AGE OF ELEGANCE ... by Susan Stokes-Chapman

In my previous blog post, I explored the world of Georgian jewellery, the crowning glory of any ensemble. But while those glittering finishing touches were undoubtedly important, they were only one part of the story. To truly appreciate the splendour of the era, we must also turn our attention to the fashions these jewels were meant to enhance, and the way dressmakers and tailors drew inspiration from the elegance and grandeur of the ancient world.

It was the Enlightenment that sparked this cultural shift. The Age of Enlightenment — a sweeping intellectual and philosophical movement that flourished across Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries — championed ideals such as human happiness, reason, empirical knowledge, liberty, and social progress. These Enlightenment values led to a renewed fascination with the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome, a reverence that inevitably found its way into the world of fashion, especially in what we now associate with the Regency period.

Women’s clothing, in particular, began to cast off the stiff structure of corsetry in favour of a more fluid and graceful silhouette. Inspired by ancient statuary and drapery, dresses adopted the flowing lines and high waistlines of classical antiquity — what we now call the Empire Line — designed to flatter the figure with a soft, slender elegance. Men’s fashion, too, echoed this classical ideal, embracing a leaner, more statuesque form reminiscent of the heroic figures of Grecian myth.

 

It is little wonder that the ancient world held such allure. With the rise of archaeology and the increasing accessibility of classical artefacts, many brought to wider attention through the aristocratic tradition of the Grand Tour, the beauty and refinement of classical imagery captivated the European imagination. The aesthetics of antiquity were irresistible: men were depicted as clean-shaven, with artfully curled hair and sculpted, athletic physiques that embodied virile strength and nobility. Women, by contrast, were portrayed with flawless skin, elegant hairstyles, and an air of serene grace, together forming the classical ideal of human perfection that so enchanted the Georgian mind.

© Victoria and Albert Museum

 
© Victoria and Albert Museum

The earliest Grecian-inspired gowns were simple, column-like shifts, most commonly made from muslin. Though other fabrics were occasionally used, muslin dominated the fashion plates of the day, prized for its soft drape and airy lightness. These gowns were intentionally unstructured, with shape achieved not through stiff corsetry, but by a ribbon or tie just beneath the bust, creating the now-iconic Empire Line silhouette.

This style offered women a remarkable sense of freedom and comfort. The dresses were lightweight, required minimal underpinning, and were paired with flat shoes, liberating wearers from the discomfort of high heels. White, in all its subtle variations, was the prevailing colour, evoking the purity and simplicity of classical antiquity. During the day, women often wore soft pastel shades, while deeper tones appeared in shawls, trims, or decorative tunics — many of which were edged in gold. These elegant overlays enhanced the Greco-Roman aesthetic, echoing the timeless beauty of ancient dress.

These ensembles were often complemented by delicate reticules (small handbags that sometimes echoed the elegant contours of a Grecian urn) and by hoods inspired by the Grecian caul, a fine cloth or netting designed to cover the hair and extend gracefully down the back in an elongated shape:

Returning briefly to jewellery, one accessory in particular captured the imagination of the era: the tiara. Frequently seen in contemporary portraits, these elegant headpieces also drew inspiration from the mosaics and pottery uncovered in archaeological excavations across Greece and Rome. As the examples illustrated below reveal, the classical heritage made tiaras a natural and highly fashionable adornment:

© The British Museum

Moreover, cameos were perhaps the most overt homage to the ancient world in Georgian jewellery. As early as 1805, the Journal des Dames observed that “a fashionable lady wears cameos at her girdle, cameos in her necklace, cameos on each of her bracelets, and a cameo on her tiara.” Below is a striking portrait of Queen Louise Augusta of Prussia, painted by the French artist Madame Le Brun, which beautifully showcases a cameo adorning her tiara, an elegant testament to this enduring classical influence.

The English potter Josiah Wedgwood found great success with his jasperware, renowned for its exquisite classical scenes. Featured below is a belt clasp framed in cut steel and adorned with Matthew Boulton’s faceted steel studs, depicting a priestess performing a sacrifice. Such cameos were a popular accessory among Georgian women (and even some men) who embraced these classical motifs as a mark of style and sophistication.

© The Walters Art Museum

And speaking of priestesses, the painting below by Madame Le Brun portrays Lady Hamilton — Lord Nelson’s famed mistress — as a graceful dancing priestess. Her layered garment and intricately patterned underdress blur the line between Regency fashion and ancient Grecian robes, so striking is the resemblance. In the background, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius serves as a vivid reminder of the recent excavations at Pompeii, an archaeological discovery that further fuelled the Georgian era’s fascination with the classical world.

For men, the approach to fashion was notably more restrained. Gentlemen wore breeches crafted from fabrics that stretched comfortably across the legs, subtly accentuating their form, while skin-tight pantaloons evoked the virile grace of classical statues much admired during the period. The dandy Beau Brummell — depicted below — famously asserted that the purpose of men's fashion was to “clothe the body so that its fineness may be revealed,” emphasising understated elegance over ostentation.

Of course, not all bodies conformed to the idealised shapes of the era. For women of fuller figure, the Empire Line dresses remained remarkably flattering, gracefully skimming the silhouette. Men, however, who lacked the muscular contours celebrated in Grecian heroes, often did not hesitate to enhance their form with padded garments to create the desired curves. This humorous caricature below playfully captures that very practice. Beside it is a surviving example of a padded stocking, a testament to the lengths men would go to achieve the perfect classical profile.

There is much more to be said about Georgian fashion, but for the purposes of this blog, I wanted to focus on the striking visual parallels between Regency styles and the ancient world. Personally, I believe they were truly onto something remarkable. It feels high time these fashions made a comeback. They were elegant and regal, wonderfully cool in the summer months, and flattering to every shape and size. What more could one possibly ask for?

~~~~~~

My Georgian-set debut novel Pandora acknowledges this obsession with the ancient world, and you can order by clicking the image below:

www.susanstokeschapman.com
Instagram: @SStokesChapman

Kimono fashion ~ by Lesley Downer

Kosode with autumn flowers
by Ogata Kōrin, 18th century
(Tokyo National Museum)

‘First the courtesan Kaoru commissioned the renowned artist Kano Yukinobu to paint a picture of flaming autumn on plain white satin. Eight court nobles were next asked to inscribe vignettes in verse, in black decorative calligraphy, on this gorgeous design. The result was a picture of breath-taking beauty, admirably suitable for a hanging scroll. But Kaoru had no idea of putting it to such trifling use. She had it made into a robe for herself.’

The Life of an Amorous Man, Ihara Saikaku, 1682

The trendsetters of old Japan were the fabulously wealthy and celebrated courtesans of the pleasure quarters, as in the story above, by the famous writer and teller of naughty tales, Ihara Saikaku.

The key word is ‘trifling’ - ‘trifling use’. Why waste a beautiful painting by hanging it on a wall when you could have it made into a kimono? Then you could wear it and reveal how the painted image would change as you draped it on your body and, even more spectacularly, how it would flow as you moved, transforming it from a two dimensional object to a three dimensional work of art!

'Whose sleeves?'

Tagasode, 16th - 17th century (Met Museum)

There’s a genre of painting in Japan called Tagasode - 'Whose Sleeves?' Whose indeed? There are no people in these pictures, no beautiful women, just kimonos, draped seductively over a lacquered clothing frame. In old Japan a picture like this was considered provocative, even erotic. Just as a person’s fragrance and belongings can strongly evoke them, so it’s an invitation to speculate on the wearer. How gorgeous must the lady be who wraps herself up in one of these! In terms of allure clothing counts for as much as or more than the body wrapped up inside.

Moronobu Hishikawa (1618-1694) (Met Museum)

In woodblock prints the faces and figures of the courtesans, dancing girls and kabuki actors tend to be rather simply delineated, a hint rather than a studious portrait, not much differentiated. The focus is on the kimonos, rather, which are ravishing and distinctive. In this print by Moronobu each kimono is different.

Kimonos as art
Kimonos are always the same shape. What makes them different is not the cut or the style, which never change, but the painted design. In Japan the kimono is very far from just a garment. It is an art form and the great kimono designers are revered as artists. Museums worldwide show exhibitions of kimonos, both historical and contemporary. And in the women’s palace of the shogun’s castle in Edo (now Tokyo) and in daimyo’s castles and in wealthy merchants’ homes, sumptuous kimonos were hung on lacquered racks as a form of interior decoration.

Kosode moyo hinagata bon. Book
of painted kosode designs, second half
17th century (Met Museum)

In fact the silk kosode (the basic kimono) was the primary canvas for artistic expression in the 17th and 18th centuries in Japan. Kosode were often works of art on a par with paintings.

As in the story above, some designs feature written characters or whole poems used as decoration. Literature, the visual arts and traditional motifs and themes such as the ‘One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets’ happily combine with textiles to make a unified work of art. The artist incorporates their reaction to the feeling of the poem in their design, sometimes including a line or phrase in the pattern.

In the Edo period (1603-1868) kimono designers were as high in status, if not higher, than woodblock artists. Many artists, beginning with Moronobu, created kimono patterns. The legendary woodblock print artist Katsushika Hokusai, creator of The Great Wave and much else, also made designs for kimono fabric. He did small repeat patterns which became popular in the late Edo era when sumptuary laws restricting elaborate dress were increasingly enforced.

Kimono pattern books (Hinagata-bon)
Shops turned out kimono pattern books for every season promoting the latest fashions. A clerk would take a selection of books to a daimyo’s castle or a wealthy merchant’s home so that the lady of the house or an assistant could choose suitable designs. Less wealthy clients could go to the shop and study the pattern books there. Every year you would need to order new kimonos so as to keep up with the fashion.

 

Pattern book (hinagata-bon)
Enoki Hironobu 1751 (Met Museum)

The pattern books show designs for younger women, older women, young men, courtesans - but that doesn’t mean that the purchaser of the books would commission such designs, just as you wouldn’t actually expect to wear the clothes you see on the catwalk at Fashion Week. The pattern books were more like fashion magazines, like Vogue. People who couldn’t afford or wouldn’t want to wear such extravagantly glamorous clothes could still enjoy thumbing through the pages.

If you decided to commission a kimono, first you would choose your pattern from the pattern books. The tailor would record details of your requirements then make full size draft drawings with specifications to send to the dyers or embroiderers for the next stage of the production process. Once the decoration was finished the garment would be complete. 

Kosode, Edo period, 18th century, design of autumn
grasses and brushwood fences on  light green
chirimen crepe (Tokyo National Museum)

Edo period sumptuary laws decreed what sort of fabrics and designs you could and couldn’t wear. Certain fabrics and designs were reserved for the ladies of the imperial court or of the women’s palace at Edo Castle or for extremely high-ranking daimyos’ ladies. Conversely townswomen in particular were prohibited from wearing luxurious fabrics. 

As a result both they and their tailors became expert at, for example, designing a very plain unostentatious jacket with an incredibly expensive, over the top lining. It was the height of chic to dress very conservatively, allowing just a flash of the glorious lining to be seen.

The courtesans were famously flashy dressers. Yet what men found the most provocative was not the layers and layers of brilliantly coloured and heavily embroidered fabric - it was the tiny bare foot peeking out from under the voluptuous skirts, the only hint of the real woman gift-wrapped inside it all.

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and an inveterate traveller. She is the author of many books on Japan, including The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death, out now in paperback. For more see  http://www.lesleydowner.com/.

Pictures courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Tokyo National Museum - by way of Wikimedia Commons. 

Sumer is icumen in, but am I ready for it?

By Susan Vincent

 

You know how the (very) old song goes:

Sumer is icumen in (Summer is a coming in)

Lhude sing cuccu (loud sing cuckoo)

Groweþ sed (groweth seed)

And bloweþ med (bloometh mead)
And once again I start to shave my underarms and legs.

 

 

So, I’m kidding about the last line, but the return of warmer weather and the corresponding casting of clouts, does mean for me a return to depilation. Now well into middle age, I am much less commited to the whole enterprise though. Something that was once a year-round practice has shrunk to the few months that require summer clothing, and even then only when I can be bothered.

Like my own personal practice, the history of women’s hair removal has been closely tied to what she wore – or, put more accurately, what she didn’t wear. The ‘problem’ areas were limited to those body parts on show.

 

Back when garments covered mostly everything from neck to feet, shoulder to wrist, then faces were the sole target. Recipes and advice manuals from these centuries suggest ways of tending to eyebrows, upper lip, and those pesky foreheads, at the time admired with a high hairline.

 

 

 

Then, as now, women might pluck with tweezers, 'wax' with a mastic, or use chemical depilatories. The last of these, by necessity home-made, featured a range of ingredients on a continuum from anodyne to excoriating and ordinary to outré. So we have things like vinegar, nettle heads, cats' dung or horse leeches (both dried and powdered), arsenic compounds, and quicklime. In the words of the author of one early printed recipe,

Some that have the hair of their forehead growing too low, others the hair of their eyebrows growing too thick; and some women that have haire growing on their lips, (an unseemly sight to see) would give any thing for this Secret. (La Fountaine, A brief collection of many rare secrets (1650), sig. Br.)

 

As sleeves got shorter from the later seventeenth century, a new potential area was disclosed: forearms. 

A handwritten recipe in one manuscript collection advises that you can dispose of long arm hair by singeing it off with a candle at the wane of the moon (London, Wellcome Library, English Recipe Book, 17th-18th century, c.1675-c.1800, MS. 7721, 'To hinder haire from growing'). I'm assuming this would be effective but for the life of me can't see how you'd escape painful burns – losing hair and skin, both. (One history lesson when I was fifteen was made memorable by the loud discussion between three of the girls about shaving forearms, with one demonstrating the results of her attempt. By contrast, I can remember nothing about that year’s actual curriculum.)

 

The Victorians, as we well know, were mad about head hair. For women it was an abundant crowning glory, brushed one hundred times (anecdotally anyway) and let down to her waist. Men had side whiskers, beards and a moustache; a manly beauty. But the Victorians were also vocal about the removal of hair from the wrong place. In the new world of print saturation, mass production and rampant advertising, the dread words ‘superfluous hair’ were presented as a suffering that could be relieved by the right product. Tweezers, mastics, creams, and now the newly invented electrolysis charged to the rescue, at a price.

 

This, except for the electrolysis, was little different from earlier ages. When sleeveless evening wear made an appearance though, the world definitely tilted, shifting closer to the precipice down which it would soon hurtle. 

And the destination at the bottom? The hairless woman. 

 

The next key moment came in the 1920s, and what a moment it was. Hemlines rose and for the first time, well, pretty much ever, adult women routinely showed that above the ankles, they had legs. And guess what, those legs needed to be hairless. 

 

And this was where the new invention of the safety razor was truly revolutionary. Breaking a centuries-old tradition linking masculinity and the open blade, the safety razor found a market with female users. Manufacturers were quick to spot the opening, developing dainty ‘women’s’ styles with attractive names and pretty cases. More helpfully, some even had design adapatations like a curved edge, easier for underarms. 

 

But the history of women’s hair removal is like a corporeal whack-a-mole, with new areas popping up that now suddenly need attention too. The old zones are not forgotten, more are just added. 

And so after a brief flurry of hair in the 1960s, the 1980s brought highcut swim and gym wear and a new worry about the bikini line. Over the ensuing decades the permutations of pubic hair removal have been many, with different mini-fashions of sculpting all nibbling away at the hairy growth between our legs. Total pubic depiliation is common. (Who knows, it might be the norm – obviously, it’s a bit hard to gain a sense of this through mass observation . . .)

 

 

For women, superfluous hair is a social solecism. A failure of femininity. And here’s the irony, it’s an invented problem. Growing alongside her sartorial emancipation, this is a new, and voluntary, servitude.

But I get it. Who is brave enough to defy cultural norms? More importantly, who is able to recalibrate their own ideas of beauty and decency in defiance of received assumptions and the familiarity of habit? A few can, but sadly I’m not among them. 

 

On the other hand, I have – joy of joys – discovered the delight of swim shorts.

 

 

Picture credits

Imgae 1: ‘shaving my legs’ by Mario A. P. is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Images 2 and 3: Queen Elizabeth I (The Ermine Portrait) by William Segar (and detail), c. 1585, Hatfield House, photo Wikimedia Commons

Image 4: Self-Portrait with a Harp by Rose Adélaïde Ducreux, oil on canvas, 1791. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Susan Dwight Bliss, Accession No. 67.55.1

Image 5: ‘Women 1888–1889, Plate 019’, Gift of Woodman Thompson, Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Image 6: Evening dress (silk, cotton), 1898–1900, House of Worth. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Miss Eva Drexel Dahlgren. Accession No. 1976.258.4a, b

Image 7: ‘Two women in pleated skirts’ by simpleinsomnia is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Images 8 and 9: Razorette miniature safety razor for women, case measures 2.25 inches in length, razor measures 1-5/8 inches, made In USA, c. 1930s–1940s, both photos by France1978 licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Image 10: ‘Um Mergulho’ by Rodrigo Soldon Souza is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Image 11: My Home magazine, ad for Veet depilatory (1930s), photo by davydubbit (‘Superfluous Hair’) licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0