Fashion@NYPL

I’m going on hiatus again, and my destination is True West.

I’ll be traveling to Mesa Verde Country, in what’s known geographically as the Four Corners (where AZ, UT, CO, NM meet). After some short walks in Utah national parks, and visits to some still active Indian trading posts, my goal is an American Indian Arts fair, located right in Mesa Verde National Park on Memorial Day weekend.

I’ll be visiting Park City, Utah, and Durango, Colorado, during my vacation. Both towns are noted for attracting a more fashionable class of tourist. When I return, I’ll report on what the well-dressed locals and tourists are wearing these days.

While men show a more unified presence in their two-and-three-piece suits, augmented by the ubiquitous power necktie, women have an interesting range of options for garments. Yet it hasn’t gone unnoticed that Hilary Clinton, while on the campaign trail, wears trousers as much or more than skirts. Nor does she don many dresses.

Personal appearance is a key factor in any campaign for elected office. Since fashion, however, is often a window into a person’s psyche, a look at Clinton’s, Obama’s, and McCain’s dress sense is justifiably revealing. Their political advisors (as well as spouses) have weighed in on their clothing. At present, McCain is running third in the sartorial sweepstakes, but he may have no problem with that. The last Republication to look really good in a suit was Ronald Reagan. Want more perspectives on the quiet competition between the sexes? Search in CATNYP under the heading Fashion—Psychological aspects.

The Punch and Judy Show, which has become the Democratic Party’s campaign for presidential nominee, calls for analysis of every last detail. So why not fashion? At this point in time, Hilary wins hands down for her versatile wardrobe effects. Her pastel pantsuits have grown stronger in color, embracing cobalt, coral, rust, turquoise, and ever-cheery yellow. Her matching costume jewelry choices are truly awesome to me, and she drapes a truly elegant scarf round her throat when she wishes.

Gender studies related to clothing first appeared in full force in the 1970s. One of the best, however, is a Smithsonian Institution Press study from 1989, Men and women: dressing the part. Will this year’s presidential election be about two men in suits slugging it out, or be a true battle of the sexes?

Francis Bacon had a studio showroom in South Kensington that was reproduced in a 1930 issue of The Studio. He was one of three designers profiled for “The 1930 Look in British Decoration,” and his interior is sparsely geometric and modern, not the lavish French Art Deco style, but much more Breuer and Bauhaus. I asked Mark Stevens for some clarification about the motives behind Bacon’s visual leanings.

PAB: Does it make sense to you that he artistically gravitated toward the more austere modernistic aspect of the period?

MS: I think his desire was to find what was most radical or “advanced” in the period. A pared-down style probably seemed more challenging than more lush style did. Pared-down furniture was also probably easier – and less expensive – to make.

PAB: What about those white rubber curtains?

MS: Texture and touch was important to him from the first. Later, he would become a master of the flesh, with a truly tactile sense of the body. He often wore a leather jacket.

PAB: Certainly the early 1930s were a time of economic struggle in Britain, and by 1932-3, Bacon was moving away from design and into painting. Do you think that once he became acclaimed as a painter, he found his old work in the decorative arts to be an embarrassment?

MS: English society was not particularly interested in advanced continental design, and Bacon’s business was probably not very successful. Most of his customers were friends. For example, the Australian novelist Patrick White bought a desk. But I think Bacon, in his twenties, simply became more and more interested in painting as he grew older. He was already painting as a teenager in the late 1920s.

PAB: In interview after interview when he was older, Bacon consistently belittled his youthful experience as a designer. Why did he do this?

MS: Many artists like to imagine that they spring fully-formed into the world. They do not enjoy acknowledging that they were ever confused or uncertain.

PAB: The 1920s was the age when modernity shone with such new promise. Do you think this affected Bacon, even though his time as a designer was short?

MS: I doubt Bacon was ever very optimistic about the promise of modernity or that he took seriously the utopian aspirations of modernist design. But he remained interested until the end of his life in creating an environment that represents more than just a fashionable interior and, instead, embodies a powerful worldview. Today he is celebrated for establishing what may be the most chaotic and messy space ever inhabited by a sane artist. In fact, after his death, the artist’s studio – litter and all -- was placed on public view in Dublin. I’m sure that Bacon, who had an appealing sense of humor, occasionally smiled at the contrast between his mature working space and the clean, honed clarity of his youth.

Bacon (1909-1992) is known for being a self-taught “force” in modern figurative painting. His subjects often provoke unease in viewers for their gritty, fleshy looks at the human figure laid bare psychologically. Therefore, I was greatly intrigued when I learned that Bacon could be counted among those fine artists (like Raoul Dufy) who had early stints as designers during the Art Deco years.

I turned to Cullman Center scholar Mark Stevens, who is currently at work, with Annalyn Swan, on a definitive Bacon biography, to give me some insight into what effect those years might have had on Bacon.

PAB: Bacon spent most of 1927 in Paris, where he was exposed to the height of Art Deco artistic energy. When he returned to London, he started up as a furniture and rug designer. Do you think his experiences in Paris led to this development?

MS: Before Bacon went to Paris, he spent time in radical Berlin. There he would have seen the most advanced furniture and rug design, and he also came to know elegant and raffish people interested in whatever was new. In Paris, he discovered Picasso.

PAB: One of my reference books up at the Art Desk says that Bacon considered his furniture designs to be “extremely bad copies of Le Corbusier.” Other books, however, state that his furniture and rug designs were actually quite good.

MS: I wouldn’t call them either extremely bad or extremely good. Remember, he was barely twenty years old. He had no formal schooling in art or design. When considered in that light, his work is remarkably precocious. Historically, however, it just amounts to an interesting example of period design. His pieces have flair, but are not especially original.

PAB: Bacon himself called his designs unoriginal and heavily influenced by contemporary French design. However, doesn’t his work seem to reflect a variety of influences from the period, including English and German modern trends?

MS: I’m not an expert in the design of that period – yet! -- but, yes, he seems to draw upon a variety of sources. Creating a pastiche is what most young artists do.

PAB: Did his early work with interiors help him with his later paintings?

MS: In his paintings, Bacon often sets his figures in an abstract geometric space that may well recall his immersion in the edgy designs of the twenties and thirties. The furniture in some paintings is also reminiscent of his early designs.

The Library is home to the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Every year, a new group comes in with fascinating projects, and work extensively with the Research Library’s collections. This year, we were privileged to have well-known art critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mark Stevens as a fellow. Mark, who has written about Willem De Kooning, is working on a biography of the famous twentieth century English painter Francis Bacon.

During my research into the Art Deco years, I ran across the fact that Bacon was a furniture and rug designer from 1929 to 1933, and had been influenced by travel to Berlin (1926) and Paris (1927). He lived and breathed the artistic atmosphere of that fascinating era, only to break off his design work and turn to figurative oil painting fulltime. Knowing that Mark has been working away downstairs, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to question him about Bacon’s early years. The next several posts, on April 29 and May 1, brief interviews with Mark Stevens, will recount what I learned from him.

What happens to fashion when the global economy becomes strained? The answer isn’t clear, by any means, but there are hints from past circumstances. Generally, clothing stays conservative, or doesn’t vary from the ideas seen in the last pre-troubled seasonal lineup. I’d made some New Year’s predictions which seem to be falling short of expectations. Baby doll styles, shrunken jackets, and giddy colors can still be seen for sale en masse. The only thing I predicted that seems to be turning out as I’d hoped is a steady drumbeat for ecologically-minded, or green, fashion.

Which brings me to the 1930s, a time when economic bad news was pervasive. Ironically, some of the clothing to come out of that decade proved to be stylish, and came to be labeled as “classical.” Men’s suits, for example, received accolades for being glamorous: well cut, smart lapels, and textural dash. This had everything to do with the fact that Hollywood and its talkies had a great impact on popular culture of that period. Movie stars are still considered fashion icons. Financial recession these days, however, will mean that innovation is stifled. Lack of cash will force designers and companies to sit on big changes in garments. Look for classical to have a strong run this year…

Ancient peoples, especially the Egyptians, understood that perfume was both a luxury and a necessity. I’m running low on one of my favorite perfume scents. Fortunately for me, I won’t have to head out to one of the rather intimidating old-time New York emporia featured in the illustration below.

I only have to trot up the street to Saks!

The packaging of perfume, now more commonly known as branding, is a subtle business in itself. A magnificent overview of this ingenuity is richly represented in an Art title called Masterpieces of the perfume industry. You can find even more good reading by trying the following subject headings: perfume and incense; perfume bottles; miniature perfume bottles; perfume paraphernalia; scent bottles; and even cologne bottles.

Isn’t it interesting that, when searching for books on perfume bottle design, I found the most titles on the subject appeared in the 1980s? I wonder if there is a reason behind this, or if the “me decade” just made it a natural topic for investigation? Sometimes a quick visual metaphor for the 1980s still pops into my mind: Nancy Reagan in a red ball gown and a tiara.

Over the weekend, I was engrossed in a murder mystery set in medieval Cambridge. The suspense centered on men who were sneaking around after dark doing nefarious deeds. They masked their identity with their hat, which went by the name of a liripipe. The author never gave a particularly cogent description of this item, so I looked it up in the Encyclopedia of Clothing and Dress. I learned that a liripipe was a 14th century headdress of an eccentric nature—and an important object of masculine fashion. Worn over a gorget, a form of hood and neckpiece, the liripipe was composed of soft tubes of cloth, up to two feet in length, with drooping points. They could be suspended, worn over the shoulder, or wound round the gorget like a turban. Fashionable men went to great lengths to twist the liripipe like a scarf, and drape it in dashing modes. Villains, on the other hand, as my book demonstrated, used it as a means of concealment.

Speaking of concealment (or not), there was a local television story last week about pork barrel monies in the finally-passed New York State budget. $5000 was approved for a group called Men of Exquisite Taste. Anybody know anything about this intriguing organization?

The cloche hat was all the rage in the Art Deco decades. The bell-shaped cloche had a close fit and narrow, dipped brim suited to the shortened, or bobbed, hair of the young flapper. She was a new incarnation of the modern woman, with places to go and things to do. Why, she’d even smoke cigarettes in public!

Want to have a good laugh? Or maybe purchase something, once the offerings are made clear? Go onto www.20sgangstercostumes.com and get yourself a flapper costume. I think my first memory of this stereotypical dress was during an episode of the original Star Trek television series, when Captain Kirk and his landing party ended up on a planet where everybody dressed and acted like 1920s gangsters and molls.

A colleague of mine at the Library knows a place in the Garment District where you can go and have your own cloche hat constructed for you! You can pick out the fabric and trim, and even watch the hat being blocked. We’ve always meant to go there, but invariably we get distracted by something or other at work. One day we will go—if only to release our inner flapper!

There are a number of great quotes to be found in The Rise of Fashion: A Reader, a compilation in the Art Department. Short essays or extracts from larger works by famous intellectuals and scholars can be found here. I looked at Oscar Wilde’s contribution to this anthology. Wilde (1854-1900) was famous for so many things, but what many people most remember is his biting wit.

His piece, “The Suitability of Dress,” from 1882, was written years before his notorious trials, conviction, and tragic physical breakdown. The opening lines remind me of the late William F. Buckley in full spate:

“Nothing, in general, bewilders or tortures the female mind more than the endeavor to establish some kind of harmonic relation between the law of the fashion book and the law of life, the one being for the idler, the other for the worker. Yet with some resolute self-assertion and heroic defiance of conventional prejudice, a compromise might be effected, the result being increased comfort to the workers in life’s thorny paths without even the sacrifice of beauty.”

I ran across the following book while doing research the other day. Written by H.D. Eastman in 1853, it's called Fast man's directory and lovers' guide to the ladies of fashion and houses of pleasure in New-York and other large cities. What strikes me is the understanding that "ladies of fashion" is a term for prostitutes. I didn't know that! I recall that high end courtesans and prostitutes in England were called "fashionable impures" in the early nineteenth century, but didn't know about this American usage.

Does anyone know the story behind this label and how long it lasted?

I was so intrigued by the Christian Louboutin exhibition at F.I.T., it led to me rummaging around our catalogue in pursuit of further information. One thing I discovered was an authoritative scholarly work on the shoe industry in Europe, with focus on fashion rivals France and England. Giorgio Riello’s A foot in the past: consumers, producers and footwear in the long eighteenth century offers significant information about the textile and production history of shoes and boots.

In the process of locating this book, however, I began to see how shoe history researchers could become easily confused with their findings. The problem lies in our Library of Congress Subject Headings. The obvious term to use is shoes. Yet there is another term that was adopted at a later date: footwear. To do a thorough search, it helps to search both terms. The tricky part is in the age difference between the terms; shoes will yield more citations because it’s older and been around longer, yet newer, and often more up-to-date works on the subject will only show up under the heading footwear.

Now, for the even more tricky fact! When one searches shoe industry and footwear industry, more citations show up under the newer footwear industry heading. Again, this is undoubtedly because so much more has been researched and written about this subject, as with all costume history, over the last ten years or so.

The exhibition of Christian Louboutin shoes at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology is a must-see for those who love or loath high heels. French designer Louboutin gained fame for learning well from the “everything old is new again” maxim. His shoes have his signature red sole, a convention that may come down from the days of King Louis XIV.

At the same time, despite his historical references to footwear from the late eighteenth through nineteenth centuries (see the illustration above), Louboutin moves his shoe designs from the pretty to the provocative. The exhibition text delightfully suggests the sexual and other connotations that spring to mind when we look at a pair of spiked heels.

Alas, I belong to the legion of women who have had to put heeled shoes behind them. It didn’t help that I never had the kind of legs that looked slinky when thrust into a pair of really high heels. Yet this exhibition allows for plenty of fantasizing. To give yourself a preview, in order to get in the mood for a trip to F.I.T., go to Google Images and put in Christian Louboutin’s name. Prepare to be dazzled—and more than a little bit excited…

I spotted this statement on a tee shirt worn by a young woman in Grand Central Station, just the other day.

From a file I was putting away at my desk, I ran across some quotes I’d gathered for the “Rakish History of Men’s Wear” exhibition. The following lines are by Georg Simmel (1858-1918), who wrote an academic treatise called “Fashion” in 1901:

“..we see that fashion furnishes an ideal field for individuals with dependent natures, whose self-consciousness, however, requires a certain amount of prominence, attention, and singularity. Fashion raises even the unimportant individual by making him the representative of a class, the embodiment of a joint spirit.”

If true, and I suspect it is, the young woman’s tee shirt makes even more sense…

Don’t Forget! Costume and Fashion History class this Thursday at 12:30 p.m. in South Court Classroom B.

Sung to the tune of any Amy Winehouse song:

Spring is coming early this year,
Just in time to erase any fear,
I might have of wearing a silly bonnet,
With lots of flowers and bunnies on it.
After all Easter is more than just a religious holiday,
It’s the time that the fashion-conscious hit the streets to say-
We’ll wear whatever it takes to get on the air,
You wouldn’t believe the time it took to prepare
This chapeau in the greatest taste,
Couldn’t let all that tinsel go to waste…
My grandmother wore hats year round,
But that craze has gone to ground.
I’ll wear this hat and look really funny,
All to honor that cute Easter Bunny.

And the Easter Bunny replies with the immortal words from the Bugs Bunny cartoon:

“I’m the Easter Bunny, hurray—
I shoulda stayed in bed today!!!!”

The issue of whether to wear fur or not has only become a politically correct one in recent years. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the wearing of luxurious furs was something that many women aspired to. I can readily understand the mystique, which streched back over the centuries. By the twentieth century, however, the need to wear furs was becoming more and more just an option. The creation of new synthetics, especially after the two world wars, makes the wearing of fur unnecessary.

Then, too, there are the issues of animal cruelty in harvesting pelts. Unsavory practices at mink farms and other facilities has thrown the practice into an unfavorable light, aided by PETA. The history of creating fur-trimmed garments can be seen in remarkable Library works like Mama Made Minks and Fur in Dress. The Native Americans of various tribes had a practical approach. When they'd stalked an animal and made ready for the kill, they offered a prayer to the animal and its' protecting spirit. The hunter would thank his prey for the gift of his life and pelt, saying that he appreciated this since he needed the food and warmth.

Me, I have rabbits at home. No spirit would protect me from their wrath if I should choose to wear fur. Hurray for synthetics...

Part of my daily job is ensuring that people doing costume and fashion history research get the prepping they need for their research. To aid that purpose, I offer classes on this research several times a year. A class is coming up: I’ll offer “Researching Costume and Fashion History” on Thursday March 27 at 12:30 p.m. in the South Court classrooms. The next one will be Thursday, May 8, at the same time and location.

For those far away, or who cannot get away for a class, I do have a Research Guide on our Library website on Costume and Fashion History. It’s a great way to start in. One of the primary hurdles for people doing such research is understanding that library research isn’t as simple as doing a Google search. When you work with library catalogues, including our CATNYP, your best approach is not a word search, but choosing the right subject heading to get to the material you want. And this is a bit dictatorial, for we all use Library of Congress Subject Headings. This means, for example, that searching under the subject heading Fashion History will prove disappointing, when what you really want is Costume—History. Want to know why? Come to my class and I’ll explain...

Well, The New York Times Style Magazine offered its “Men’s Fashion Spring 2008” issue on Sunday. The emphasis was on hard-edged masculinity, a trend to be expected now that troubled times and belt tightening are in order. Although the occasional pale pink shirt could be found in an ad here and there… The emphasis was on hard-edged masculinity, a trend to be expected now that troubled times and belt tightening are in order. Although the occasional pale pink shirt could be found in an ad here and there…

Here’s a rather appropriate quote I found in my research papers for “A Rakish History of Men’s Wear,” from an old-time academic, Friedrich Vischer (1807-1887), writing an essay entitled “Fashion and Cynicism” in 1879:
“We cannot escape fashion once it has assumed the place of traditional dress. As we just said, fashion represents through and through the keenly roused spirit of modern culture, including, to be sure, all its bad habits, but fashion represents spirit.”

After a delay necessitated by my jaunt to the Southwest, I can turn my attention now to the latest fashion summaries. I usually find that the New York Times Style Magazine serves as an excellent bellwether for the latest word on fashion musts, pop culture, and targeted consumerism. The February 24 “Women’s Fashion Spring 2008” offers a wrap-up of all the trends in the recent round of spring fashion shows. The results are actually fairly agreeable and promising. First of all, the colors on view are great. Red is one, already foreseen in all the glamorous gowns worn by attendees of the Academy Awards. But I was also struck by the effusive hues of blue, yellow, and mint green that appeared in ads.

To my great pleasure, articles in the magazine offered many takes on everything old is new again, including mentions of Pre-Raphaelitism, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and retro modernism. Textile designs seemed to be tributes to ornamentation from those periods. An American actress from the 1920s was treated to a flapper evaluation. Big cuff bracelets were in evidence, a satisfying sign to me! Accessories were sensible and attractive, with one huge exception. The platform and stiletto shoes shown in spreads were among the most obscene styles I’ve ever encountered; the milder versions of this footwear had “dominatrix” stamped all over them.

Two exhibition footnotes that appeared must be shared. The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) is having an exhibition on that enigmatic designer, Madame Grès, maker of divine draped and sensual dresses, through April 19; and “Wiener Werkstätte Jewelry” will show at the Neue Galerie here in NYC starting March 27. Got to see that one: the Wiener Werkstätte contributed greatly to Art Deco’s liveliness.