Houze, Rebecca Textiles, Fashion and Design Reform in Austria-Hungary Before the First World War (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 534 Houze, Rebecca. Textiles, Fashion and Design Reform in Austria-Hungary Before the First World War. The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950. Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2015. xxii + 383 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £85.00. The visual and material cultures of late-nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary have been so exhaustively examined that one might wonder if anything new on the topic can be said. This highly impressive study indicates that it can. The book analyses two inter-related themes: embroidery and textiles, and fashion, and demonstrates how central they were to design reform in the Habsburg Monarchy and, as such, became the focus of much wider debates about cultural, social and political identity. The fact that as humble an art as embroidery should have figured so prominently is due to the influence of one figure: the architect and theorist Gottfried Semper. Best known as the author of the monumental treatise, Style (1861–63), Semper exerted a huge influence in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, including Austria. This ranged from his ideas on museum organization to his aesthetic theory that argued both that textiles were ur-form of all subsequent artistic practices and that architecture could be described with the metaphor of dressing. His ideas were eagerly taken up not only in the Museum of Art and Industry in Vienna but also by its counterpart in Budapest, which quickly built up a substantial collection of textiles and embroidery. Museums as well as displays at world exhibitions foregrounded embroidery and textiles as exemplars of new possibilities of design reform. Although much of her narrative is centred on Vienna, Houze’s extensive knowledge of the context in Hungary is admirably on display here, in her detailed attention to museum practice in both halves of the Monarchy. Her analysis also highlights the wider tensions. Hence, while the Vienna Museum of Art and Industry sought out examples of quality design worldwide, the Museum of Applied Arts, originating in collections from the Hungarian National Museum, had a more focused mission: promotion of Hungarian national culture. Promotion of embroidery and textiles was part of an attempt by the Habsburg administration to breathe new life into the often moribund rural economies, and alongside museums, new craft and design schools were founded across the Empire. Due to the predominantly female associations of these practices, they also raised the question of women’s labour. Exhibitions of women’s work were frequent, although as Houze notes, this was emphatically not a drive towards female emancipation, but rather, driven by bourgeois ideal of domesticity and the role of women’s work within the household. Indeed, it was often only through enlightened male patronage that women’s work became an object of sympathetic interest. REVIEWS 535 A more positive aspect of this theme, however, is the prominence of women writers as contributers to debates about art and design reform. Some of them, such as Bertha Zuckerkandl and Amelia Levetus, are already well known, but Houze also engages with the numerous other, mostly forgotten female authors, who were respected in their own time as participants in the public conversation. Houze also mentions the numerous successful women designers who were equally important and influential figures in the late nineteenth century. Although it is not her primary aim, Houze thereby challenges the dominant tenor of historiography on Habsburg artistic culture which, shaped by authors such as Schorske and Le Rider, has tended to over-emphasize the Oedipal conflicts of the age and viewed the Vienna of 1900 through the lens of masculine anxieties. Women here gain a voice they have not often been granted, and Houze’s book performs the valuable task of showing how partial that more established approach has been. Having analysed in great detail embroidery and the related debates over the meaning of textiles and ornament, the book then discusses fashion. Dress and fashion became the foci of familiar issues in the cultural politics of the late Habsburg Empire; folk costume was promoted as an instrument of nationalist ideology. In Hungary, for example, the traditional shepherd’s cifraszűr was worn by the Budapest bourgeoisie and was even incorporated into architectural decoration such as...