Couture and/or Culture?

Abstract

Nancy J. Troy: Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 150 b&w illns, 456 pp., hardback ISBN 0-262-20140-2, £39.95, paperback ISBN 0-262-70103-0, £16.95. The tropes of art-historical study have formed the basis for the study of design history and, to a lesser degree, extended investigations into material culture. This is not a simple adoption of analytical tools or historiographies but resides in the original proximity between the two fields. In modern Western history, from the Enlightenment to the middle of the nineteenth century, examples from decorative, applied, or industrial arts such as wall coverings, porcelain decoration, furniture or textile weaving were discussed as analogous to developments in painting, sculpture, architecture, or music. This is not to say that they were accorded identical cultural status – as the fluctuating hierarchy of the arts since the seventeenth century had obviously privileged painterly discourses – or that their material value, based on rarity, production process, and forms of consumption, was regarded as the same. However, the forms in which decorative art were debated, that is the analyses of technical skill, significance of expression and aesthetic experience, and the discussion of their public impact, were comparable to those ascribed to stately building, monuments or academic painting. Due to the significant absence of the concept of the avant-garde, which was to develop at the end of the nineteenth century for aesthetic as well as economic reasons, the ‘fine’ arts had been valued in terms of technical proficiency, emulation of the classical canon and relation to historical models, adding to the established high regard in which individual marks of artistic creation had been held. An identical set of values was adopted for the discussion of the decorative arts, not merely in absence of an alternative valedictory scheme but because there was a similar regard for decorative hand-made objects before the advent of industrial production processes. With the development of large-scale manufacture and extended structures of distribution and mediation, a gap opened in the latter half of the nineteenth century between the applied and fine arts, and their cross-references and confluences marked a significant area of artistic and wider cultural debate.