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Picturing French Style: Three Hundred Years of Art and Fashion

2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/kni125

1468-2931

Miranda Gill,

Art History and Market Analysis

By Jill Berk Jiminez. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2003. 226 pp. Pb £29.95. In 1702 the French founded the City of Mobile, now in Alabama, as the first capital of the Louisiana Territory. Three centuries later, the Mobile Museum of Art based its inaugural exhibition on the connections between French art and fashion in the intervening period. The result is a beautifully designed and illustrated exhibition catalogue, reproducing French costumes and artworks gleaned from dozens of collections, mainly across the United States. The catalogue is preceded by three essays by historians of fashion, discussing the upstart marchande de modes Rose Bertin, fashion advisor to Marie-Antoinette; the first grand couturier, Charles Frederick Worth, and his elaborate concoctions of the Third Republic; and the uses of clothing and costume in the contemporary French art scene. The relationship between art and fashion, the work demonstrates, has long been one of reciprocal influence and inspiration. Examining paintings and sculptures from the perspective of fashion places centre stage flounces, ruffles, ribbons, intricate embroidery, and swathes of silk and brocade, revealing both their aesthetic potential and their subtle social symbolism. Certain artworks, furthermore, may be assigned a precise date purely from the sartorial styles they depict. In turn, the central role of art in the fashion world is evident from designers' sources of inspiration: Madeleine Vionnet's geometrical patterns are indebted to Cubism, for instance, and Madame Grès's pleated dresses to the drapery of Greek statues. From the eighteenth century onwards, pre-eminent fashion designers claimed for themselves the status of artist (Rose Bertin explicitly compared herself to the painter Claude-Joseph Vernet, whilst Charles Frederick Worth donned flamboyantly bohemian attire to symbolize his genius). Such figures' wealth and unusually free access to their social superiors were signs of their immense cultural prestige. The catalogue concludes by contrasting the creations of grands couturiers whose names are now synonymous with vast business empires — Hubert de Givenchy, Christian Dior, Jean-Paul Gaultier — with experimental works of installation art. The work could have benefited from devoting slightly more space to historical contextualization and theoretical analysis. Given that most of the costumes illustrated in the work were designed for women, for example, the causes and consequences of the increasingly sharp differentiation between male and female fashions during the nineteenth century might have been addressed. Overall, though, the work is creative and interdisciplinary in approach, juxtaposing sculptures, gowns, accessories, and paintings so as to highlight the complex entanglements of life and art, bodies and aesthetic theories, texture and vision.