Re: [h-cost] Re: aesthetic dress
Sounds oh so Gothic to me. (everything old is new again...) Sheridan P. :-) From: Gail Scott Finke [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 2006/08/25 Fri PM 10:16:06 EST To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [h-cost] Re: aesthetic dress Lovely as it may seem now, aesthetic dress was considered strange and subversive at the time. Gilbert and Sullivan had a great show (I have never seen it, unfortunately) about the aesthetic movement -- Patience; or, Bunthorne's Bride. The heroine is a young girl who thinks she can't be in love unless she's suffering, so she ignores the nice young man who loves her in favor of the Oscar Wilde-ish poet whom she can't stand. Whenever she's around him, she suffers, so she thinks she must be in love. During the operetta, all the young soldiers give up their uniforms for velvet suits and lilies, to catch the women who are swooning over poets. When I Go Out the Door is the final song describing the poet and the hero. The poet is: A most intense young man, A soulful-eyed young man, An ultra-poetical, super-aesthetical, Out-of-the-way young man! and A pallid and thin young man, A haggard and lank young man, A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery, Foot-in-the-grave young man! Of course, the aesthetic folks didn't see themselves that way. There's also a great cartoon by G.K. Chesterton called Vision in Bedford Park. I can't find it online, unfortunately, but it's in the edition of The Man Who Was Thursday published by Ignatius and annotated by Martin Gardner. It shows a pallid and thin man carrying a lily and a woman in a loose, aesthetic gown staring in shock at the shadow of a man in a respectable coat, carrying a prayer book. The caption is Bedford Parkers see a Dreadful Vision of the Future: an old acquaintance going to Church. Bedford Park was an artsy area of London where poets and the like hung out, and Chesterton was an old Bedford Parker himself, before his famous conversion, after which he preferred common sense and religious orthodoxy to aesthetic movements, atheism, and intellectual fads. But his associating aesthetic dress to these things gives you an idea of the way it was regarded. Gail Finke ___ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume ___ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
[h-cost] Re: Aesthetic dress
But just as fashion-conscious people in the 1960s and 70s adopted tie-dye and denims from the hippies, mainstream 19th century designers adopted a version of the Aesthetic look and tidied it up for fashionable wear. The less extreme Aesthetic look appealed to middle-class women on a budget, because it had a number of solid advantages. Less expensive materials could be used, jewelry tended to be things like amber instead of diamonds, you could have a skimpier style that used less material, and you could have a quasi-historic style that didn't have to be updated every few months to keep up with fashion. Also, the Aesthetic look celebrated some physical characteristics, such as red hair, and a square jaw on a woman, that were commonly considered downright ugly in mainstream fashion. Also, the muddy and greenery-yallery Aesthetic colors looked better on some people than fashionable bright colors. There was also an intellectual, arty aspect to the look that appealed to people who liked to be thought artistic, even though they had no intention of becoming professional artists. And there was some crossover with the dress reform movement, which also had moderate as well as extremist adherents. For example, the Aesthetic look often either omitted the corset or used a modified light corset. (I put a pattern for one, from a how-to guide to moderate Aesthetic dress, in the first volume of _Fashions of the Gilded Age_.) The Aesthetic look lent elements to mainstream fashion--over time it influenced colors, for one thing--but the extreme Aesthetic look seldom appeared in fashionable magazines. I do have some original how-to directions (not a pattern) for reproducing a dress from a production (one of many) of _Patience_, from a mainstream fashionable magazine. Fran Lavolta Press http://www.lavoltapress.com ___ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
[h-cost] Re: aesthetic dress
Thanks, Gail -- but darn it, I even have a copy of The Man Who Was Thursday, but no illustrations. Oh well. Thanks for all your input, guys, I really enjoy this kind of discussion. That tea dress pattern is totally yummy! And I'm going to have some fun looking up all those links and reading them. Tea Rose, who likes to imagine she bears a resemblance to that redhead in all those Waterhouse paintings. ___ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
[h-cost] Re: aesthetic dress
Lovely as it may seem now, aesthetic dress was considered strange and subversive at the time. Gilbert and Sullivan had a great show (I have never seen it, unfortunately) about the aesthetic movement -- Patience; or, Bunthorne's Bride. The heroine is a young girl who thinks she can't be in love unless she's suffering, so she ignores the nice young man who loves her in favor of the Oscar Wilde-ish poet whom she can't stand. Whenever she's around him, she suffers, so she thinks she must be in love. During the operetta, all the young soldiers give up their uniforms for velvet suits and lilies, to catch the women who are swooning over poets. When I Go Out the Door is the final song describing the poet and the hero. The poet is: A most intense young man, A soulful-eyed young man, An ultra-poetical, super-aesthetical, Out-of-the-way young man! and A pallid and thin young man, A haggard and lank young man, A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery, Foot-in-the-grave young man! Of course, the aesthetic folks didn't see themselves that way. There's also a great cartoon by G.K. Chesterton called Vision in Bedford Park. I can't find it online, unfortunately, but it's in the edition of The Man Who Was Thursday published by Ignatius and annotated by Martin Gardner. It shows a pallid and thin man carrying a lily and a woman in a loose, aesthetic gown staring in shock at the shadow of a man in a respectable coat, carrying a prayer book. The caption is Bedford Parkers see a Dreadful Vision of the Future: an old acquaintance going to Church. Bedford Park was an artsy area of London where poets and the like hung out, and Chesterton was an old Bedford Parker himself, before his famous conversion, after which he preferred common sense and religious orthodoxy to aesthetic movements, atheism, and intellectual fads. But his associating aesthetic dress to these things gives you an idea of the way it was regarded. Gail Finke ___ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
