Dress Reform Research Articles

Power + Fashion

“Power dressing,” itself a women’s dress reform movement, as it came to be called in the 1970s, used to distinguish typical feminine dress styles and was seen as a necessary strategy for a more subdued image on par with the masculine, serious, and formal professional dress, namely the ubiquitous suit and tie. This new ‘career’ woman became visible by her appearance and choice of dress codes that reinforced her position as a businesswoman who was seriously committed to her work. But from the perspective of the first decades of the new millennium, power dressing and power and fashion have far wider meanings and ramifications. For Michel Foucault, power is a regulatory principle that is used to control social interactions and to impose structures that inform the ways in which we act and appear. In line with Foucault’s analysis, to dress is already to respond to tacit frameworks of power, and because it involves already accepted codes of visualisation and behaviour, to “power dress” is not simply to wield or enact power voluntarily but to succumb to it as well. Further, as this paper will reveal, power dressing can also be understood according to Foucault’s “technologies of self”, which sees the historical subject as both subject and object of a network of discursive forces that are considered normative as opposed to constructed. Power dressing still exists today but according to a more nuanced and multivalent configuration. It can also be thought of as a particular form of renunciation that facilitates an embodiment of power much as religious asceticism and privation is (purportedly) constitutive of a more authentic self.

Shame and Safety Pins: Dress Controversy and ‘Moral Technologies’ in 1900s Urdu Magazines for Women

This article interrogates the changing bodily practices of shame (sharm) in colonial India at a time when a Muslim national identity was being shaped and gender expectations were being questioned with the growing presence of women in the public sphere. Focusing on a controversy on Muslim dress reform in two Urdu periodicals for women, Tahzīb un-Niswān (Ladies’ Culture, a weekly from Lahore) and Ḵẖātūn (Madam, a monthly from Aligarh) in 1905–7, I examine the way upper- and middle-class women navigated Islamic prescriptions and Western ideas of ‘progress’ while debating the contours of community identities. In the quest to safeguard their modesty, the new technology of the safety pin offered a creative solution. This article argues that it played an active role in allowing for new practices of female modesty and in creating tensions around group (qaum) formation in British India.

Poryadok, paradigma i politika estetiki: reforma odezhdy v period nepa (1921–1928)

Based on the combing and analysis of historical documents and newspaper images, this paper examines the early Soviet social costume style in the New Economic Policy (NEP) period, and the reasons for its transformation from the perspective of social history of art. The research shows that the dress reform during the NEP period of the Soviet Union experienced multiple model stages such as the paradigm shift from “simple imitation” to “self-construction”, and the discourse integration of “modern” and “national”. At the same time, the aesthetic discourse of socialist fashion, as the politics of aesthetics in daily life, become the mythic metaphor of socialist utopia in the process of constructing national ideology, social and cultural concepts and citizenship consciousness.

Dentistry and Embroidery in 1890s Utah: The Work of Kate D. Barron Buck

Dentistry and Embroidery in 1890s Utah: The Work of Kate D. Barron Buck

The Social Movement Archive

The Social Movement Archive

Dress Reform and Fashion

From the early 1820s through the mid-1850s, a dress reform movement to emancipate women from tight-lacing and corsets became prominent. Living in the prevailing gender hierarchy, male reformers and female authors took different approaches to express their arguments and participate in the public discourse. Although women’s clothing may have started as the instrument of misogynistic fetish, it has also become a medium to advocate women’s agency when women take control. Society’s expectation on how female members should appear remains prevalent in modern days.

Make a Picture of Yourself: Indigenous Portrayals in the Reservation Diaries of Abby Williams Hill

Make a Picture of Yourself:Indigenous Portrayals in the Reservation Diaries of Abby Williams Hill Tiffany Aldrich Macbain In the summer of 1902, an artist named Abby Williams Hill (1861–1943) camped with her children at Trout Lake, Washington, not far from their home in Tacoma. A few days into their stay, Hill found herself drawn to a large group of Yakama people who had established an encampment nearby. She approached the camp, according to her diary, with the twin desires to experience "Indians" not living "among the whites" and to sketch them in their "national costume[s]" (Journal, Aug. 1902, 304). In this account we find the romantic language and sympathies Hill typically reinscribes when writing in her diaries about Indigenous people. Her common recourse to received ideas about "the Indian" imposes cultural, emotional, and intellectual distance between her and her Native American subjects and signals the dominant cultural assumptions that shaped her artistic vision. Another diary entry from Trout Lake typifies these conventions of representation and, written early during what would be a decade of travels, provides a baseline understanding of the contradictory ways Hill imagined herself in relation to Native people:1 The next day we tramped back again to see / temporary camps + picturesque enough we found them—Unlike our Indians, satisfied with a 50 ct calico wrapper, these Indian women wear a national costume made of a strip of very gay calico with a hole in / middle, gores on / sides + a straight piece over / sleeves which are fastened to some undergarment. [Hill includes a sketch.] It sets off their sturdy forms well[.] They were all made by hand[.] They wore many bead ornaments, handsomely made usually a bead belt with purse attached[.] I priced one, it was 3 dollars (/purse)[.] I did not buy. I asked a handsome squaw sitting in her wigwam door if I might sketch her. I had passed chocolate freely + thot [sic] myself on pretty good terms but she persistently refused however a young brave consented[.] (Journal, Aug. 1902, 304)2 [End Page 22] Evident here are Hill's cultural biases and practices—her insistence on stereotyping Native American people and romanticizing and appropriating their lived experience. Her emphasis on clothing signals her preoccupation with white women's dress reform and her abiding opinion that traditional Native attire was preferable to the frippery and changing fashions of her own culture.3 Elsewhere in the diaries she acknowledges Western clothing as a function of forced assimilation, but here she holds the Puyallup people—"our Indians" in Tacoma—responsible for moving away from tradition. In relation to the Yakama encampment at Trout Lake, Hill positions herself as surveyor of a scene that satisfies her aesthetic preferences. Though aloof from her surroundings, she also wishes to claim elements of the culture before her, like images of the women she entices with chocolate or the "national costume" that might suit her own "sturdy form." Laying bare Hill's colonial impulses and enriching the diary's status as a historical record is the confounding performance of one Native American woman who—by way of Hill's own documentation—disrupts the stock narrative of cultural contact and draws attention to Hill's part in the exchange. As Hill completes a sketch of "a young brave," another figure, whom she refers to as the "/ chief woman of / camp," approaches and watches "with an ever deepening frown." Through an interpreter the woman commands Hill: "You make picture of yourself!" Hill's clumsy use of dialect does not diminish the significance of the interruption; the woman's disapproval adds friction to the smooth workings of the artist's colonial vision. Hill puts her off with the excuse, "I can not see myself," at which point the woman leaves, only to return moments later with a hand mirror. "Now," says the woman, "you make picture of yourself." In holding a mirror to Hill's face, the woman obstructs Hill's perspective and imposes a new image for her to behold: Hill as both artistic (and colonial) subject and object. The moment reads as one of forced self-recognition, for Hill must regard herself in the mirror as the imperial "I" and the...

A Tale of Two Bloomer Costumes

This article analyzes the history of two extant bloomer costumes from the 1850 s, one in the collections of the San Diego History Center and the other in the Cortland County, New York Historical Society. An analysis of the two bloomer costumes reveals two different styles of dress-reform outfits worn by women during this era. Biographical information on the women who owned these outfits expands upon the reasons the wearers might have chosen one design over another. Through a material culture analysis of these outfits and a textual analysis of the history of dress reform, I argue that for a variety of reasons nineteenth-century women might have owned, but perhaps not worn, a bloomer costume.

As Nature Formed It: Venus Sculptures and the ‘Natural’ Waistline in Dress Reform Discourse

Abstract In the second half of the nineteenth century, ancient sculptures of Venus became models for the ‘natural’ waistline. Drawings of the Venus de Medici or de Milo were popular in texts published by American dress reformers, who advocated for the rejection of corsets and tight-lacing. This article takes as its subject these drawings and their simultaneous signification of multiple bodies: a specific sculpture, an idealized form, the ‘natural’ form of any female torso, and the supposedly superior physicality of the ancient Greeks. It argues that the elision of these various bodies is facilitated by the treatment of ancient sculptures as ‘truth-to-nature’ representations — images that are simultaneously ideal and faithful to the form produced by nature. This understanding is encouraged by drawings of the statues, which imply the comparability of sculpture and body. In this way, the sculptures enter dress reform discourse, serving as both a faithful representative of a now-lost ancient body and a kind of visual lexicon by which living women might revive ancient aesthetic and moral perfection. As constructions of aspirational physical ideals, the sculptures and the drawings of Venus are enlisted in a developing and deeply charged visualization of white American womanhood.

The Kurious Kase of Kim Kardashian's Korset

The 2019 Met Gala’s theme was based on the Susan Sontag essay “Notes on Camp,” and the celebrity attendees had a broad range of interpretations. The look that caused the most controversy was worn by the reality TV star Kim Kardashian, in a Thierry Mugler dress and Mr. Pearl corset. Rather than focus on the design, the first for Mugler since 2002, or how the dress fit into the theme, critics instead chose to focus on the corset and repeat a rhetoric about the controversial garment that has been recurrent for over a hundred years. There is a long tradition of opposition to corsets, including claims that the accessory is bad for the health of the wearer, that corsets are unnatural, and that they are anti-feminist. This article explores the history of corsets, health, popular culture, and fashion, using Kardashian as a contemporary source of examination. Kardashian’s body is a site of controversy, much like corsets, as she wears and sells shapewear. The critique of Kardashian’s use of modern shapewear reflects a long tradition of controlling women’s bodies through dress reform and medical intervention, a debate the Met Gala dress reignited.

“Palpably Ugly” or “beauty of their form”?: Corsets in Toronto periodicals, 1871-1914

ABSTRACT At the turn of the twentieth century in Toronto, articles in local newspapers and magazines exposed women to disparate views on corsets. On one side of the argument were dress reformers who advised women to do away with corsetry for the sake of their health and wellbeing. On the other side, were fashion journalists who advised them about current styles, which often oscillated from year-to-year. Despite this disparity, corsets were an ever-present foundation of nineteenth century fashion, to the extent that they were a frequent, sexy addition to crime reporting. The exaggerated stories in the media subjected women to a tug-of-war over their body autonomy. This article is based on content analyses of periodicals and exposes how corsets were presented in Toronto periodicals such as The Toronto Star, The Globe, and The Canadian Dried Goods Review, among others.

‘The Artistic Aspect of Dress’: The Story of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union

This article presents a short biography of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, a dress reform society formed in 1890 with the aim of ‘teaching both men and women how to discriminate by choosing and rejecting, and so gradually moulding the exigencies of our climate and situation, the claims of artistic arrangement of drapery, and harmony of colour’. It presents a new account of the group that goes beyond previous discussions, which have been solely gleaned from the group's journal Aglaia. A brief history of the organization under the leadership of artists such as Henry Holiday, Walter Crane and G. F. Watts will precede an examination of their 1896 Exhibition of Living Pictures, and a discussion of their educational journal Aglaia and its later iteration The Dress Review, illustrating the creative production and philosophy of Artistic Dress from this later period in its history.

Mary Edwards Walker: military surgeon who wore the trousers

Mary Edwards Walker was a highly principled and passionate reformer who refused to recognise the oppressive social conventions of 19th-century America. At the time, women's educational opportunities were limited and hard to access, their legal status inferior to that of men, and their right to vote denied. Fashion dictated that they lace themselves into tight corsets under voluminous skirts and petticoats that compromised their health and freedom of movement. She would have none of it. Qualifying as a doctor in 1855—only 6 years after the first woman doctor in the USA, Elizabeth Blackwell—Walker campaigned for dress reform and wore trousers, sometimes under knee-length skirts, throughout her adult life. “The greatest sorrows from which women suffer today”, she wrote, “are those physical, moral and mental ones, that are caused by their unhygienic manner of dressing!” Walker's feminism extended to the battlefield: she served as a military surgeon in the American Civil War and received the Medal of Honor. Women making medical history: introducing A Woman's PlaceIn December, 2017, The Lancet issued a call for papers for its special theme issue on women in science, medicine, and global health .1 The Comment outlined the gender inequalities in medicine that still persist, long after many overt barriers to women's participation have fallen. While that theme issue will be forward-looking, I believe we can also gain insights from looking to the past for examples of women who have made their mark against the odds, and by asking what it was about their particular circumstances that enabled them to do so. Full-Text PDF Rukhmabai: doctor and social reformerStraddling a faultline between tradition and progressive education in 19th-century British India, Rukhmabai forced legislators to reconsider laws on the status of girls, and went on to forge her own career as a doctor—one of the first Indian women to practise in her country. She was quick to generalise her own experience of injustice as a Hindu woman to the predicament of all her fellow countrywomen, and was an outspoken social reformer. Full-Text PDF

Sewing, Cycling, and Sociology

Sewing, Cycling, and Sociology

Dissent Dressing: The Colour and Fabric of Political Rage

Dissent Dressing: The Colour and Fabric of Political Rage

QueerCrip fashion in the twenty-first century: Sky Cubacub and the QueerCrip Dress Reform Movement

Sky Cubacub, designer, artist and twenty-first century activist, based in Chicago, Illinois, creates garments and accessories for their fashion brand Rebirth Garments while critically considering gender, body size and ability, using the body and its expressions as a site of resistance and rebellion. This research is a case study of the life of Sky Cubacub and their work. We used the oral history method and triangulated information from the oral history with a material culture approach by analysing garments or apparel-related items produced by the designer; their self-produced zine/manifesto; and analysis of content on their social media accounts. Cubacub challenges ideas of visibility and ambivalence around the identities of queerness, fatness and disability. Through Cubacub’s life story, design philosophy and business practices, these shifting and, most importantly, stigmatized and invisible identities can be expressed on an individualized basis in a celebratory fashion, leading into the twenty-first century as a hyperaware designer who is arguably a model for others looking to do the same.

‘Bloomers’ and the British World: Dress Reform in Transatlantic and Antipodean Print Culture, 1851–1950

The ‘bloomers’ are rarely considered beyond their 1851 origins in the United States and subsequent appearance in Britain. This article expands dress reform scholarship by analysing print culture elsewhere in the British world, specifically Australia and New Zealand. The colonial press manufactured controversy over this fashion – a perceived transgression of gender norms – even though antipodean women rarely sported the outfit. This article focuses on the dress reform lectures and writings of Amelia Bloomer, Caroline Dexter and Dr Mary Walker. While certain continuities resurfaced alongside the bloomer-like rational dress popularised in the bicycling culture of the 1890s, dress reform was largely deemed far less controversial by the turn of the twentieth century.

"He May Sneer at the Course We Are Pursuing to Gain Justice": Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, The Sibyl, and Corresponding about Women's Suffrage

"He May Sneer at the Course We Are Pursuing to Gain Justice":Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, The Sibyl, and Corresponding about Women's Suffrage Laura J. Ping (bio) In the fall of 1863 Wallkill, New York resident Dr. Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck was arrested for failure to pay her road tax. Hasbrouck, a water-cure physician and dress reformer, had achieved prominence within reform circles as the editor of the biweekly reform newspaper the Sibyl. The Sibyl primarily promoted the dress reform movement, which placed comfortable clothing at the center of women's fight for equality, but many articles also reflected Hasbrouck's passionate support for the women's suffrage movement. One of Hasbrouck's most ardent arguments was that women should not be required to pay taxes if they were unable to vote. It violated citizenship. By 1863 Hasbrouck, in protest, had not paid her road tax for more than two years. Consequently, the local commissioner of highways notified her that in order to settle the debt she would have to work ten and a half days on a road crew, a common punishment for tax evaders.1 On September 9th of that year Hasbrouck arrived at the appointed patch of road. She had been instructed to bring her "best" shovel and so, she wrote in the Sibyl, she did; it was a fire shovel designed for scooping ashes from a fireplace. The road overseer replaced it with a standard shovel and instructed Hasbrouck to begin filling a wagon with debris. She did not comply. Instead Hasbrouck stood, leaning on her shovel, talking, and "calling the attention of other workmen from work."2 At one point she sat down and began tossing pebbles into the wagon. Finally she occupied herself by reading a newspaper. After the fifth day Hasbrouck did not return to work, resulting in her arrest.3 [End Page 317] Newspapers across the United States reported this incident, but these articles do not reveal for how long Hasbrouck was imprisoned or if her punishment included a fine.4 She wrote more explicitly of the incident in the Sibyl. "Remember we did not go there to do a man's day's work or to work out a man's tax," Hasbrouck wrote.5 Her deliberate insubordination proved a point; women would not accept taxation without representation. But Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck's protest against women's disenfranchisement went beyond simply agitating local officials. In the pages of the Sibyl Hasbrouck used her experiences fighting for suffrage to expose her readers to the hypocrisy of demanding women to fulfill the obligations of citizenship without allowing them equal rights. Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck was born in 1827 in Warwick, Orange County, New York, the fifth of eight children. Her father worked as a farmer and distiller of apple brandy. Although few details are known about Hasbrouck's childhood, local historians noted from interviews that her family often hosted gatherings in their home. During these events young Lydia was the center of attention. She was intelligent and independent; neighbors noted her fearlessness. In 1849, at age 22, this vivaciousness was likely what gave Hasbrouck the courage to abandon fashionable dress in favor of the short dress and trousers worn by dress reformers, also known as the "American Costume." During the 1850s and 1860s the American Costume was adopted by the faction of dress reformers who dedicated themselves primarily to improving women's health. Although Hasbrouck never explained how she learned about dress reform, based on the year of her adoption it is likely that she read about it in health reform publications. The design had first been promoted in 1849 by the hydropathic newspaper the Water Cure Journal as an alternative to fashion. Many reformers feared that corsets and the long, heavy skirts typically worn by middle-class women caused irreparable [End Page 318] damage to their bodies.6 A similar garment, the bloomer costume, would famously become associated with the women's rights movement in 1851 after Elizabeth Smith Miller, daughter of abolitionist Gerrit Smith, adopted it full time. Miller then introduced the design to her colleague Amelia Bloomer, for whom the costume was nicknamed. For Miller and Bloomer dress reform symbolized women...

She Wears the Pants: The Reform Dress as Technology in Nineteenth-Century America.

This article examines the American dress-reform movement, detailing the ways in which reformers conceptualized clothing as a social and bodily technology. In the mid-nineteenth century, women began making and wearing the "reform dress"-a costume consisting of pants and shortened, lightweight skirts-as an alternative to burdensome feminine fashions. When ridiculed in public for wearing overtly masculine garments, dress reformers insisted their clothing was healthful, functional, and natural. This article discusses women's use of medical science and technical knowledge in their rejection of fashion, promotion of sexual equality, and efforts to change mainstream clothing practices. When approached from a technological perspective, the reform dress reveals broader tensions in an industrializing American society, such as changing gender relations and new understandings of the relationship between humans and technology.

The Aesthetic Interior as Incubator of Health and Well-Being

ABSTRACTDomestic interiors created during the Aesthetic Movement have often been interpreted in terms of the ideas of aesthetic autonomy associated with Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater and Joris-Karl Huysmans. This essay takes a different tack by analysing the aesthetic interior in light of concerns with health reform. It focuses on the writings and designs of architect E.W. Godwin (1833–86) who pursued interior design as part of an effort to foster a healthy life, one that consisted of hygiene, relief from urban stress, and an enlargement of the aesthetic responsiveness of his clients. He conceived of spare and calm interiors that were healthful alternatives to dust-infested Victorian clutter while concomitantly offering psychological respite from the ‘high-pressure, nervous times’ endemic to metropolitan life. This goal accords with Godwin's related interest in dress reform, a preoccupation that led to his participation in the Health Exhibition of 1884. By unpacking Godwin's specific contribution to the sanitary discussions that prevailed in Victorian Britain, I align the aesthetic interior with the central imperative of sanitary reform: promoting health through ameliorating Britain's urban environment.