delaunay, drew on her ideas about the use of contrasting colors in painting (simultaneism) to create clothing in bright colors that was described by her husband, Robert Delaunay, as "a living painting . . . a sculpture of living forms" (65). Her goal was to eliminate the traditional separation between the design of the printed cloth and that of the dress. The Italian Futurists in the same period produced clothing designs that were radically innovative. For example, the wearer was encouraged to modify the design according to his or her needs and moods, anticipating an orientation toward clothing design that became widely accepted at the end of the twentieth century. By contrast, Russian designers, working in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, were attempting to create clothing for the new proletariat that would eliminate the class distinctions inherent in previous styles of dress. A comment by the French poet, Apollinaire (181), concerning the designs of Delaunay is relevant to the designs of most of these artists: their innovations were primarily in the selection of materials and colors rather than cut. With a few exceptions, clothes designed by these artists were never widely commercialized and were worn primarily by relatives and friends of the artists and other members of cultural elites. They generally preferred to produce "unique pieces" for personal use and did not possess the requisite skills for creating designs suitable for commercial production. Their lack of understanding of popular taste was another impediment to the dissemination of their ideas. Consequently their ideas had virtually no impact on what the average person wore. Their dream of using dress design as a means of bypassing the limits of "pure art" and acting "directly on daily life" (3) was not realized. The image of commercial fashion that emerges from these texts is stereotypical. The differences between designs created by avant-garde artists and by commercial fashion designers were greatest in the late nineteenth century and diminished considerably in the early twentieth century...