Fashion and Textile History Gallery Spring 2021, but subject to change
Head to Toe will explore approximately 200 years of women’s dress from 1800 to the early 21st century through the lens of accessories. Often garments are the focus of fashion exhibitions, however accessories are integral components of the full ensemble, and are important in communicating vital messages about the wearer. Over time accessories have become powerful tools in articulating ideas about femininity, sexuality, modesty, power, class, and race, as well as an important outlet to express style and individuality.
Head to Toe will detail the intricacies and etiquette of Euro-American women’s fashion, showing its evolution over time and its changing social context. Topics such as imperialism, industrialization, feminism, and modernity will be explored.
Accessories are often considered ancillary to clothing in women’s fashion, yet they have always been integral to the overall ensemble. Public historian Ariel Beaujot notes that, from the nineteenth century, accessories “helped women create a sense of who they were, with important consequences for how they experienced gender, class, and race.” Head to Toe explores more than two hundred years of women’s dress from 1800 through the early twenty-first century, focusing on the role that accessories play within the total ensembles of Western women’s fashion, as well as the messages that they communicate about social and cultural values.
Sangster, parasol, late 19th century. Museum purchase
Lace dress with ivory silk hat and pink satin parasol, circa 1907-1910. Gift of DuBois Family (dress) and Gift of Fernanda Munn Kellogg (parasol).
In her book Accessories to Modernity: Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France (2011), French cultural historian Susan Hiner writes that in nineteenth-century France, “A cashmere shawl might obliquely refer to imperial conquest in Algeria but openly indicate married status in Parisian society. A silk parasol could whisper … cultural supremacy but loudly proclaim the delicacy of the fairer sex. A painted fan might conceal aesthetic and social inauthenticity but also reveal the uncontested power of social status buttressed by wealth.”
The consumer revolution of the mid-nineteenth century led to an explosion of available fashion goods at increasingly affordable prices. More middle- and even working-class women could buy industrially produced accessories; however, this accessibility created class tensions between the aspirational and those who had traditionally participated in luxury fashion. These anxieties were expressed in intricate rules of dress that dictated how and when proper ladies should wear certain garments and accessories. Social commentators judged women as extravagant or ruinous by the style of their hats, marked morality by the cleanliness of their gloves, and condemned by the vulgar color of their shoes. Etiquette books were created to aid women new to fashion’s intricacies. In 1860, author Florence Hartley advised that “white kid gloves, full trimmed, a fine lace trimmed handkerchief, and a fan are indispensable” at a ball, while the book Practical Etiquette (1899) admonished that “necklaces and jewels in the morning are monstrous, no matter what the fashion of the moment may be.”
Courrèges, ivory plastic sunglasses, Spring/Summer 1965. Gift of Abel Rapp.
Dr. Martens, ]work boots, 2000. Gift of The School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
J. Duvelleroy, fan, circa 1860. Gift of Barbara T. Eisendrath.
The communicative properties of fashion accessories did not diminish into the twentieth century. The “new woman’s” straw boater hat indicated her vitality and independence as surely as a flapper’s embellished compact and cigarette case displayed her modern urbanity. During periods of hardship, such as the Great Depression and the world wars, when fashion goods were less available, accessories provided flexibility by changing the look of simple garments to suit multiple occasions. A jaunty hat or fanciful purse also played the important function of raising morale and creating an outlet for social anxieties. Elsa Schiaparelli’s circus-themed brooches and Marcel Rochas’s flower petal sunglasses were deliberately bizarre in defiance of Europe’s unravelling political situation, while the hats and shoes created during World War II ranged from the patriotically staid to creative flights of fancy that made use of unrestricted materials to a farcical extreme.
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