Fashion and Modernism 9781350044494, 9781350044524, 9781350044500

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Notes On Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One Fashion, Change, Modernism
1 Tarde, Simmel, and the Logic of Fashion
2 Italian Futurism and Fashion
3 Modernism Versus Feminism George Sand, Paul Gavarni, and Trousers For Women
4 Ménilmontant Time, Space, and Urbanity
5 Designing the Future Constructivist Laboratory of Fashion
Part Two Creators And Creations
6 Paris–new York 1925 Jean Patou’s “advertising”
7 The Slit Skirt Fashion and Empathy in the Tango Era
8 Look at Me! Fashion as Expression and Strategy in Isaac Grünewald’s and Sigrid Hjertén’s Painting and Self-staging
9 Mago’s Modernism Fashion and the Modern From Smiles of a Summer Night to Hour of the Wolf
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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FASHION AND MODERNISM

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FASHION AND MODERNISM Edited by

LOUISE WALLENBERG AND ANDREA KOLLNITZ

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Selection, editorial matter, and Introduction © Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz, 2019 Individual chapters © their authors, 2019 Some chapters within this book were first published in Swedish with Carlsson Förlag, 2014, in Modernism och mode Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Cover image: Ateljéinteriör, 1916. (© Sigrid Hjertén) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-350-04449-4 ePDF: 978-1-350-04450-0 eBook: 978-1-350-04451-7 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

List of figures  vii Notes on contributors  x Acknowledgments  xii

Introduction  1 Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz

PART ONE  FASHION, CHANGE, MODERNISM 1 Tarde, Simmel, and the logic of fashion  19 Sven-Olov Wallenstein

2 Italian futurism and fashion  39 Patrizia Calefato

3 Modernism versus feminism: George Sand, Paul Gavarni, and trousers for women  53 Ulrich Lehmann

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Ménilmontant: Time, space, and urbanity  83 Louise Wallenberg

5 Designing the future: Constructivist laboratory of fashion  101 Olga Vainshtein

PART TWO  CREATORS AND CREATIONS 6 Paris–New York 1925: Jean Patou’s “advertising”  127 Caroline Evans

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Contents

7 The slit skirt: Fashion and empathy in the tango era  157 Alessandra Vaccari

8 Look at me! Fashion as expression and strategy in Isaac Grünewald’s and Sigrid Hjertén’s painting and self-staging  177 Andrea Kollnitz

9 Mago’s modernism: Fashion and the modern from Smiles of a Summer Night to Hour of the Wolf  203 Astrid Söderbergh Widding Bibliography  217 Index  233

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FIGURES

3.1 Paul Gavarni, George Sand in Student Garb, lithograph  59 3.2 Paul Gavarni, In Men’s Clothing, lithograph  67 3.3 Paul Gavarni, “T’morrow morning my sweet fiancé will bawl at me: Ah! But . . . damn! Tonight I am Simonienne: breakin’ down the conjugal and livin’ as Chicard!”  68 3.4 Paul Gavarni, “—Come to the ball tonight! . . . What are you waiting for?—A pair of trousers”  70 3.5 Paul Gavarni, “The débardeur, manly and womanly . . . alive! . . . brought back from a trip around the world by Monsieur Chicard”  71 3.6 Paul Gavarni, “You were not aware that this dance was prohibited by the authorities?”  72 3.7 Paul Gavarni, “At your service, my good Sir! Your obedient servant, Madam”  73 3.8 Paul Gavarni, “Sweet Jesus! It’s my lover from Saturday! Hullo, mate!,” lithograph  74 3.9 Paul Gavarni, “After the débardeur, the end of the world,” lithograph no. 1  75 3.10 Paul Gavarni, Scene from the Private Life of the Débardeur, lithograph, from the series Carnaval, 1846  76 4.1 Still from the shocking montage scene opening of Ménilmontant  89 4.2 Paris—the modern metropolis in Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant, 1926  91 4.3 The younger sister played by Nadia Sibirskaïa in a montage sequence  92

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Figures

5.1 Olga Rozanova, Suprematist ornament, textile design, 1917–1918  105 5.2 Liubov Popova, sketch of a coat and a costume, 1924  106 5.3 Liubov Popova, textile design, 1923–1924  108 5.4 Liubov Popova, dress design, 1924  109 5.5 Varvara Stepanova, poster “Book evening,” 1924  114 5.6 Olga Rozanova, textile design with Suprematist ornament, 1917  115 5.7 Liubov Popova, textile design, 1924  115 5.8 Ljubov Popova, theater costume design for The Magnificent Cuckold, staged by V. Meyerhold, 1922  118 6.1 Jean Patou, Advertising, 1925. The top half of the ensemble  129 6.2 The battery and light switch  130 6.3 Authorized Patou replicas from Bonwitt Teller, Harper’s Bazar (October 1925): 4. From the house of Patou’s press cutting album for 1925  132 6.4 Sunday Pictorial, November 29, 1925, n.p.  134 6.5 Fashion drawing from Harper’s Bazar, c. 1925  138 6.6 The Eiffel Tower in 1925, illuminated with the name CITROEN  140 6.7 One page from a Patou press album, showing an article from March 1925 on Patou’s American mannequins  146 7.1 Actress Léone Devimeur as Clothon in La semaine folle, Athénée Theatre, Paris, 1913  162 7.2 Embroidered stocking, c. 1910  167 7.3 Les honneurs du pied, Fantasio 8, no. 157 (1913)  168 7.4 Passo a due. Photo by Itala-Photo-reportage, Torino, 1913. La Donna 9, no. 201 (May 5, 1913)  170 8.1 Isaac Grünewald and Sigrid Hjertén in their studio, c. 1916  178 8.2 Isaac Grünewald together with artist friends outside of Café de Versailles, Paris  181

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Figures

8.3 Isaac Grünewald, Self-Portrait, 1912  184 8.4 Sigrid Hjertén, Portrait of Isaac Grünewald, 1918  185 8.5 Cover of Nya Nisse, 27, no. 26, 1917  186 8.6 Sigrid Hjertén posing in the area of Gränna, Sweden, 1913  189 8.7 Isaac Grünewald, Sigrid and Iván, 1917  193 8.8 Sigrid Hjertén, Ateljéinteriör (studio interior), 1916  194 8.9 Sigrid Hjertén, Self-Portrait, 1914  196 8.10 Isaac Grünewald, c. 1916  198 9.1 Still from Ingmar Bergman’s comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) with costumes by Mago  208

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Patrizia Calefato teaches Sociology of Culture and Communication at Università degli studi di Bari Aldo Moro in Bari, Italy. Her main fields of research are fashion theory, socio-semiotics, and cultural studies. Among her latest works are Paesaggi di moda:  corpo rivestito e flussi culturali (2016); “Italian fashion in the latest decades” in Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture (2016); Fashion Journalism (2015); and Luxury, Lifestyles and Excess (2014). Caroline Evans is Professor in Fashion History and Fashion Theory at Central Saint Martins in London and was affiliated professor at the Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University, between 2010 and 2017. Her foremost publications include The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (2013) and Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (2003). Andrea Kollnitz is an art and fashion historian and since 2009 has been Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University. Her research is focused on art and fashion during modernism, the avant-garde artist’s role, and artistic self-fashioning fashion caricature and nationalist art and fashion discourses. Her publications include her PhD dissertation Konstens nationella identitet. Om tysk och österrikisk modernism i svensk konstkritik (2008) and the co-edited volumes Modernism och mode (2014) and A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries (2017). Ulrich Lehmann studied philosophy, sociology, and the history of art in Frankfurt am Main, Paris and London. His research interests can be grouped in a couple of areas: the histories of ideas and of material culture in Europe from the 1780s to 1850, and the meaning and materiality of contemporary design. His role as Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Design and Art at The New School in New York connects projects, disciplines, and approaches across departments

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and develops inclusive models for contemporary art and design practice and research. Astrid Söderbergh Widding is Professor of Cinema Studies and since 2013 she is the vice chancellor of Stockholm University. Her many publications include Konst som rörlig bild (2006); A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture (2010); and the co-edited volume Not So Silent:  Women in Cinema before Sound (2010). Olga Vainshtein is a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Research within the Humanities at Russian State University in Moskva. Her research focuses on fashion and gender; fashion and accessories; Soviet cultural history; fashion and the body. Her publications include Dandy: Fashion, Literature, Life Style (2006, 2012) and Smells and Perfumes in the History of Culture (ed., 2003, 2010). She is co-editor of Fashion Theory; Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion; International Journal of Fashion Studies and has founded Russian Fashion Theory Journal. Louise Wallenberg holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from Stockholm University. Since 2010, she is Associate Professor in Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, a center for which she was the establishing director between 2007 and 2013. Her research focuses on gender, fashion, and film, and her publications include the anthologies Mode:  en tvärvetenskaplig introduktion (2009); Nordic Fashion Studies (2012); Modernism och mode (2014); Harry bit för bit (2017); and Fashion and Film in the 1960s (2017). Sven-Olov Wallenstein is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörns University College in Sweden. His many publications include 1930/31:  Den svenska modernismen vid vägskälet (2009); Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture (2009); Swedish Modernism:  Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State (2010); and Architecture, Critique, Ideology (2016). Alessandra Vaccari is Associate Professor in Contemporary Art and Fashion History at Università IUAV di Venezia. Her research interests include fashion and modernism; fashion heritage and fashion archives; and fashion design. Her publications include Vestire il ventennio (2004); Fashion at Time of Fashion (2009); and La mode nei discorsi dei designer (2012).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection of essays was first published in Swedish with Carlsson förlag in Stockholm as Modernism och mode in 2014. We want to thank publisher Trygve Carlsson for kindly letting us publish a new, translated version in English. While the original collection has lent itself to this edition, it should be noted that a few changes have been made:  three chapters have been taken out, and two new chapters have been added. We have also revised and developed the introduction. As for financial support, we want to thank Magnus Bergwalls Stiftelse for generously funding translations from Swedish and Italian into English. We also wish to thank our translators: four of the essays were translated from Swedish to English by Professor Emeritus Rune Engebretsen, and two essays were translated from Italian to English by Dr Sveva Scaramuzzi and Dr Gian Paolo Chiari. We are grateful to all three of them for their wonderful and meticulous work. Lastly, we would like to thank the commissioning team at Bloomsbury Publishing, Frances Arnold and Pari Thomson. They have encouraged and assisted us in every way possible in finalizing this collection, and for this we are sincerely grateful.

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INTRODUCTION Louise Wallenberg and Andrea Kollnitz

Fashion as an aesthetic, artistic, and cultural phenomenon, as well as an inevitable marker of identity within modern society, has played a crucial role long before the period that this book is focused on, modernism. From Renaissance artists creating and portraying the fashions of the powerful to the meticulously staged display of luxury fashions during the seventeenth century, or the careful distinction between feminine conspicuous beauty and masculine elegant sincerity in nineteenth-century fashion and portraiture, fashion and the arts have been closely interacting since the beginning of fashion history and early modern society. Yet, it was during the very first decades of the twentieth century that fashion reached an earlier unseen artistic significance. As Hans Siemsen, the prominent editor of the German expressionist journal Zeit-Echo, tellingly proclaimed in 1915, it was during the period that fashion was to be seen not only as a part of, but more so as a node for the unification between art and life. Siemsen’s proclamation—which opens this book—summarizes the inspiration and urge behind this publication, not least as his words still seem to hold relevance today, one century later. Accordingly, this collection is based on the idea that the phenomenon of fashion today, maybe more than ever, carries important meaning in a discussion that merges cultural, aesthetic, social, and economic interests. Departing from the current relevance of fashion and the strong interest for fashion in different academic and nonacademic fields, we want to shed light on the period when the comprehensive and manifold aesthetic role of fashion within European culture for the first time was clearly emphasized and embraced. Previous research on fashion as part of modernism is oddly enough rather limited: it has looked either at singular modernist artist icons who have dealt with fashion creation along their “real” art production, or at known fashion designers who were active in different modernist movements. While several modernist designers/artists, such as Elsa Schiaparelli or Sonia Delaunay, have gained strong individual attention, the manifold interactions between fashion and the arts during modernism have hardly been discussed per se. Repeatedly, fashion has been treated as a marginal and secluded side area within the modernist

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-isms.1 Among the more comprehensive attempts where fashion’s significance for modernism is in explicit focus are Radu Stern’s Against Fashion:  Clothing as Art 1850–1930 (1992), Nancy Troy’s Couture Culture:  A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (2003), and Mark Wigley’s White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995). Fashion and Modernism thus aims to make a complementary contribution with the ambition to offer a wider, interdisciplinary perspective, first, on the general significance of fashion for and within modernism and, second, on different types of artistic fashion creation within the margins and peripheries of classical modernism. In the aftermath of post-structuralism and following Whitney Chadwick’s statement on the peripheral yet “significant others” in art—especially Sonia Delaunay’s position vis-à-vis a presumed center of art—we aim to contribute to a (re)definition of the center.2 One attempt to shed light on and make use of peripheries lies in the origin of this anthology:  it was initiated by the two of us, working at the academic margins of fashion studies, that is, at Stockholm University, and it invited other scholars from the “outside” of this field to participate. Hence, the collection is the collaborative product of scholars residing in Sweden, Italy, Russia, the UK, and the United States, all of whom have their background in various academic fields. As the two of us, as editors, set out to do this book back in 2010, it was due to our common interest in the aesthetic and political aspects of fashion, not least based on the currently increasing attention given to fashion in Swedish economic and cultural life. During the last twenty years, fashion has come to gain a previously unseen significance in Sweden:  the Swedish fashion industry is one of the most expansive in Sweden, and Swedish fashion has become internationally attractive, both through large chains with fast and cheap production, and through minor, exclusive designer brands. From an economic perspective, a recurring discourse is that of a Swedish fashion “miracle”—at least within the national context.3 Fashion is continuously visualized and discussed in diverse forms of commercial and social media, and it is given an expanding space in Swedish cultural debate, while also engaging the academic world, with several Swedish universities and colleges today offering education in fashion studies.4 While this recent and broad interest for fashion is considered “new” by most of our fellow Swedes, a similar novel interest in regard to fashion is also found within our neighboring Nordic and European countries. As a comprehensive social, economic, cultural, and aesthetic phenomenon, fashion has thus become an urgent topic, important to discuss, analyze, and study. Fashion and Modernism can be considered one of the first collaborations manifesting the interdisciplinary and aesthetically focused research approach developed during the first years of the Centre for Fashion Studies as the main academic platform for Swedish fashion research.

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Fashion, modernity, modernism Looking at the book title’s combination of the concepts of fashion and modernism, a first reflection on their conceptual relationship and the related concept of modernity is elucidating. All three terms—with fashion translated to mode in French, mode in German and Swedish, and moda in Italian—are based on the verbal root of mode, which points at their etymological and accordingly semantic connection (based on the Latin term modus, with “manner” being one of its main meanings). When Siemsen chose to proclaim fashion as the area of contemporary art closest to life in 1915, a lot had happened in the development of fashion during only a few revolutionizing years. Women’s fashion—which had prescribed a tightly corseted waist in combination with abundant volumes of fabric around the hips during the previous decades, promoting ultrafeminine silhouettes with an often restrictive effect on body and movement—radically shifted to straighter, shorter, and looser shapes in the early 1910s, offering new possibilities for physical as well as social movement and liberty. With this new physical mobility came a new autonomy—economically, as well as socially. Together with the mass production of fashion, which had gained momentum and had rapidly expanded since the late nineteenth century, this new fashion and its imagery contributed to a loosening of social categorizations concerning gender as well as class. The new fashion was to be made accessible for all, and thus, during the first decades of the twentieth century, fashion was slowly “democratized,” although this is a truth with modifications.5 The differentiation of classes that fashion always has served to visually manifest was now more difficult to recognize—at least at first glimpse. Relatable to these fundamental fashion changes in modern society, a key concept in the context of fashion’s fundamental changes during this period is modernity. For both historically and more contemporary-oriented fashion research, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity and modernization processes constitute an important and constantly discussed framework; in fact, the period of modernity must be described as nodal for the research executed on the origins, history, and stylistic development of fashion.6 It implies the rise and distribution of a quickly increasing fashion production in the shape of haute couture, as well as the beginning of mass-produced and consumed fashion goods. The mid-nineteenth century sees the emergence of Parisian fashion houses with regular collections and seasonal shows for an exclusive clientele. It is the time when Europe and the United States open up their first department stores where the sale of fashion early on makes a fundamental part of commerce. In the words of William Leach, the department stores become a kind of “pleasure palaces” where the display of fashion on both mannequins and life models stage the possibilities and dreams of a more

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beautiful life.7 It is also during this period that fashion receives its first sincere analysis and evaluation as a central part of ongoing societal development and change: During the 1850s, thinkers like Charles Baudelaire discuss fashion as one of their time’s most important economic and aesthetic phenomena, and also as a direct expression of the big societal upheaval and new concepts of beauty arising in the context of modernity. In Les Fleurs de Mal (1856), and later in Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne (1863), Baudelaire observes and discusses modernity and “the evasive moment,” the latter, he claims, both characterizing the new time and serving to make it endurable. The evasive is clearly connected not only to an accelerated working and living rhythm, but can also be linked to the changeability and can strive for novelty inherent in fashion. In his short, essayistic, and at times paradoxical texts, Baudelaire describes his contemporaries and the emergence of the city—Paris—as a public stage. He sheds light on how different fashions are created and celebrates the significance of fashion, recurringly personified in the fashionable urban woman, for the progress of modernity.8 Following Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin later ascribes to fashion a central role in the development of modernism, both as an economic force and as a visual and material marker. In Das Passagen-Werk, Benjamin’s unfinished chef-d’oeuvre on Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century, he writes: For the philosopher, the main thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations. It is well known that art will often—for example, in pictures, precede the perceptible reality by years . . . Each season brings, in its newest creations, various secret signals of things to come. Whoever understands how to read these semaphores would know in advance not only about new currents in the arts but also about new legal codes, wars, and revolutions . . . Here, surely, lies the greatest charm of fashion, but also the difficulty of making the charming fruitful.9 Already a few decades before Benjamin, two prominent scholars, German sociologist Georg Simmel and Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen, had pointed at fashion’s significance for the new era, characterized by industrialization, capitalism, and a growing bourgeoisie. Simmel’s Philosophie der Mode (1905) and Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) are theoretical key works for any analysis dealing with fashion and modernity. In these two oeuvres, fashion is critically interpreted as based in social relations, class distinction, waste, and “conspicuous consumption” (the latter is understood to be the display of economic capital through not least women’s fashion).10 For later fashion theories, the function of fashion and its role in social differentiation through exuberant consumption and/or neomania has come to take a central position. Neomania has been seen as symptomatic of fashion production and fashion consumption and is discussed by Roland Barthes in Le système de la

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mode (1967), as closely linked to capitalism and its premises and conditions.11 For all of the above-mentioned authors, fashion emerges as an utterly significant and characteristic phenomenon of contemporaneity. Simultaneously the contemporary, the zeitgeist of modernity, also functioned as a striking influence on fashion and its development and constant changes. For today’s scholars in the humanities and the social sciences who meet and work under the umbrella of fashion studies as an academic field, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are thus of crucial interest. From an economic and social perspective, issues regarding the expanding fashion industry are gaining more and more attention, while from a more humanist and aesthetic perspective, the increasing medial distribution of fashion as image is playing an even bigger role in visual representations of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. How then can we understand the relationship between modernism and modernity? If following the thoughts of literature scholar Andreas Huyssen in After the Great Divide (1987), modernity can be described as an explosive and volatile relation between old and new.12 This volatile relation, though, we must understand as manifold, contradictory, and ambivalent, and its shapes and outcomes as differing and diverse. Modernity (or rather modernities) is demarcated by a dynamic tug-of-war on many different levels and in different constellations: political, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual. Common for and connecting those is the combat between the old and traditional and the new and modern. Closely linked to this combat is the struggle between the classes:  in Europe, modernity is a time of upheaval where the old aristocracy gradually lost its economic and political power to the growing middle class, that is, the bourgeoisie, while the working class rose and was politically united. Another struggle linked to the overarching tug-of-war are negotiations and struggles within the arts. These are based on, on the one hand, the conflict between conserving traditional values and academism versus the shock of the new and the transgression and breaking of established rules and, on the other hand, on the explosive relationship between fine art and popular culture, that is, between high and low culture. The feud between old and new and between high and low figures also in the fashion debate that was developing around the fin de siècle 1900. Not least the revolutionary modernization of female fashion in the spirit of emancipation created a storm of conservative reactions, and it is not surprising that the increasing mass production and consumption of fashion became discursively linked to (feminine) superficiality and moral decadence. Fearing that the new century would bring a “feminization” of society and culture, openly misogynist views were common among male thinkers and artists at the time, as seen, for example, in the work of Otto Weininger, Franz von Stuck, and Thorstein Veblen. Apparently, if the new century lurking behind the corner were a sex, it was definitely a woman.

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The mutability of fashion, its avant-gardism, and ephemeral commercial character may be seen as triggers of the fascination for fashion, as well as triggers of the suspicion that the “fine arts” held against fashion. Both in its economy and production and as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon, fashion is thus closely connected to the concepts of modernity and modernism. Not least through its etymology, fashion may be considered a conceptually inherent part of modernity and modernism, a signifier of novelty, change, innovation, or avant-garde that plays a central role within a cultural and aesthetic revolution. The view of many modernist intellectuals on fashion negotiates modern processes of industrialization and urbanization with its seductive but also terrifying effects while at the same time embracing the aesthetic revolution it brings about. The renunciation of realist mimesis and figurative motifs in fine art, its progression toward abstraction, and the dominance of line, surface, and form over narrative content both inspire and are inspired by contemporary fashion. Dress historian Anne Hollander writes, “The rise of abstract art and decorative design permitted the citizens of Western Europe to accustom their eyes to visions of themselves as shapes.” From mainly expressing and communicating a message about their bearer and her or his body, clothes could now “aim at an ideal shape of their own, to which a body was truly subordinate—a box, a cylinder, a pyramid—and they could be shown to achieve it in a painting or a fashion illustration.”13 Art and fashion are united and influence each other in their development of the dominance of form, line, and color over content. In a dispute with traditional values, modern society’s situation is to be expressed, met, and negotiated through an aesthetic quest of a partly utopian character. Fashion, from its origins inseparably linked to change, plays an important role in the modern avant-garde’s fascination for transgression and revolution. As Susanne Neuberger writes, “Inscribed into fashion is the constant progression, fashion is the prototype for an avant-garde movement.”14 The abstract visual values of fashion, its “superficiality” and ephemeral character, its devotion to form, color, and sensuality, and its urge to always be up-to-date and even precede and break against the presently viable makes it an excellent field of experiment for the period’s “total artists.” Through them, the advocators and practitioners of the Gesamtkunsterk, that is, the total artwork, fashion is uplifted to an art form of the same gravity as the traditional arts. The rapid change of fashion during the early twentieth century has many possible and general explanations: political, economic, social—all of them closely connected to the profound changes in society through the rise of urbanization, industrialization, and individualization. Yet, the clear connection between fashion and art, or rather between fashion and a variety of different arts, has another more concrete influence on the visual development of fashion: never before have art and fashion been so deeply and mutually influential and inspiring for each other as during the first decades of this century. Radu Stern refers to Gilles

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Lipovetzky when he calls fashion “a particular type of change indissolubly linked to modernity and the pursuit of the New.” And he continues: “It is precisely in the field of modernity that artists were confronted with fashion.”15 Artists and fashion designers are in lively dialogue, and several of them choose to see themselves as being both artists and fashion designers. The boundaries between art and fashion are blurred, and in the case of Henri Matisse’s theater costumes, Erté’s fashion illustrations, Fortunato Depero’s magazine covers for Vogue and Vanity Fair, or in Sonia Delaunay’s robe simultanée, fashion and art appear to be one and the same. Contemporary modern art, modernism, and its different movements and expressions are, at this point, crucial for the development and shaping of fashion, while the rapid and revolutionary changes of fashion make an imaginative source of inspiration for art. These multifaceted relations between fashion and modernism is what this book wants to investigate.

Fashion as artistic expression Already during the middle of the nineteenth century, the role of fashion within art emerges strongly as never before at the artists’ group that has been called the first modern avant-garde group, the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Aesthetic Movement. Christopher Breward writes about Oscar Wilde’s belief in aesthetic taste and fashion as superior to moral values, claiming that Wilde’s “ ‘art for art’s sake dandyism’ . . . guaranteed Aestheticism’s place at the start of a longer trajectory pf artistic provocation. It ushered a new conception of identity formation, avant-gardism and the commodity value of art that would reverberate through the twentieth century to Warhol and beyond.”16 And Radu Stern refers to the late nineteenth-century debate about fashion: It involved controversies over fundamental issues in the art theory and aesthetics  .  .  .  including the abolition of the traditional hierarchy between “major” and “minor” arts, a questioning of the difference in “status” of artists and craftsmen, and the artist’s wish to go beyond the traditional boundaries of art  .  .  .  The historical avant-garde would appropriate dress design as a privileged field in which the artist could overstep the limits of “pure” art and act directly on daily life.17 In resistance to fashion as a mass-produced, unhealthy, and superficial phenomenon within modern industrial society rises the total artist’s dream about a timelessly beautiful and liberating fashion, which is to be an indispensable part of a life permeated by art and health-giving beauty.18 Fashion, both as an artwork, but also as a means of personal self-performance, becomes an important arena where modern artists aim to realize their visions about a new society, changed

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and directed by art.19 At the fin de siècle 1900, a dynamic and visionary fashion production arises in different avant-garde movements all over Europe. From architect Henry van de Velde’s utopian ideas on clothing and Wiener Werkstätte and Gustav Klimt’s notion of the original dress (das Urkleid) to the Aesthetic Movement’s body-friendly style ideals and the Swedish reform movement with artistic inspirers such as artist and designer Karin Larsson emerges a fashion revolution and an anti-fashion that questions, denies, and finally even reforms the restrictive conformism of commercial fashion. Not least Le Corbusier uses fashion as an important reference and metaphor in his architectural theories, and in one of his obituaries he is honored as “ ‘the fashion master of his age,’ the couturier with a keen sense of the right form whose every move was immediately picked up by his followers or should we say clientele.”20 It is the late nineteenth-century idea of the total artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk, giving equal importance to all aesthetic expressions as part of an ideal new life that makes the background for modernism’s celebration of fashion as a creative hub for artistic self-expression, form experiments, and societal change. As several of the essays show, in most of the classical modernist art movements, fashion gains a pronounced and proclaimed position both as an art and as an anti-movement during a time when commercial fashion production is more and more connected to mass production and consumption. Artists active within different arts, such as painting, film, theater, music, dance, and literature, apply fashion as a means of self-expression and self-staging, as part of a total artwork, and as an individual form of artistic creation. Many of the artists who use, relate to, or create fashion during the period are total artists with diverse areas of creation. Fashion designers like Paul Poiret and Jacques Doucet communicate their fashions as and through art and promote themselves as artists. Painter Sonia Delaunay creates clothes as an extension of her simultanist painting and, in 1927, publishes her famous article “L’influence de la peinture sur la mode.”21 In 1914, artist Giacomo Balla writes his two futurist fashion manifestos—Le Vêtement masculin futuriste manifeste about male futurist dress and, only a few months, later Il vestito antineutrale:  manifesto futurista about an “antineutral” fashion where the significance of fashion, and not least the innovation of male apparel, is proclaimed as the point of departure for a universal aesthetic and political revolution. Dress utopias are also part of the art revolution proposed by Russian constructivism, where art and politics seem to merge in an anti-fashion ideal that wants to change the body of society on a direct physical level. In the world of theater and dance, the phenomenon of the Ballets Russes revolutionizes conventional forms of dance and stage art through having artists such as Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse turn ballet performances into total artworks with strikingly experimental fashion/costumes and scenography. The artistically created costumes in the productions of the Ballets Russes further inspire contemporary Parisian fashion designers, making

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the borderlines between the arts not only hard to define but oftentimes irrelevant. Accordingly, surrealist fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli can be called a sculptor of fashion, not least in her collaborations with artists such as Salvador Dalí, Jean Cocteau, and Leonor Fini. Salvador Dalí hailed her workshops as the “beating heart” of Surrealist Paris and, according to Judith Thurman, “they produced the first true hybrids of clothing and art . . . Her surreal couture . . . anticipates, by six decades, the mutant fantasies of Alexander McQueen and Martin Margiela.”22 While Man Ray’s fashion photographs might be ranked as art photography, fashion illustrations created by George Barbier, Paul Iribe, George Lepape och Erté, together with Salvador Dalí’s Vogue covers and other surrealist fashion illustrations in magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair, must be seen as part of a visual culture where art, artists, and their expressions are selfevident contributors to the total artwork of fashion magazines. Contributing artists from different movements and of nationalities are clearly inspired by the avant-garde character and alluring changeability of fashion, and they are keen on displaying their illustrations in those early fashion media while also inspiring fashion designers. Furthermore, artists now become style icons through their fashion-conscious self-performance. As Elizabeth Wilson writes: The bohemian is a complex personification of the cultural moment of this crisis [of modernity]. Emerging in the early nineteenth century as a distinct actor upon the urban stage, he dramatizes these difficulties in his person, transforming them into a way of life. He was not simply a creative individual; he created and performed an identity which rapidly became a stereotype.23 While Sonia and Robert Delaunay show off their self-designed garments as textile artworks in Paris art life, the Swedish artists couple Sigrid Hjertén and Isaac Grünewald are notorious for their daring colorful apparel on the Swedish art scene. Fashion thus had an apparent aesthetic attraction for many modernist artists, while also bearing a large potential as expression and representation of modernity and contemporary life. The essays of this collection all strive to emphasize and discuss the multifaceted significance of fashion for modernism and its arts, while they all present different cases and interpretations of fashion as an artistic expression. And while Fashion and Modernism hopes to make a contribution to the already existent research published on fashion and art, it also inscribes itself within exploratory interactions between art and fashion that have been the focus of strong interest not only for academics but also for practitioners. Many contemporary fashion designers relate to fashion from what may be called an artistic perspective, and more and more artists show an interest in fashion, as they include and problematize it in their art. To name just a few well-known examples, we may think of Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan in the fashion world, and Yayoi Kusama or

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Marina Abramovic in art. Museum exhibitions launch fashion designers as artists, and a number of international exhibitions at art museums have created conscious connections between art and fashion. For example, in 2012, the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna displayed the exhibition Reflecting Fashion about fashion in art from modernism to contemporary art, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, staged a fictive dialogue between fashion giant Miuccia Prada and surrealist Elsa Schiaparelli. That same year, Musée d’Orsay in Paris presented L’Impressionisme et la Mode and exhibited late nineteenth-century fashion garments together with paintings by impressionist artists that depicted and were fascinated by contemporary fashion. Only recently, in 2017, the Modern Museum in Stockholm included the fashion creations of Yayoi Kusama as well as her collaborative work with Louis Vuitton into a large retrospective of the artist—a clear manifestation of how fashion is being upgraded as a valid part of artistic production. The academia too has shown a long-lasting interest in the relationship between art and fashion. A lot of early fashion research has its basis in art history, along with cultural studies and ethnology. To the pioneers connecting dress-historical questions with art history belong Aileen Ribeiro and Marcia Pointon with their interpretations of historical portraiture through perspectives from fashion studies, and Christopher Breward who has described and discussed the cultural history of fashion through its visual representations.24 Not least Anne Hollander who proclaims an interpretation of fashion as image has contributed to a heightened awareness on the role of fashion in visual art. She emphasizes that the main function of western dress is to contribute to the making of a self-conscious individual image, an image linked to all other imaginative and idealized visualisations of the human body . . . Western clothing derives its visual authenticity, its claim to importance, its meaning and its appeal to the imagination, through its link with figurative art, which continually both interprets and creates the way it looks.25 Also, the relation between fashion and art, or rather fashion as art, has been repeatedly reflected upon, such as the recently published anthology Fashion and Art by Vicki Karaminas and Adam Geczy. The book with the subtitle “Critical Crossovers” wants to show common places of art and fashion instead of delimiting and defining them as separate spheres: “We begin to notice that to call fashion art’s inferior and frivolous Other is far to glib, let alone inaccurate and unfair.”26 Fashion and Modernism departs from the same perspective, and thus continues a tradition of fashion research that looks at art, that is, different types of arts. It offers a focus on the role of fashion in modernism with its sincere and open-minded interest in fashion—both in terms of couture fashion as well as its mass-produced counterpart. Our contributing co-authors touch upon different

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areas of art, though mainly the visual arts, in relation to fashion and modernism. In order to break with the Anglo-Saxon dominance that continues to characterize much research literature in fashion studies, we have invited a varied international group of scholars to write for this collection. Further, the contributing co-authors have their background within fashion, art, philosophy, literature, and cinema studies, and based on the wide-ranging themes of the essays, the book has been divided into two different, but interconnected, parts. The first part, “Fashion, Change, Modernism,” consists of essays that focus on a more overarching discussion of the role of fashion in modernism and its different expressions, as well as the political power of modernist fashion or antifashion. This part begins with the Swedish philosophy professor Sven-Olov Wallenstein’s essay “Tarde, Simmel, and the logic of fashion,” which reflects on Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel’s thoughts about the significance of fashion for the new time and its organizing force in social terms. The essay shows the importance of their thinking for the very understanding of the modern, but also for an interdisciplinary field as fashion studies with many of its roots not only in the aesthetic but in the early social sciences. Italian semiotician Patrizia Calefato’s contribution is entitled “Italian futurismo and fashion,” and it discusses the interest Italian futurism devoted to fashion. It investigates ways futurism had come to influence Italian society with the help of fashion, but also the connections that futurism had with other European avantgarde movements in the late 1930s. Finally, Calefato reflects upon how Italian futurism can be said to have provided the basis for what later came to be called the “Italian style” in fashion. German fashion scholar Ulrich Lehmann takes us back to the nineteenth century and to George Sand’s self-performance in trousers in the streets of Paris and in the drawings by Paul Gavarni. He reinterprets Sand’s “use” of this masculine garment as hardly a feminist political statement, but rather a pragmatic choice giving social advantages and a practical solution based on them being cheaper than the elegant fashion demanded for a proper feminine appearance. Lehmann thus problematizes notions of modernism as a political revolutionary movement through discussing the ambiguous position of the artist between bourgeois and avant-gardist values and showing how the male attire of George Sand rather confirmed than transgressed the gender binary in nineteenth-century fashion. Similar to many different art movements within modernism, much of French impressionist and avant-gardist film production in the 1920s would strive to create total artworks. For this, the medium of film seems to be the most adequate of all the arts: in a film, image, music, costume, fashion, dance, and painting can be brought together while cutting techniques, cinematographic, and technical aspects such as lighting, image speed, and tinting contribute to shape the unique character of the film medium. In her essay “Ménilmontant: Time, Space, and Urbanity,” film and fashion scholar Louise Wallenberg discusses French

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film impressionism through focusing on Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant (1926). Besides showing fashion as an important part of the urban visual milieu that Paris provides and for the emancipation of young women, Wallenberg pinpoints how Kirsanoff’s film makes a fantastic time document on Paris, while being intimately linked—on a narratively and a cinematographic level—to Baudelairian and Benjaminian thoughts on the rise of modernity. Contemporary to Italian futurism and French film impressionism was Russian constructivism. In her essay “Designing the Future:  Constructivist Laboratory of Fashion,” Olga Vainshtein, researcher in cultural studies at Russia State University, focuses on Russian constructivist ideas on clothes and conventional fashion—and especially on the work of Varvara Stepanova. Constructivists were opposed to fashion being fickle and volatile and strived for dress with a purpose, a kind of dress that was functional, timeless, and beautiful in its simplicity. They were in resistance to the extravagant fashions coming from Paris, a fashion that was bound to seasons, individual and exclusive. Clothes were made an integral part of a socialist society where the dividing lines between life and art were to be erased, but also they constituted an important visual part in a total artwork built on progressive technologies. Here, we may recall Siemsen’s statement about fashion as the part of art that comes closest to life. The second part of the book, “Creators and Creations,” offers five case studies dealing with specific Swedish and international artists and fashion designers and their relation to fashion as an art form, as well as specific fashion creations. In “Paris–New York 1925: Jean Patou’s ‘Advertising,’ ” British fashion historian Caroline Evans discusses French haute couture designer Jean Patou’s large interest in the modern world of advertising and its visual culture through focusing on one single dress:  through that dress, Evans examines the modern fashion designer’s conditions and transnational strategies, discussing the mythical role of French fashion in American eyes and the renewing role of American advertising for French haute couture production. Italian fashion historian Alessandra Vaccari focuses on the slit skirt as a fashionable means of self-expression in the early 1910s in her essay “The Slit Skirt: Fashion and Empathy in the Tango Era.” Vaccari shows how the slit skit was turned into a fashion icon by the dance craze in the early twentieth century, and particularly within tango—while spectacular and shocking suffrage movements and women’s emancipation were coming on strong. Here, Vaccari considers the slit skirt as “worn” fashion and, as such, as an object deeply related to vision and to the modernist experience of women’s legs on show, that is, as a key manifestation of modernism, inaugurating a discourse that lasted through the entire twentieth century. In “Look at Me! Fashion as Expression and Strategy in Isaac Grünewald’s and Sigrid Hjertén’s Painting and Self-staging,” Austrian-Swedish art historian and fashion scholar Andrea Kollnitz focuses on color and form experiments through

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the depiction of fashion in modernist paintings. At focus is Swedish expressionist artists Isaac Grünewald and Sigrid Hjertén’s use of fashion as expression and strategy in both their painting and their self-fashioning—a self-fashioning that is seen to play an important part in giving the artist couple its iconic status in the modern Swedish art world. Kollnitz here analyzes diverse pictorial genres from painted self-portraits to private photographs where Grünewald and Hjertén are displayed in conspicuously fashionable ways and show the significance of selfaesthetization through modern fashion for the male and female modernist artist’s public performance and self-identification. The second part ends with Swedish film scholar Astrid Söderbergh Widding’s case study on specific kind of clothing creator, a costume designer. In her essay “Mago’s Modernism:  Fashion and the Modern from Smiles of a Summer Night to Hour of the Wolf,” Söderbergh Widding highlights the possibly most accomplished costume designer in the modernist Swedish theater and film world, Max Goldstein—Mago, in his experimental creation of fashion and costume for Ingmar Bergman’s film Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende, 1955) and elucidates the central role of costume and fashion in the total artwork that modernist film presents. While the first part of the book deals with more general and overarching aspects of the relation between fashion, modernism, modernist movements, and modernity, the second part is focused on case studies concerning individual artists, fashions and designers, their production and expressions, bringing to the fore the diversity of activities and meanings emerging from collaborations between art and fashion. Yet, the reader is encouraged to move freely between the different essays and may, therefore, begin to read this book starting with the end. We finally hope that this collection will convince the reader about the strong interactions between fashion, modernist art, and culture and that it will communicate, as well as trigger, the fascination that has led us and our co-authors to indulge into fashion and modernism from various disciplinary positions. In concluding this introduction, we would like to emphasize that the words of Hans Siemsen from 1915, celebrating fashion as a natural link between life and art, must be seen as valid and accurate today as they were back then, more than 100 years ago.

Notes 1 S ee, for example, Catherine Grenier, Salvador Dali: The Making of an Artist (Paris: Flammarion, 2013); Judith Watt, Vogue On: Elsa Schiaparelli (London: Quadrille, 2012); Petra Timmer, Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2011); and Alston Purvis, Peter Rand, and Anna Winestein (eds), The Ballets Russes and the Art of Design (New York: Monacelli Press, 2009). A few books on modernism

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include fashion as an artistic medium among others; see, for instance, Jessica Burstein, Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012). Following fashion exhibitions at art museums, a number of catalogues touch upon the role of fashion in modernism; for example, Richard Harrison Martin, Cubism and Fashion (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998); Christopher Wilk, Modernism: Designing a New World (London: V&A Publishing, 2008); and Jane Pritchard and Geoffrey Marsch (eds), Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929 (London: V&A Publishing, 2013). 2 W hitney Chadwick, “Living Simultaneously: Sonia and Robert Delaunay,” in Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnerships, ed. Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 34. 3 See Modebranschen i Sverige. Statistik och analys. Rapport 13:03. ASFB och Modeinkubatorn. See also Lisbeth Svengren Holm, Internationell tillväxt i svenska modeföretag (Textilhö gskolan i Borå s, 2013). 4 D ue to a generous donation from the Erling-Persson Family Foundation in 2006, Stockholm University could establish a Centre for Fashion Studies providing education on basic, advanced, and doctoral levels. In 2012, Campus Helsingborg, affiliated with Lund University, opened a BA program in fashions studies, and since a few years also, Gothenburg, Uppsala, Malmö, and Umeå University offer diverse free courses in fashion studies, only to mention a few. 5 S ee Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) for an initiated discussion about the democratization of fashion. 6 S ee, for example, Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams (London: I. B. Taurus, 2003); Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans (eds), Fashion and Modernity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005); Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); and Daniel Purdy (ed.), The Rise of Fashion: A Reader (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004). 7 S ee William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1994), 4. 8 S ee especially Baudelaire’s shorter texts “Eloge du maquillage” and “Le beau, la mode et la bonheur,” in Le peintre de la vie moderne (Paris: Fayard/Mille et une nuits, 2010). 9 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 63f (orig. Das Passagen-werk [1925–39]). 10 S ee Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: MacMillan, 1899); and Georg Simmel, Philosophie der Mode (Berlin: Pan-Verlag o. J., 1905) and “Fashion,” International Quarterly 10, no. 1 (October 1904): 130–55. 11 Roland Barthes, La système de la mode (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967). 12 Andreas Huyssen, After the Modern Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1. 13 Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 336f.

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14 S usanne Neuburger (ed.), Reflecting Fashion. Kunst und Mode seit der Moderne (Wien: Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, 2012), 14. The original quote says: “Die Mode hat das ständige Vorrücken in sich eingeschrieben und liefert das Protomodell einer Avantgardebewegung.” 15 Radu Stern, Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 2 (orig. A contre-courant/Gegen den Strich, 1992). Gilles Lipovetzky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 16 C hristopher Breward, “Aestheticism in the Market Place: Fashion. Lifestyle and Popular Taste,” in The Cult of Beauty. The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900, ed. Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle Orr (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), 203. 17 Stern, Against Fashion, 3. 18 See Calloway and Orr, The Cult of Beauty. 19 S ee Radu Stern, Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003) (orig. A contre-courant/Gegen den Strich, 1992). See also Cora von Pape, Kunstkleider. Die Präsenz des Körpers in textile Kunst-Objekten des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2008). 20 R ayner Banham quoted in Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001), xxii. 21 S onia Delaunay, “L’influence de la peinture sur la mode,” in Bulletin d’Etudes Philosphiques et Scientifiques pour l’examen des tendances nouvelles (Paris, 1927). 22 J udith Thurman, “Twin Peaks,” in Schiaparelli and Prada. Impossible Conversations, ed. Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda (New York: Yale University Press), 28. 23 Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 3. 24 S ee, for example, Aileen Ribeiro, The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Ingres in Fashion: Representations of Dress and Appearance in Ingres’s Images of Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Clothing Art: The Visual Culture of Fashion 1600–1914 (London: Yale University Press, 2017); and Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteen-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1998); Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 2012). 25 Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, xiv. 26 A dam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, Fashion and Art (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 1.

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PART ONE

FASHION, CHANGE, MODERNISM

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1 TARDE, SIMMEL, AND THE LOGIC OF FASHION Sven-Olov Wallenstein Translated by Rune Engebretsen

Introduction The feeling of a thing being detached from its place, of a separation between the inner and the outer, and of everything solid being volatilized, is one of the basic experiences of early modernity. Fashion assumes a central role in this complex: At once a threat and a promise, it constitutes one of the concepts used in modern esthetic theory to describe one’s own shortcomings and breakthroughs. Within the theory of architecture, and in reflecting on the relation of the arts to the city, we first encounter an analysis of fashion’s logic as a loss of substance, soon, however, to be developed into a theory about a new relationship between the inner and the outer. When, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the social sciences assume shape, this experience has been incorporated into the very substance of the theory. In Gabriel Tarde and Georg Simmel, for instance, we encounter an understanding of the social dimension where fashion takes on an organizing role. In Tarde, this occurs in terms of a logic of imitation that is at once the birth and threatening catastrophe of social life; in Simmel, in terms of a process of socialization through which individuals and groups attain a balance between the tendency toward individualizing and universalizing.

Architecture’s dress One of the early telling factors in this story about the apprehensiveness of the modern in facing the splitting of forms is the controversy about “the significance of style” that arose in Germany. It was inaugurated in 1828, with Heinrich Hübsch posing the question: “In which style shall we build?”1

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Style appearing as an open question can be seen as symptomatic of a historical transformation. In the field of architecture, this became manifest in the institutional divide that, at the threshold to the 1800s, arose between the old Academy and the new polytechnic institutes. The former held to a theory rooted in a tradition of beauty, order, and proportion, whereas the latter launched a new proto-functionalistic program based on the science of engineering. Initially, the issue of style may seem to have been of relatively limited scope. Yet it was a matter of whether the entire Vitruvian and classical canon, transmitted since the Renaissance, could be integrated with the newly gained expertise in engineering and industrial technology, or whether it simply had to be abandoned. Was there a style capable of expressing the new technique? And if so, could it restore to architecture the ability to express its era, even as architecture went through the same phase of uncertainty as the other genres of art, albeit more intensively? The curious hold that Greek and Roman heritage continued to have on this time period became evident in its very idea of “style.” It still had to be conceptualized via Classical Antiquity, and the terminology for discussing and debating it was drawn from traditional academe. Two years before Hübsch posed his question, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, an architect of somewhat greater renown, had anticipated it. In his travels in England, he encountered the great landmarks of the industrial revolution, observing their effect on the city and the landscape. Upon returning to Germany, he asked himself when and how “our time” was going to engender its own style. Would it be able to express its own experience, while simultaneously taking its place within the style of Classical Antiquity? Finding the emphasis on speed and novelty in contemporary life a risky matter, Schinkel linked this feeling of modernity to fashion, which became an expression for loss of place and natural order. Upon his return to Berlin in 1826, he wrote about “the new time making everything easier; no longer believing in anything permanent, it has lost its sense of the monument,” whereas architecture, the art of building, “first and foremost requires repose.” And he adds:  Woe to the times in which everything turns into motion, even that which should be the most enduring, to wit, the art of building, where the word fashion is hawked about within architecture, where forms, material, and every tool are considered but playthings to be handled at pleasure, where one is prone to try everything, since nothing is in its place and consequently nothing appears to be required.2 The issue of style’s place within the modern would later merge with the theory about “the tectonic,” that is, about the connection between the inner and the outer. This issue was given a more specific slant. The question of how the esthetic forms can retain their validity in the machine age becomes a question that turns on the relation between body and dress as a basic esthetic paradigm.3

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Schinkel’s and Hübsch’s question was subsequently carried forward by Karl Bötticher (who also succeeded Schinkel as professor in Berlin) and given programmatic impetus in his lecture on “The Principle of Hellenic and Germanic Architecture with a View to Its Application for Today’s Architecture” (1846). Bötticher here analyzes the esthetic predicament of his time in terms of the tension between Kernform, core form (technology), and Kunstform, art form (tradition). As for the possibility of a future style, he states that it could be attained only through a novel synthesis of the classical and the modern that would justify both elements. He had already outlined the rationale for this in his main work, Die Tektonik der Hellenen (The Tectonics of the Greeks), in which he examines the relation between the constructive statics in the Greek temple and its external form.4 Bötticher views Greek architecture essentially as a language where the forces, motions, and conflicts of statics are esthetically expressed. But his concern is not only historiographical, it is one of overcoming the contemporary antithesis between style and construction, that is, overcoming the very distinction that to Schinkel could be summed up in the concept of fashion. To the Greeks, according to Bötticher, there is, on the contrary, an inner connection, a “juncture” (Junktur) between the “sheath” (Hülle) and the core, and to them style is therefore a necessary expression, not an external choice. In agreement with Johann Winckelmann, but also with an entire metaphysical tradition going back to Plato, Bötticher defines architectonic form as based on a “body image” (Körperbild), where the inner and the outer meld in an organic union of nature and construction. But, according to Bötticher, this body form is intrinsically double:  Over against an inner constructive Kernform (core form)— which, by virtue of a “naked body undressed of its decorative attributes, is fully capable of expressing all architectonic functions”—stands an external and so-to-speak “dressed” Kunstform (art form), an esthetic manifestation that as such is architectonically superfluous but at the same time also has the task of showing the core in a transfigured and clarified way. Tectonics, says Bötticher, can therefore be characterized as that which actualizes the body image in its external augmentation by elevating the construction to art. The dress makes the body what it ought to be from the beginning but is incapable of presenting in its nakedness. What is presently lacking in the modern is, in other words, the intermediation, the conjuncture, that is supposed to unify the inner and the outer in supplementary contiguity, with the outer actualizing the inner and thereby making it the inner it should have been in the first place. This supplementarity would soon turn out to be the condition for what we perceive as artistic truth, fidelity, and integrity, something that Adolf Göller would point out in a lecture from 1887, with the telling title of “Was ist Wahrheit in der Architektur?” (“What Is Truth in Architecture?”). The outer “style sleeve” (Stilhülse), states Göller, must express the inner “core,” making it sensate and palpable as a phenomenon, and truth is the harmonious relation between these two aspects.

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In Göller, we see the concept of esthetics and beauty receiving a twist that would become decisive for developments in the early 1900s: on the one hand, truth is no longer defined via a system of representation but as direct fidelity, an expressivity that connects the inner and the outer, and does so by showing the structural elements inherent in the art form. In the case of architecture, this is about the relation between the forces (vectors) in the building, the texture of the material, etc. With the art of painting, it is about pigment, texture, brushstroke, and so on. Everything that in an earlier day was considered to be subordinate to the forms of representation and their stylistic hierarchies now comes to stand out as expressive in its own right. On the other hand, there is simultaneously the gnawing suspicion that this material expressivity is equally as much a rhetoric— that truth, regardless of whether it pertains to the system of representation or to the materiality of the construction, always is a play between what we see and what is hidden, and that all the metaphors we use to express this relation will be irremediably ambiguous. The most developed and complex study of the tectonic concepts in this early phase is found in Gottfried Semper, in his theory about clothing or dressing (Bekleidung), where the dialectical implications become even clearer, as does the connection with the body expressed through a system of representative layers. Semper speaks of a building’s shell as “a dress,” and plays directly on the association between the German words for “wall” (Wand) and “garment” (Gewand).5 To Semper, it is textile, its ornamentation and veiling, that becomes the paradigm for the “wall” instead of the actual tectonic function, which he ascribes to “the brick wall” (Mauer). The dress conceals the structure while simultaneously giving it prominence, allowing it to come the fore by reminding the viewer of that which lies behind, in the interplay between the signifying (the shell, the veil) and the signified (the body, the structure). Buildings, says Mark Wigley in analyzing this aspect of Semper, are like clothes. They “are worn rather than simply occupied.”6 Semper’s theories aim at redefining the very question of architecture’s origin, and he wants to demonstrate how it has evolved from technology rather than from reflection on ideal forms—that is, from the “canon” and its entire attendant architectonic-philosophical culture. This canon was, for example, still valid to Bötticher, whereas Semper actually removes it altogether from the agenda. But the complexity of the new dressing metaphor also shows how the relationship between the inner and outer, tectonics and surface, appear more uncertain than ever because of the breakdown of the classical order. As Fritz Neumeyer has pointed out, the concept of the tectonic is always suspended in the space between what we see and what we know, and the seeing has a legitimacy of its own, a history of its own, that does not always keep in step with the development of constructive thought: the tectonic is thus more about an image of construction than about the construction itself, and once this image has started to detach

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itself from its “juncture,” it gains in freedom in step with the fading reference to the underlying truth of the body. As demonstrated by Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina, the association to clothes and fashion makes its presence fully known in early modernism. To Adolf Loos, men’s fashion is the ideal: a controlled calm surface, the suit that is visibly invisible. In contrast to Loos, Le Corbusier takes an interest in women’s fashion. In Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (1930), he speaks of how “woman has reformed her ensemble”; she has “cut off her hair, her dress, and her sleeves” and “seduces us with her charming pleasures which the fashion designers have obviously made the most of.”7 The men, on the other hand, find themselves in “a sorrowful state” with their starched collars. The analogy to the modern architectonic style that Corbusier had advocated seven years earlier in Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture) is evident:  the modern body with its sportiness and effectiveness, with its esprit nouveau, requires new clothes as well as a new architecture. Here, too, the body is present under architecture’s shell as a guarantor for the external having a ground, a reference. But which body is this? Is it formed by its external dress, is the sheath simply supposed to conceal, or is it supposed to reflect (mirror), express, or outright contribute to forming the internal? On this point, Loos and Corbusier make a complementary pair: Loos separates the inner from the outer, accepting their total dissociation, whereas Corbusier, at least at first sight, demands a thoroughgoing expressiveness, where the inner is to be expressed without remainder in the outer, even as the thought hovers ever close at hand that the inner can become itself only through this particular modern expression. With both of them, there is perhaps a deeper disquietude (though expressed in contrasting terms) that the body, as that which is to be expressed, is actually an effect of the garment, that precisely by being applied in certain way, the mask/the veil engenders the thought of an underlying substrate—that every unmasking is but another masking, at the same time as the shell/the surface produces its own depth without therefore lapsing into a mere lie or a sham.8

Fashion and modernity The logic of fashion—which the architects see in terms of a spatial, material, and structural divide between the inner and the outer, core form and art form— appears to Baudelaire as a basically temporal experience, where the eternal intersects the transitory in an intensified feeling of the now. In a series of texts published under the title Le peintre de la vie modern (The Painting of Modern Life) (written in 1859 and published in 1863 as a serial in Le Figaro), Baudelaire maintains that the central feature of modernity is, on the one hand, to be situated on the boundary of one’s age, at its outermost point, but, on the other hand, to

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escape it in the direction of another order, which is eternal beauty: “He [the artist] seeks something that we allow ourselves to call modernity (la modernité), for there is no better word for the idea at stake. To him it is about freeing the poetic content, in fashion, in the historical situation, about evoking the eternal in the contingent . . . Modernity is the passing, the fugitive, the accidental, half of the art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”9 To Baudelaire there is a crucial relationship between la modernité and la mode, and it consists in a continual alternation expressive of the very intersection between time and eternity. In the modern work, the now is a starting point precisely in continually escaping us because of fashion’s change, while it simultaneously, through this very desubstantializing of the given, may open a way to the eternal values. The fugitive and the eternal hang together, and only conjointly can they constitute a ground for beauty, which, without this inner conflict and movement, would be merely a-temporal, that is, deprived of its temporal power and thus incapable of affecting us. The descriptions Baudelaire offers of the modern painter’s life show how this doubleness permeates the painter’s relation to the surrounding world. Proceeding from, in our day, the little-known illustrator Constantin Guys, Baudelaire analyses the modern painter as having to handle a new type of suddenness. The paradigmatic form of this suddenness is the unexpected encounter arising from the artist’s plunging himself into the crowd and getting lost in it, as it were, only later to recreate and recast his impressions: The crowd is his element, just as the air is the element of the bird and the water that of the fish. His suffering and his creed are to embrace the big crowd. To the consummate flâneur, to the impassioned observer, it is an endless pleasure merely to mingle in the sea of people, the perplexity, the movement, the fleeting, and the infinite . . . The one who is in love with life in general thus enters the crowd as if it were an infinite source of electricity. This can also be compared with a mirror that is just as vast as is the crowd, or with a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which at every move reflects life’s multifariousness and the shifting charm in all these elements. It is the insatiable self of the non-self, in every moment reflecting and expressing the lover in images more vivid than life itself, which is ever mutable and escaping.10 The painter of modern life throws himself into the world so that the boundary between the subjective and the objective is blotted out in a movement of ascent. But then evening comes, everyone goes home to his or her place, and the artist begins to transform his impressions in a manner that detaches them from their ephemeral origin and gives them their eternal value:  “Now when others are sleeping, he bends over his working table and casts the same glance on the paper sheet that he recently attached to the things,” which are now “reborn on

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paper and more than true to nature, beautiful and more than beautiful.” “The phantasmagoria has been extracted from nature” in the “imposed idealizing that is the outcome of a childlike awareness.”11 Both of these movements—the surrender and the withdrawal—complement each other in the same way as the fleeting and the eternal constitute reciprocal conditions within modernity and beauty:  the fleeting and the ephemeral are the outer layer (Hülle) without which the inner essence would remain abstract, lifeless, and incapable of moving us. If the city with its boulevards has been transmuted into an image, into a continual spectacle in the process of becoming, with the variability of fashion producing an electrified multiplicity of impressions, then this must in turn be matched by the artist’s subjective reflection and his imaginative processing that elevates us above mere mechanical reproducibility, which Baudelaire sees exemplified in photography. The attention, the focused seeing, is possible only in retrospect, on the basis of an initial distraction, with the sense impressions being received in an unsorted manner. Walter Benjamin’s subsequent reading of Baudelaire would expressly lend emphasis to the first element (the surrender), in which the unexpected encounter, the shock, breaks through the defensive and reflective capacity of the subjective individual, and in which the photographic element, the unmanageable closeness and force of the image, is placed at the center rather than the reflective reworking of it.12 In Johanna Drucker’s precise formulation:  “Guy’s images inscribe the artistic subject in the image as part of the process of revision, elimination, inversion, and transformation. To Benjamin, the subjective function is inverted— the subject produces not only an image but is himself produced by it. The image is an instrument that creates awareness rather than being its result.”13 Baudelaire’s artist wants to keep his traditional position, but under pressure from the new urban experience, the new visual technologies, and a social life increasingly contingent upon fashion’s mobility which makes every form obsolete as soon as it appears, the charge of reproducing, telling, and configuring comes more and more in conflict with the means available for doing this. It is therefore no coincidence that Baudelaire chooses to have the painters of modern life be represented by an illustrator, such as Guys, whose cursory and light style seems to register the nervousness in the variegated shifts of social life. Here we find an attentiveness to fleeting details that, in turn, calls for a suspension of traditionally bequeathed esthetic hierarchies. This was a suspension that as yet was seminal only within contemporary painting, and appeared to have been unfamiliar to Baudelaire.14 In this way, Baudelaire becomes a transitional figure where an older cast of poets and artists collide with a new realism and gradually also with a symbolist doctrine about art for its own sake. If we assume Benjamin’s perspective, we can see how these incongruities retrospectively can be traced back to Baudelaire’s position as the first but involuntary analyst of capitalism’s new configuration,

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with the commodity form infiltrating the very substance of esthetic expressivity. This allows Benjamin to view the respective positions of the Baudelairean dandy and flâneur—the former participating actively in the transformations of the elegant life (fashionableness), the latter noting them and attempting to extract a perception or an image from the volatility—not only as two different figures echoing romanticism but also as an image of the artist’s new alienated situation, caught between aristocratic self-affirmation and a drive to plunge into the new mass movements. Baudelaire’s ambivalence makes him, in a certain sense, a modernist against his own will. His flâneur glance is alienated; he stands on the threshold to the big city and the bourgeoisie—he fights on “the side of the a-socials,” says Benjamin, Baudelaire’s writing drawing “its strength from the rebellious pathos that dominates this stratum.”15 The battle Baudelaire staged in his text were doomed in advance, but that is also why they become anamorphic images or picture puzzles of sorts where we are able to see the old and the new colliding. This view comports with the passages that Benjamin interprets as dialectical images of nonsynchronicity of the age, in which the modern role of the artist receives its first distinctive expression, with all its ambivalence vis-à-vis the new social sphere and its accelerating consumer logic.

Tarde and imitation Baudelaire’s experience of the crowd, the masses, as a gigantic reservoir of electric energy, in the face of which the artist transforms himself into a mirror or a kaleidoscope, would soon become a fundamental constituent of sociology. This crowd is at once fluid and ungraspable, and equipped with potential substantiality. Its dissolving force becomes a threat to be warded off, yet the processes forming it simultaneously give rise to the highest modes of intellectual abstraction and ideality. Gabriel Tarde is one of the first to formulate this theoretically. To him, fashion as such is not, to be sure, a central concept. It is rather found in a diffused way in his entire theory, in which imitation is the term binding the constitutive parts together, not least in his ideas about the crowd. To Tarde, the crowd is not only the outcome of a process of individualization following the dissolution of an organismic society; it is not a mere matter of a Gesellschaft (society) succeeding a Gemeinschaft (community); it introduces another dimension outside of the contrast between the individual and the collective, with such concepts assuming only secondary effects. Rather than being an aggregate of given entities, the crowd is the outcome of unpredictable micro-happenings; it emerges and crystalizes through the random motions of its pre-subjective particles—but once imitation, running from one point to the next, has assumed shape and the

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process been set in motion, it can no longer be stopped. As Leibniz, Tarde’s great source of inspiration, has pointed out, the wave consists of innumerable small water drops, but when encountered at a certain speed, it turns hard as a rock and shatters the boat.16 Attention is occasionally called to Leibniz’s influence on Tarde. In a text such as Monadologie et sociologie, we see how he sketches a whole Leibnizian program for the social sciences, beginning with “small inklings” and their differential relations, which then later rise to encompass society in its entirety. “Every case in point is a society, every phenomenon is a social fact,” writes Tarde, without society and the social dimension thereby remaining what they always were.17 The prospect of this kind of new reading has reinstated Tarde on the charts of sociology’s nascent days, with some now even speaking of a “neotardianism.”18 He was long totally overshadowed by Durkheim and the objectivistic theory of “social facts,” his focus on the individual and the “mental-spiritual” making him appear as a dilettante. Tarde’s specific observations could certainly be entertaining enough, but being largely literary and unsystematic, his texts were dismissed as a mere offshoot in the social sciences. (As we shall see, George Simmel became the target of similar criticism). The return of Tarde has, however, entailed that his work is being read in a way that cuts transversely through individual psychology and system theory, and his thoughts on “micro-sociology” for deviant behavior and small displacements have proven to be highly efficacious. In his analysis of how acts are propagated by imitative processes and how transformations are initiated by inventions of “small people,” Tarde ascribes the locus of the essential happenings to a level of difference and repetition, with the point of departure being in little gestures and postures, minimal turns in conversation and use of language, which then later meld together in what we call autonomous subjects with their beliefs and habits. “Let us not forget,” writes Tarde in Les lois de limitation (1890), “that every invention and every discovery consists of interferences in somebody’s mind, engendered by older ideas that generally have been handed down by others.”19 Based on this broad concept of imitation, he asks the question: “What is society?” and unhesitatingly answers: “Society is imitation.”20 Imitation has its own logic; it is the wellspring of authority and power: “Three out of four times we obey someone before we see him being obeyed by others.” Imitation shapes our social relations, but is already at work as a contractual and differential movement through which the individual comes into existence; we exist by virtue of an encounter between “imitative streams” that crisscross the social space. If individuals are formed by interference and convergence of repetitions, then something similar can be said about institutions: certain traits are repeated, they become successful and can be incorporated into current practices, which in turn consist of deposited repetitions. Tarde underscores the weight of the urban centers with their intensified mode of spatial interaction: they are “the aristocracy

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of place” that have assumed the role previously played by the courts. Paris, writes Tarde, “undoubtedly rules the provinces more royally and more Orientally than the courts ever ruled the city.”21 In the spatial order of modernity, however, the “imitative rays” propagate horizontally more than vertically, which explains why the phenomenon of fashion has become so central. To Tarde, fashion is basically a mode of hypersociality, and it is therefore also—in a twist already anticipated in Baudelaire, but more acutely presented in Tarde—at once the most elemental expression of the social and its destruction.22 This tension has its origin in the two seedbeds of society, which Tarde sees in the family and the crowd or “the herd” (la foule).23 In the family, imitation has its origin in the father; in the crowd, it originates in the leader. The family preserves customs and manners, whereas the crowd has a revolutionary potential, precisely because its imitative putty is based on fashion’s ephemeral quality, which always promises something new. The family has its base in the countryside, the crowd in the city. The crowd, writes Tarde in a passage that highlights its menacing aspect, is an “aggregate of heterogeneous elements, unknown to one another.” It depends on a “spark of passion” that “electrifies” a “confused crowd” so that the “clamour becomes a voice,” “sheer animal, a wild beast without name that moves toward its goal with irresistible force.”24 Tarde’s analysis of the crowd exhibits deep ambivalence and apprehensiveness, something he has in common with most of the early social theorists. The crowd is a constant source of apprehensiveness, also when it comes to organizing the urban space and the possibility of controlling unpredictable movements and concentrations.25 It is not accidental that Tarde’s theories principally evolve from his criminological investigations. In these, he concludes that certain bizarre crimes, which appear inexplicable in terms of the perpetrator’s individual motive, seem to spread through society like ripples of water, as if they were fads.26 On the other hand, he notes that the perfection of society, which at least has to be theoretically conceivable, has a form that is structurally analogous with, and outright inseparable from, the crowd, that is to say, inseparable from “an intensive concentration of urban life” in which seminal ideas “are immediately transmitted to all prudent people in the entire city.”27 In order to distinguish good sociality from bad sociality, Tarde in this context emphasizes the role of the family and the father and, further, that imitation by way of custom has to regulate and imbed the amorphous imitations of the crowd, so that the “voice” emerging from “the din,” so to speak, always will retain an echo of the master’s voice. Only this way can the crowd become a public, a collective based on purely mental-spiritual and intellectual interaction. A  seed to such rational publics consists of modern newspaper readers, says Tarde. To cultivate such readers is the real objective of modernity, even if they always remain a “potential crowd” susceptive to lapsing into the hurly-burly interaction of physical space and palpable bodies.28 It is consequently not a matter of preventing

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crowds from forming, which would run counter to the nature of society, but rather of preventing publics from lapsing into crowds and of encouraging crowds to become publics. “Extensive research” remains to be done in this area, states Tarde. The rediscovery of his thought in present-day research on the formation of fluid and easily affected collectives in social media indicates that perhaps not until now has one come to understand the perspectives he opened.29

Simmel and fashion Georg Simmel is one of the central figures in the first phase of modern sociology. A reputable intellectual and widely read during his lifetime, he and his work in social theory were nevertheless long overshadowed by the likes of systematic theoretician Max Weber. In that regard, the historical reception of his work partially parallels that of Tarde’s work falling under the shadow of Durkheim. In more recent times, however, Simmel’s writings with their detailed, impressionistically essayistic, and eclectic approach have gained new ground and relevance. That pertains in particular to his analyses of the significance of the metropolis and money in modernity, with observations that in many respects are reminiscent of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.30 In his central work, Philosophie des Geldes (The Philosophy of Money) (1900), Simmel analyses, in the wake of Marx, the abstraction that results from the generalization of monetary economics. In having an absolute means be converted to an absolute end in itself, “the coin becomes God.” The bank replaces the church as the hub of society in such a way that the whole sphere of sensuousness and particularity now must be thought in relation to the monetary sphere, even if certainly never totally identified with it. To Simmel, Marx’s model partially has to be reevaluated, inasmuch as base and superstructure form a circular causality or, rather, a system of relations and “endless alternations” with no level being primary. In his introduction to Philosophie des Geldes, he says that the purpose is to build a level under historical materialism in such a way that one holds on to the incorporation of economic life among the causes of spiritual culture, but in such a way that these economic forms are themselves identified as the result of deeper-lying evaluations and tendencies with psychological, indeed, metaphysical presuppositions. To the praxis of the cognitive process this must imply a development in endless alternation:  every interpretation of an ideal formation with the aid of an economic formation must be followed by the requirement of the latter, in turn, being comprehended on ideal grounds, for which one again must find the general economic basis, and so on ad infinitum.31

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To Simmel, as in the case of Weber’s “disenchantment,” this is, however, a process of differentiation along evolutionary lines; he does not see it as a basic contradiction that will with necessity end in a revolutionary recasting. In a subsequent essay, “The City and Spiritual Life” (1903), Simmel understands this process of abstraction as a “spiritualization” of all societal relations, which will bring about a new type of subjectivity with a different “nervous life,” a “blasé” attitude, and restlessness.32 The city thereby becomes a new milieu where, in the face of the increasing influence of the “objective spirit” and the social institutions, the individual’s struggle to maintain his or her autonomy brings about a new sensibility. In Baudelaire, we saw an evolving connection between fashion and modernity, in which fashion stands for the fleeting features of the time, while simultaneously unlocking a new understanding of the two aspects of the aesthetic:  on the one hand, the accidental and the fleeting, on the other hand, the eternal and the classical, which in Baudelaire are pivoted in a precarious balance. In the subsequent generation of sociological theorizers, we find an analysis of fashion that sooner sees it as a complex process of individuation and imitation. In the modern urban culture, this process has certainly accelerated, but as pointed out in Tarde’s analysis, it actually characterizes all societies. To Simmel, the aesthetic expressions are largely interwoven with the abstraction process of modern capitalism in which substances and essences become relations, and fashion can be seen as a typical expression of this. At the same time, he is influenced by the philosophy of life, notably in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Bergson. At an early stage, this made him a target of criticism from Marxist quarters, but it has also prompted present-day interpreters to see in him (as in Tarde) the beginning of a theory about the individual as a bundle of changeable and dynamic relations rather than a given substance.33 “The Philosophy of Fashion” (1905) is one of the first attempts in the early days of social science to create a systematic theory about fashion.34 Unlike most of his predecessors, Simmel does not view fashion as a menacing loss of meaning that must be compensated for by reverting to the eternal. He simply considers it the process through which aesthetic values and value systems are engendered and transformed in a given society. In this regard, he is close to sharing in certain features of Tarde’s analysis of imitation. As with Baudelaire, fashion is still a figure of instability, but now as a key to society’s evolutionary dynamics, whereas the eternal remains only as a rhetorical figure within each element; it is this aspect of stability that allows the fluctuating to assert itself, like the relationship of figureground in painting, which at this time received new emphasis in the emergent abstraction. To Simmel, as with Tarde, existence is a relation between various forces, each one with a tendency to go beyond the given phenomenon, which is also constitutive of the human being and is what provides depth to a person’s

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existence. These forces can, however, not be studied on their own, but only by way of how they assume shape in particular contrasts. From the physiological to the emotional life, from societal organization to the intellectual level (philosophies, religions, politics, art), there is a tension between the universal and the individually differentiated. This a battle and a struggle that gives movement to life and also becomes basic to the phenomenon of fashion, which, as it were, realizes this dynamic on the most abstract and ideal level.35 The “face” of fashion makes allowances for individuals to displace this tension to an outer layer and thereby to retain some of its inner substance. In a functional context, it, therefore, essentially plays the role of Vergesellschaftigung, that is, socialization. Imitation mediates the two tendencies, granting occasional peace and identity with the group in protecting the individual from the compulsion to differentiate oneself through a risky choice—it is “a child begotten by thought and thoughtlessness” (509). Fashion’s most general logic is thereby hemmed in as a first step: it imitates a pattern and guarantees that the individual follows the universal, while simultaneously enabling a differentiation by having today’s fashion appear unique in relation to yesterday’s fashion and fostering a sense of individuality, and in this way joining the two tendencies in a functional whole. More specifically, fashion serves to distinguish one group from another and to establish an inner cohesiveness—“equally dressed people behave in relatively the same manner,” states Simmel—to which any attribute can be ascribed.36 Fashion has no objective or purposeful rationale, not when it comes to criteria for beauty either, even if it sometimes incorporates such criteria. It rather rests exclusively on the “formally social,” which causes it to be experienced as the most provocative within the intellectual disciplines, morality, and politics, where objectivity ought to be decisive.37 This differentiation follows a class pattern: new fashion is the prerogative of the upper classes, and when it begins to spread downward, the elites change their attributes, and the game begins anew. This relation is especially fluid and dynamic, both in society as whole and in the upper crust. That is in part because imitation within the field of fashion has a more volatile character and is open to everyone, and in part because the merchandise is available only to those who have money, whereas more substantial factors (such as, education or cultural breeding) require a considerably larger investment of time. Even in societies without this kind of social stratification, the same process of differentiation is found, albeit on a horizontal plane and at a lower intensity. The impact of fashion increases with society’s differentiation, and decreases when it is more homogeneous; and the “nerves” of the modern metropolis demands extremely differentiated stimulation, a constant nervous activity of interpretation and emission of differentiating signs.38 Fashion belongs to a certain group and cannot by definition be generic. That is why it always moves toward its own abrogation and has, in terms that are

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akin to Baudelaire’s, “the unique enticement that belongs to the boundary, the enticement of being at once the beginning and the end, the enticement of the new and simultaneously of the transient.”39 This provides fashion with a specific and intensive feeling of the now, a contemporaneity at the demarcation of the past and the future, whose transience makes it particularly desirable, but for that very reason also possible to discard. The break with the past makes us focus more and more on the now, and as this permeates society, fashion expands from an external attribute to passing muster with all aesthetic, theoretical, and moral convictions. On the individual level, fashion fosters a special structure of desire that combines the general and the particular, a “refreshing mixture of approval and envy.” And envy links us to what we cannot attain, implying that, in an imaginary alliance, I  am not absolutely being denied something, it is merely due to an incidental fate that always can be summarily dismissed.40 Deeper down, in the registry of individuality, fashion’s logic brings about special personages, such as the “fashion slave,” whose desire is to drive the tendency of fashion to an extreme: “when pointed shoes are in fashion, he has his shoes end in lance points; when high collars are in fashion, his will reach the ears; when it is in fashion to attend scholarly lectures, it will be impossible to find him at any other place.”41 He considers himself to be the spearhead of individuality, but he is just as determined by the dialectics of the individual and universal as is his counterpoint—the one who purposely dresses in an unmodern way, the association for resisting associations, and atheism practiced as an intolerant and fanatical religion. On one level, Simmel suggests that this social logic historically predisposes women to fashion after allowing individualization that would otherwise be reserved to men. It works like a vent that allows the realization of needs that are blocked on other fronts, whereas the total indifference to fashion is a specifically male trait contingent upon a stronger societal standing. In this way, fashion can compensate for the individual’s frailty, but it also offers a form for the totally marginalized, a desperate aesthetic of the rebellious and the lost. This was seen already in Baudelaire—the “demimonde” who in his “idiosyncratically rootless form of existence” feels hate toward everything that is institutional, and points to an “aesthetic form of the destructive drive that seems to belong to all pariahexistences insofar as they are not totally enslaved.”42 Even within the individual soul, these contrasts are at play. Fashion has its locus on the periphery of the personality; but through its contrastive effect, it also gives to the self its sense of constancy. And that is exactly why it can be used as a masque: blind obedience in the face of social conformity can conceal an inner richness and be a means of preserving the personality (Simmel points to Goethe as an example), which is one of “the highest and subtlest of triumphs: the enemy himself is turned into a servant.”43 Like all “mass demonstrations,” this

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can also protect us from shame through feeling part of a collective, easing our responsibility of decisions we should not have made as individuals; the extravagant and shameless acts, but also crimes, are made possible precisely because they are done by many. The rhythm in the changes of one’s own life is subject to this fluctuation, as in the hastily appearing and disappearing mania when faced with a particular kind of behavior, which one subjects oneself to within the norms of the group. This is, for example, borne out in our use of language, in the locutions that are utilized for everything with the aim of gaining control. To respect the individuality of things actually demands the utmost power and concentration, whereas doing violence to them is natural, and is as spontaneous as it is illusory and short-lived. To this could be added (which Simmer does not do at this point, even if it follows from his argument): the shame and the discomfort in the face of a fashion that has just turned obsolete, reminding us of what we have just left behind, points to the futility of the present.44 In this way, fashion brings together the main contrasting tendencies of the soul, something that imparts intensity on the personal level, just as the opposing tendencies in society imparts its social energy. The acceleration of fashion coincides in a general way with the growth of the third estate, which sets the other strata in motion and introduces a new phase in the history of imitative processes. This pertains also to the price of products and their general availability, while simultaneously entailing a subjection to a coercive power—“for humans need an ephemeral tyrant when they have discarded the enduring and absolute ones.”45 The temporal figure of fashion, at long last, gathers all these paradoxes of modernity:  it is always there, but its particular content is necessarily fleeting, something that guarantees its eternal perpetuity: “The fact that the alternation does not itself alternate gives each object in which it attains expression a psychological glimmer of permanence.”46

Notes 1 F or a presentation on this development, see Werner Oechslin, Stilhülse und Kern: Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos und der evolutionäre Weg zur modernen Architektur (Style Sheath and Core: Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos and the Evolutionary Path to Modern Architecture) (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1994). The German debate on style is collected and commented on in Wolfgang Herrmann (ed.), In What Style Should We Build? The German Debate on Architectural Style (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1992). 2 Q uoted in Fritz Neumeyer, “Tektonik: Das Schauspiel der Objektivität und die Wahrheit des Architekturschauspiels” (“Tectonics: The Stage Play of Objectivity and the Truth of Architecture’s Stage Play”), in Über Tektonik in der Baukunst (On Tectonics in Architecture), ed. Hans Kollhoff (Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1993), 59, my emphasis.

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3 W hen Fritz Neumeyer discusses to what extent the body in our day can be retained as a basic reference in architecture, he formulates the task of tectonics in a typically defensive way as: “not having the vanishing body stand out once again, yet keeping it from disappearing altogether,” in “Tektonik: Das Schauspiel der Objektivität,” 59. 4 S ee Karl Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen (The Tectonics of the Greeks), 2 vols (Berlin: Ernst & Korn, 1844–52). For an analysis of Bötticher’s program, see Hartmut Meyer, Die Tektonik der Hellenen: Kontext und Wirkung der Architekturtheorie von Karl Bötticher (The Tectonics of the Greeks: The Context and Effect of Karl Bötticher’s Theory of Architecture) (Stuttgart: Axel Menges, 2004). 5 Gottfried Semper, Die vier Elemente der Baukunst: Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Baukunde (The Four Elements of Architecture: A Contribution to the Comparative Study of Building) (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1851). For an English translation, see Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 6 Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 12. 7 Le Corbusier, Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Details on the Current State of Architecture and Urban Planning) (Paris: Crès, 1930), 106. 8 S ee Beatriz Colomina, Privat och offentligt: Modern arkitektur som massmedium (Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media), trans. Catharina Gabrielsson (Lysekil: Pontes, 1999), 39–43 (on the mask), 316–18 (on fashion); and Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses, notably 59–85. The original English version of Colomina’s publication is Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). 9 Charles Baudelaire, Det moderna livets målare (The Painter of Modern Life), trans. Hans Johansson, in Baudelaire, Konstkritik (Lund: Ellerström, 2006 [orig. Le peintre de la vie moderne, 1863); quoted from Sara Danius, Cecilia Sjöholm, and SvenOlov Wallenstein (eds), Aisthesis: Estetikens historia, del 1 (Aisthesis: The History of Aesthetics, part I) (Stockholm: Thales, 2012), 373. 10 Danius et al., Aisthesis, 378. 11 Ibid.,  380. 12 S ee Walter Benjamin, “Om några motiv hos Baudelaire,” in Bild och dialektik, trans. Carl-Henning Wijkmark (Staffanstorp: Cavefors, 1969 [orig. 1940]), 121ff. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. and intro. by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 155–200. Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire gave rise to material that was as copious as it was fragmentary, with the German editions still offering but a partial overview of it. The most complete edition of Benjamin’s many manuscripts, letters, and drafts presently appears to be what has been collocated in Giorgio Agamben, Barbara Chitussi, and Clemens-Carl Härle, Baudelaire (Paris: La Fabrique, 2013). A German critical edition is, however, in the works. See Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vols. 1–20, ed. Momme Brodersen et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008–). 13 Johanna Drucker, Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 23.

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14 T he publication of Baudelaire’s text in 1863 coincides in a symbolic way with Salon des Refusés and Manet’s Olympia, where a courtesan is portrayed as a modern Venus at the same time as the formal prototype of this painting is found in Titian. Thus, it combines the classical and the modern in a manner that approximates Baudelaire. Baudelaire himself seems to have been incapable of understanding what was new in Manet, as evident in his infamous letter of May 11, 1865, to the artist. For one thing, Baudelaire invokes a logic of fashion that judges every expression to be superseded by a subsequent one, and he advises the painter to ignore the contempt that the public and the critics heap upon him—“Do you think you are the first one to be exposed to this? Are you a greater genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner?”—but then in a peculiar twist, he suggests that after Manet, everything will turn out for the worse: “You are merely the first in the decrepitude of your art” (“Vous n’êtes que le premier dans le décrépitude votre art”). See Baudelaire, Correspondance, ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1973), vol. II, 496f. 15 B enjamin, “Paris, 1800-talets huvudstad” (“Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century”), in Bild och dialektik, 107. 16 S ee Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of Leibniz’s theory on elasticity in Vecket: Leibniz och barocken, trans. Sven-Olov Wallenstein (Göteborg: Glänta Produktion, 2004 [orig. Le pli: Leibniz et la Baroque, 1988]), ch. 1. For an English translation, see Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 17 M onadologie et sociologie (orig. 1893), Oeuvres de Gabriel Tarde, vol. I, introduction by Éric Alliez and an afterword by Maurizio Lazzarato (Paris: Synthélabo, 1999), 58. The new edition of Tarde’s work under the leadership of Alliez has been crucial for a new reading of Tarde. For an English edition, see Gabriel Tarde, Monadology and Sociology, ed. and trans. Theo Lorenc (Melbourne: re.press, 2012). 18 F or an overview of the more recent reception, see David Toews, “The New Tarde: Sociology after the End of the Social,” Theory, Culture, Society 20, no. 5 (2003): 81–98. A recurrent reference in many of the newer interpretations is Gilles Deleuze’s footnote in Différence et répétition, where he refutes the psychological reading and points out that “small ideas of the little people” and “interferences between imitative flows” constitute a “micro-sociology” already on an individual level, “hesitancy understood as an ‘infinitesimal social opposite’ or invention as an ‘infinitesimal social adaption.’ ” See Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968), 104. For an English translation, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994). See also Deleuze, Vecket (The Fold), 176, where he points to the affinity between Tarde and Leibniz when it comes to “having” instead of “being,” or an “echology” (from Greek echein, to have). 19 Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation (orig. 1890). See Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1962), 382. 20 Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, 75. Tarde experiments with many definitions of imitation, from the dramatically and psychologically charged, such as “somnambulism,” to the more formal determinants, such as “the effect of a consciousness on another consciousness” (xiv), and he increasingly abandons the emphasis on the element of suggestiveness found in his earlier writings. By and

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large, however, he retains an emphasis on unconscious processes and is critical of “the illusion of free will” and the idea that “a person imitates because she wants to” (193f.). 21 Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, 225f. 22 S ee Christian Borch, “Urban Imitations: Tarde’s Sociology Revisited,” Theory, Culture, Society 22, no. 3 (2005): 81–100, and “The Exclusion of the Crowd: The Destiny of a Sociological Figure of the Irrational,” European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 1 (2006): 83–102. Borch proposes that the waves of imitation, opposition, and adaption moving in the urban space can be understood in terms of Henri Lefebrvre’s “rhythm analysis,” as a production of differences. This assigns a distinct role also to concrete rhythmic structures in the forming of the masses or the crowds (singing, clapping of hands, walking in step). On Lefebvre’s theory, see Éléments de rythmanalyse (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 1992). 23 Tarde, La philosophie pénale (orig. 1890), quoted from Penal Philosophy, trans. Rapelje Howell (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1968), 325. The unmistakably paranoid quality in many of Tarde’s assertions is underscored in earlier English translations by translating foule as “mob.” 24 Tarde, Penal Philosophy, 323. 25 S ee Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871–1899 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 26 D eleuze later picks up the thread from his footnote in Différence et répétition, and points to the affinity between Foucault’s idea of “minimal inventions” and Tarde, inasmuch as both of them address “diffuse and infinitesimal relations, not grand totalities or great men, but small ideas in little men, the signature of a bureaucrat, a new local habit, a lingual deviation, a visual distortion that is propagated.” See Deleuze, Foucault (orig. 1986), trans. Erik van der Heeg and Sven-Olov Wallenstein (Stehag: Symposion, 1990), 198, n.6, and Foucault, Övervakning och straff (orig. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, 1975), trans. C.-G. Bjurström (Lund: Arkiv, 1987), 257f. For an English translation, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1975). Foucault’s lecture series from 1975 about “the abnormal” is an interesting example, since he discusses a famous murder case that also appears in Tarde (who, by the way, goes unmentioned by Foucault) as an instance of social imitation. Without any apparent cause, Henriette Cornier, a young woman, slit the throat of her neighbor’s daughter, after which Tarde observes: “other nursemaids, having no cause other than this, yielded to an irresistible drive to slit the throat of their employers’ children” (The Laws of Imitation, 340). Foucault, in turn, shows how the absence of a motive in this and subsequent cases became an argument for introducing psychiatry into the penal code and was the basis for developing the notion of instinct, which is indicative of the role played by “minimal inventions” when it comes to developing large complexes of ideas. See Michel Foucault, Les Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France (1974–1975), ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), lecture from February 5; Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2003). 27 Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, 70. 28 Tarde, L’opinion et la foule (Opinion and Crowd) (Paris: PUF, 1989 [orig. 1901]), 39.

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29 S ee, for example, Christopher Kullberg and Karl Palmås, “Smitto(nto)logy” (“Contagion(to)logy”), Glänta 4 (2008). 30 F or a discussion of Simmel’s intellectual milieu and development, see Erik av Edholm’s introduction to Simmel, Hur är samhället möjligt? (How Is Society Possible?) ed. and trans. Erik af Edholm (Göteborg: Korpen, 1981). For other discussions of Simmel’s influence, see Stephan Moebius, Simmel lesen: Moderne, dekonstruktive und postmoderne Lektüren der Soziologie von Georg Simmel (On Reading Simmel: Modern, Deconstructive, and Postmodern Readings in Sociology by Georg Simmel) (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2002) and Jürgen Backhaus and HansJoachim Stadermann (eds), Georg Simmels Philosophie des Geldes: Einhundert Jahre danach (Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money: One Hundred Years Later) (Marburg: Metropolis, 2000). 31 Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (Köln: Parkland, 2001), viii. For an English edition, see Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. David Frisby, trans. Tom Bottomore (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004). 32 Cf. Erik af Edholm’s introduction to Simmel, Hur är samhället möjligt? 33 T he harshest attack came from György Luckács, who at one time was Simmel’s student, but later rejected him as a typical expression of “imperialistic philosophy,” as presenting “the most confusing reactionary obscurantism and mystery.” See György Luckács, Förnuftets banemän, trans. Bernt Kennerström (Lund: Arkiv, 1985 [orig. Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, 1954]), 84. For an English edition, see George Luckács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin, 1980). 34 T he English translation in the present article is based on the Swedish translation by Sven-Olov Wallenstein in Aisthesis: Estetikens historia, del 1. Quotations with pagination in the running text refer to this edition. 35 T o be sure, there is in Simmel a more or less objective limit to the expansion of fashion, which he exemplifies with certain forms in the visual arts. The “classical” is “relatively remote and unfamiliar to fashion-form, even if it does not elude it altogether,” since it has a “concentration that, so to speak, offers but few points of attack for modification, interference, and abrogation of the balance” (532). The Baroque, on the other hand, is “immoderate and extreme” and “to the likes of it, fashion does not come as an extraneous fate but rather as the historical expression of its objective constitutiveness” (ibid.). Simmel’s observations are here quite conventional, and there is nothing in his argument that prevents even these forms, and their attendant values, to enter into fashion’s logic, something that subsequent developments have clearly shown. 36 Danius et al., Aisthesis, 504. 37 Ibid.,  512. 38 F or an analysis of the specific nervousness that characterizes the elegant life, see Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: PUF, 1972). For an English edition, see Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). In the elegant life, according to Proust, production and the interpretation of signs replace thought and action, something that, from the perspective of thought, can appear extremely obtuse. Even so, however, the author must crisscross this world of ours, lose time in order to find it again later, and the ritual and empty quality of the signs give them a mobility we cannot be without, even if we cannot remain in this dimension. Few

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things, says Proust, can give us as much to think about as what is moving inside a dumb-skull, and even if people of elegance resemble parrots—which also is the case with intellectuals when seen through the telescope of the novel—parrots are also birds with prophetic powers. 39 Simmel in Danius et al., Aisthesis, 512. 40 Ibid.,  516. 41 Ibid.,  517. 42 Ibid.,  522f. 43 Ibid.,  523. 44 I n our own time, the category of the “obsolete” has become more complex inasmuch as the calculated coexistence of several temporary layers often is perceived as a high degree of sophistication. Giorgio Agamben suggests that the currency of fashion, that is, its topicality and up-to-date-ness, always consists of a series of references to its non-currency or its le démodé, a subtle borderline between a “no longer” and an “again,” brought together in a now that really does not belong to any chronology and therefore approximates the temporal “signatures” that, according to Agamben, characterize the concepts of historical-philosophical thought. See Giorgio Agamben, Signatura rerum: Sul metodo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008), 74–5. For an English version, see Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). In several publications, Rosalind Krauss has similarly explored the concept of “obsolescence” as an artistic strategy, in which the recent past assumes the critical function of breaking apart the idea of a single monolithic now. See Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999), and “ ‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” October 92 (2000). 45 Danius et al., Aisthesis, 529. 46 Ibid.,  531.

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2 ITALIAN FUTURISM AND FASHION Patrizia Calefato Translated by Sveva Scaramuzzi

Introduction This chapter will analyze the role of Italian futurism in relationship with fashion from a socio-semiotic point of view, using fashion theory as a cultural critique.1 I am going to focus especially on the relationship between art and society which is expressed by fashion as a “day-to-day aesthetic.” From Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first futurist manifesto in 1909 to the years of Fascism, how did futurism influence the Italian society through fashion? How did fashion represent an important link between Italian futurism and the other European avant-gardes? Did futurism influence post-war Italian style, or did the latter rise in opposition to the former?

Primary characteristics of Italian futurism The official birth of futurism was on February 20, 1909, when Marinetti’s (1876– 1944) Manifesto del futurismo (Manifesto of Futurism) was published in Le Figaro. The Manifesto glorifies velocity, dynamism, industry, war, machines and despises museums, libraries, academies, conformism and feminism. Futurism identifies itself from its very first appearance as a movement which refuses the past and defines new kinds of taste and sensibility. Art is the dominant field where this new taste has to manifest itself, which is proven by the fact that its most important achievements were in painting, sculpture, music and literature. However, art is not separated from “life,” and this was particularly true in that specific moment in history, with the rise of mass society in Europe, where industry and technology were becoming more and more the means for profound social changes. Therefore, fashion was de facto a part of the futurist intervention, because it is

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through fashion that mass society expresses its own taste as a common sense, being it conventional or experimental and innovative. In the process of Western industrialization, Italy was late, in comparison to other European countries, due both to a later national unification (1861) and to the economic gap between the industrialized North and the rural and underdeveloped South, which is commonly known as questione meridionale (Southern question). Marinetti wrote in the first Manifesto that “this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto” of futurism started its movement from Italy, and that the aim of the avant-garde was to “de-provincialize” the country: this is the reason why he wanted his Manifesto published in the French Le Figaro. The most important artists who were part of the First Futurism were, except Marinetti, poet Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974), painter Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), writer Giovanni Papini (1886–1956), and painter, composer and inventor Luigi Russolo (1885–1947). During the period 1909–15 the warlike and colonialist elements of Italian futurism were strongly highlighted. The glorification of the Libyan War (1911) and then the strong interventionism during the First World War were integral parts of the movement. It is also worth noting the elements which link the Italian futurism to the concept of total art, not in the Wagnerian meaning of Gesamtkunstwerk, but as a form of “mundane” art where literature, painting, music as “art of noises” (Russolo), cuisine, theater, toys, urban landscape are entangled with the arts of modernity: advertisement, design and fashion. In this sense, Italian futurism proposed a project similar to those of many other European avant-gardes, such as the French Art Nouveau and the Austrian Wiener Sezession, and it had some characteristics of the later German Bauhaus. The main difference from these, and similarly to Russian futurism, the most important artistic form was poetry, that is language, while the other avant-gardes preferred architecture and design as their main fields. In 1915, the manifesto Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (Manifesto of Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe) by Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) and Fortunato Depero (1892–60) was published, based on the concept of decomposition-transformation of sounds, elements, objects of daily use in order to find new discoveries, including clothing. From 1915 on, Italian futurism lost some of its followers, both because some of them died fighting during the First World War, and because some, scarred by the horrors of war, left the movement. Boccioni died accidentally in a military drill, but many other members, such as Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956) relaunched the movement starting what is commonly known as the “second Italian Futurism.” In this second phase, the movement was bound to the political and social history of Italy. In 1918 Marinetti published the Manifesto del Partito politico futurista (Manifesto of the Futurist Political Party), inspired by utopian socialism and almost contemporary to the

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foundation, in 1919, of Benito Mussolini’s Fasci of Combat, joined immediately by Marinetti.

Avant-garde and ideology In a piece titled “Marinetti rivoluzionario?” (“Marinetti as a Revolutionary?”) from June 5, 1921, Antonio Gramsci writes in Ordine Nuovo, the magazine founded by himself in 1919, that Italian futurists knew very well that “our age, the age of great industry, of the great workers’ city, of intense and tumultuous life had to have new forms of art, of philosophy, of costume, of language.”2 In this sense, according to Gramsci, the futurist idea was “neatly revolutionary, absolutely marxist.”3 If from a political point of view this idea had been already proven wrong because, after a brief dissociation from the Fasci of Combat in 1920, Marinetti and the movement enthusiastically adhered to Fascism and, after the March on Rome in 1922, they applauded to Mussolini’s rise to power, from an artistic and widely cultural point of view, we cannot juxtapose schematically Fascism and Italian futurism. Fascism was in fact an expression of the historical bloc between the “material forces” of Italian capitalists and landowners and the populist, nationalist totalitarian ideology that the National Fascist Party embodied and diffused to the masses through propaganda and repression.4 On the contrary Italian futurism had always the fundamental character of a growing project, which was not “historically organic” (as Gramsci wrote) to a form of power and its preservation. Italian futurism was indeed animated by a kind of spirit called by the Italian socialist Pietro Nenni diciannovismo (1919), embodying on the one hand the popular disillusionment for the “mutilated victory” (i.e., not followed by an economic and political recovery) of Italy after the First World War, and on the other hand the “revolutionary” populist push of the Fasci of Combat. Ideology as social engineering founded on a dynamic privilege instead of a static one, in the future instead of in the past, as the definition proposed by the Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, is linked to the role of artistic avantgardes.5 The artistic avant-garde in itself, Rossi-Landi writes, “is not realistic,” as it does not convey the messages and signs of the dominant ideology, but, on the contrary, it produces an “increase in the quantity of information and communicative refurbishment” which has to express also the need for a social refurbishment.6 In the case of Russian futurism, this engineering both artistic and political was linked to the Soviet Revolution, especially in Majakowskij, who tragically realized, after Lenin’s death in 1922, the totalitarian involution under Stalin. In Italian futurism, the political aspect of siding with Fascism was the least productive for an effective refurbishment, given the role of paladin of conservation and repression which Fascism had toward workers’ and rural movements and communist, socialist and liberal Italian intellectuals.

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Gramsci’s harsh judgement of Marinetti in a letter to Trockij in 1922 can be read in this sense, and is different from the 1921 piece: “The workers who saw in Futurism the elements of a fight against the old Italian academic culture, ossified, stranger to the people, they must fight weapons in their hands for their freedom.”7 Particularly relevant is the glorification of war declared by the futurists since their first Manifesto, juxtaposing aesthetics and politics, as acutely remarked by Walter Benjamin. The German philosopher, in a Comment on his essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” reprises the Manifesto published by Marinetti in La Stampa in Torino in favor of the Ethiopian colonial war started by Italy in 1936, when the futurist movement was declining and had lost every character as an avant-garde. Marinetti, who directly took part to this war, glorifies, as in his first Manifesto, the “beauty” of war which through weapons founds the domination of man on the “subjugated machine,” gives birth to the “dreamed-of metallization of the human body,” builds “new architectures.”8 So much, Benjamin writes: “Its [of humankind] self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.”9 Benjamin wrote his essay in a moment when he was deeply aware of the tragic and destructive turn which the cultural politics of Fascism and Nazism had taken. Fascism aims to, Benjamin writes, “an aestheticising of political life,” since it hast to give an expression to the masses, while not disrupting the relations of property.10 The ideological structure of Fascism relies on the production of cult values which have to coexist with mechanical reproduction, that is, the exact opposite of “cult” and “auratic.” From this forced coexistence, according to Benjamin, the tendency to self-destruction of the fascist aestheticizing of politics converges is produced, that is, the tendency towards war as a “new means of abolishing the aura.”11

Futurist fashion The “sign revolution” was the most ideologically innovative aspect of Italian futurism, opposite to the usually reactionary, macho and colonialist contents of the manifestos and other official documents of the movement. In this “sign revolution” fashion had a fundamental role. In their first public events, futurists gave their clothing an important function of perceptive estrangement:  they wore indeed elegant clothes, such as tuxedos and tails which contrasted with their odd and challenging poetic performances. The most middle-class and anti-bohemian male clothing was actually a sign, with which “the futurists mock the rules while they seem to respect them.”12

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In 1910, painter Giacomo Balla joined futurism, introducing in his clothing colorful and asymmetrical jackets, ties and dresses of his own design, which later would compose the Manifesto futurista del vestito da uomo (Futurist Manifesto of Male Clothing), published in 1914. According to this Manifesto, clothing must destroy every “passéism,” contrast the dull grayness of the old male clothing with asymmetry and bright colors. Balla’s designs innovatively joins the typically futurist dynamism and a peculiar kind of dandyism, which is not explicitly theorized by the movement, but which characterizes the futurist emotional clothing semiotics anyway. Here dandyism means a process of semeiotic transformation of the object:  as Roland Barthes wrote, the dandy “takes distinction that bit further” handling the clothing or the accessory in an absolutely original way and beyond any predictable common sense.13 In comparison to the futurist, however, the dandy is not “dynamic,” because he tends to preserve its details through time, for example, Brummell’s tie knot. The dandy does not aim to elicit the senses and the emotions of his public through his clothing: on the contrary, he nonchalantly displays the deformation of his clothing, thus perpetrating the tradition of sprezzatura, theorized in the sixteenth century by Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier). The futurists aim to elicit emotion in connection to vision, embracing the dynamism of fashion, which constantly tends to change, and relating fashion to future, to movement, to the direct, derisory and aggressive take on society. The futurist clothing is a sign of an “imaginative emotionality” which frees it from its role of social status indicator and from its practical daily functions.14 The futurist clothed body is relatable to Umberto Boccioni’s 1913 Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space), representing a stylized walking human form, or better a being between human and robot, which expresses the concept of automatized movement of the machines. In the 1914, harsh debate between pacifists and interventionists, Balla’s Manifesto was rewritten some months after its publication and retitled Il vestito antineutrale (The Anti-Neutral Suit). This title directly refers to the role of futurist clothing, freeing humanity from stillness, fear, “passéism,” and neutrality:  the latter word has a double meaning, both referring to “neutral” colors of clothing, despised by the futurists, and to neutrality in war, also despised and mocked. The suit has to represent dynamism, variability, aggressiveness, light and also simplicity and comfort, because it has to be possible for the wearer, in full warlike mood, to “point his rifle, wade across rivers, and swim.”15 Asymmetry, provocation, machinery and war are also part of the 1920 Manifesto della moda femminile futurista (Futurist Manifesto of the Women’s Fashion), signed by Volt, a pseudonym for Vincenzo Fani Ciotti (1888–1927). Female fashion, according to the Manifesto, is inherently futurist, as it is based on constant change. Furthermore, the fashionable futurist woman has to follow

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the three principles of “ingenuity,” “daring,” and “economy.” As for the ingenuity, fashion has to be designed by artists, because “fashion is an art, like architecture and music.” This sentence proves that in futurism art is an integral part of society, of day-to-day life, of politics and body. As opposed to the greyness of conformist daily life, the futurist clothing has oddness and daring as its principles:  this is the ingenuity which directly relates the progresses of technology to the female body: “And so, we will have the machine-gun woman, the thanks-de-Somme woman [sic], the radio-telegraph antenna woman, the airplane woman, the submarine woman, the motorboat woman. We will transform the elegant lady into a real, living three-dimensional complex.”16 The economy of fashion deals with the futurists’ engagement for saving and for fashion to be for everyone. It is worth noting that the relationship between fashion and day-to-day life in Volt’s Manifesto predicts some contemporary aspects of fashion when it describes accessories made of paper, cardboard, glass, tinfoil, aluminum, majolica, rubber, packaging cloth: it almost echoes the description of “sustainable” fashion and of recycling materials which is so en vogue today. The symbolic economy of fashion is the object of the 1920 manifesto Contro il lusso femminile (Manifesto against Women’s Luxury), written by Marinetti, a sexist and homophobic work blaming the relationship of women with fashion, the expenses of women for toiletries, and the seduction embodied by luxury clothing. The “guilty” bond between women and luxury goes back to ancient times: already in the Middle Ages, had the long trains of female dresses been stigmatized by the “sumptuary laws,” aiming to limit excessive expenses and waste. In his 1913 essay on luxury, German sociologist Werner Sombart highlighted the typical tendency of women to luxury since the beginning of capitalism.17 In his opinion, upper-middle-class women were the first to boost the expenses of the luxury of consumption, from textiles to furniture, to clothing, to food. Georg Simmel also maintained that women were the main protagonists of the fashion system, because in it they found the possibility of combining imitation with distinction and personal relevance, which was impossible for them in other fields of social life.18 The stereotype of the woman shallowly devoted to fashion and luxury expenses was depicted by Marinetti with the ideological chauvinist connotation which oppose to the charmer, luxurious woman and her “silk, velvet and jewels” to the simple, “fertile” woman who makes her own clothing and does not copy the Parisian models. This female stereotype would be reproposed by Fascism, with the ideal of the woman as “mother and wife,” money saver, housewife and autarkic. This ideal was also opposed, both by Marinetti and the regime, to the emancipated and free woman, the flapper who wore short skirts and had short hair, who listened to jazz, smoked and freely wandered through the world, and whose symbol was the American actress Louise Brooks.

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Fashion, body, writing: Between Italian futurism and international avant-gardes The contribution of Italian futurism to fashion is located between two extremes: on one side we have Marinetti’s celebration of the “Italianness” of clothing, of antifeminism and of war. On the other, we have the most innovative experience of the avant-gardes, which are connected to international experiences of fashion revolution. In the 1925 Paris Expo some Italian futurist clothes were exposed as French creations. The Parisian environment was inclined to welcome the experimentations of fashion avant-gardes:  Paris had already known the collaboration of fashion and avant-garde through Coco Chanel, as a collaborator of Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso, and Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973), more connected to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp’s dada and Salvador Dalì’s surrealism than to futurism, as Schiaparelli’s artistic production was more successful abroad than in Italy. The role of poetry, of language and of writing was essential for Italian futurism:  as a result, words and letters were the protagonists of futurist paintings, especially in Depero’s and Balla’s works, who introduced words, sentences and letters in many of their paintings. Many other artistic avantgardes had used words and letters even on the human body, or represented styles of body, such as Erté’s works, which designed an alphabet where every letter was an art déco female body, stretched and modelled with the curls of the hair or with bird feathers. On the contrary, in 1923, Sonia Delaunay designed a dress with a print of Tristan Tzara’s poem Le ventilateur tourne dans le coeur, as a sort of precursor for graphic T-shirt, brands and logos of today’s clothing, which is all the literature which clothes and designs the contemporary fashion system. The letter T, associated to the T-shirt today, was the reference for Thayaht’s— an Italian futurist artist whose real name was Ernesto Michahelles (1893–1959)— Tuta design, published in 1919 on La Nazione, the daily newspaper of Florence. The name of this new male garment was a linguistic pun on the Italian words tuta (overall) and tutta (all):  the T sound of tutta loses itself in tuta and builds un the shape of the paper pattern. The same pun could be found in Thayaht explanation of his creation: 1) tuta (all) the cloth (4.50m, 0.70 height) is used and there will be no scraps, therefore there is CLOTH SAVING; 2) it is a combination tuta (all) in one piece, with as less seams as possible, therefore MANUFACTURING SAVING; 3) it covers tuta (all) the body and, with only seven buttons and one belt, it is in place, therefore TIME SAVING; 4) in a few weeks, tuta (all) the people will be wearing a tuta (overalls), and its better comfort, its wellness, the complete

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freedom of movement will give to its wearers a sense of youth with an actual energy saving. The tuta was made of a soft washable cloth, it was simple in manufacturing, had different colors, was cheap and fit for all occasions: its smart value should have represented the symbol of a lifestyle against luxury. Thayaht’s invention was not successful, though. He designed also a female version of the tuta and tried to export it in the United States, proposing it to companies which supplied some special corps of the army, but he did not have success. In the Soviet Union, on the contrary, the 1923 Moscow-founded fashion Atelier—where many artists of diverse backgrounds worked, such as Aleksandra Ekster, futurist and constructivist, or the constructivist Aleksander Rodchenko—proposed its own overalls, which immediately became “the dress of the proletariat,” and bore a both practical and ideological connotation. This overall was “distant from Thayaht’s one” and was inspired by Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneity.19 After almost a century, in a global perspective of the complex fashion system, the overalls—between Thayaht and the soviets—have their conceptual heirs in Emilio Pucci’s evening overalls and Irene Galzine’s palazzo pajama of the 1960s. The overall has to be considered part of the same clothing tradition as those of the workers, such as those worn by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), with the history of jeans, which were worn by American gold diggers in the beginning, and, more recently, casual fashion of the 1970s and the contemporary workwear trend. The latter trend is far from the ephemeral and the shallow, because it is made of clothing which does not age and is not linked to fads; its clothes protect because they are made of heat resistant, water resistant, cold resistant textiles; they have a “male” cut, but can be easily worn by both genders. Thayaht found international recognition, anyway, by signing an exclusive contract with Madeleine Vionnet’s Parisian atelier, where he worked from 1921 to 1924. Back to Italy, he dedicated his life to the fashion of the fascist regime, by designing the classic and autarkic straw hat in 1928 and then, in 1932, together with his brother Ruggiero—Ram—he wrote the Manifesto per la trasformazione dell’abbigliamento maschile (Futurist Manifesto for the Transformation of the Male Clothing).

The noises of the world: Advertisement, music, styles Fortunato Depero managed to create in his works some fundamental connections between art and the other crucial sign system of modernity and mass society except fashion:  advertisement. He in fact designed many posters, objects and concepts for many Italian companies, such as the brick making company

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Verzocchi, San Pellegrino magnesia and water, the pharmaceutical company Schering, Strega alcoholic drink and—his most important job—the alcoholic drink company Campari. In the 1931 Manifesto for Futurist Art in Advertisement, Depero glorified the free, joyful and provocative dimension of advertisement, which he defines as an “art”: it is a round art, which also involved packaging. Indeed, he designed in 1928 the Campari Soda bottle, which is still in use today, and his campaign for Campari involved posters, radio commercials and jingles. According to Monica Centanni, who studies advertisement and classical culture, the Campari Soda bottle is still a winning choice today for “modernity and elegance,” in comparison to Earl R. Dean’s 1920 Coca-Cola bottle.20 Packaging became for Depero a form of design of the industrial product, a concept translated into the form of the goods; in this way, packaging and advertisement coincide with art and design. As Maria Rosaria Dagostino writes: “packaging is the ‘material’ translation of the advertising message into the product design; the object-image completes the project of commercial communication and relies on desire other than on its function, on imagination other than containment, on interaction other than use.”21 Depero as a designer represents the aforementioned ideal connection between Italian futurism and German Bauhaus, although its members never realized it. At the same time, Depero’s participated and dynamic vision of advertisement is the precursor for the most advanced contemporary practices of nonconventional marketing, such as graffiti, street-marketing, to Andy Warhol’s 1985 Absolute Art for Absolute Vodka project. In 1934, Depero collaborates with the world of fashion, by designing two covers for Vogue and Vanity Fair. He stylized the letters composing the two names: in the case of Vogue he transformed it into an ionic column, in the case of Vanity Fair into a strange hat between two horns on a funny head smoking a cigarette. Therefore, fashion is a part of Depero’s “mundane art” project, drawn by the artist from the futurist movement. However, Depero surpassed futurism itself, crossing the Italian borders even in the time of fascist autarky, and beyond the elitism and individualism of the movement. The noises of the world, meaning both the literal noises of urban life, of machines, of factories, of technology, and in the metaphorical sense of the “noises” of thought, of life, and history were the object of the Italian futurists’ wide attentions. The poems composed by Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974) are deeply aware of the lyrical dimension of noise. His poem La fontana malata (The Ill Fountain) opens and closes with onomatopoeic sounds: “Clof, clop, cloch / cloffete /cloppete /crocchette / chchch”; while L’orologio (The Clock) describes the noises and the movements of its gear. The poet himself read both poems at the Futurist Evening at the Teatro Lirico of Milan on February 15, 1910, though he was a member of the movement only until 1914, when he left it for his neutral position toward the war. Onomatopoeic sounds express the actual noises of

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war in Marinetti’s composition Zang tumb tumb, about the battle of Adrianople (1914), which describes with “free words” the context of war so beloved by the poet. The social and aesthetic role of noises had been suggestively anticipated by Luigi Russolo. In his 1913 manifesto L’arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises), Russolo glorifies the complex and polyphonic quality of the noises of the modern city: Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways. According to Russolo, the multiplication of machines has a sort of human sensibility which could not be possible before modernity, and the futurists have to understand and reproduce it. Therefore, Russolo invents the intonarumori, machines which reproduce the noises of urban life, whose first concert, composed by Russolo himself, is titled Risveglio di una città (Awakening of a City) and is performed at the Teatro del Verme in Milan in 1914. Italian scholar Claudia Attimonelli maintains that there is a link between Russolo’s inventions and theories and techno music, which emerges in the 1970s in Detroit, an industrial city with a fervent working class, especially African-American. Attimonelli introduces the concept of “afrofuturism,” referring to the black metropolitan communities “which develop throug cinema, sci-fi literature, music (hip-hop and techno), graphic design and videoclips.”22 Afrofuturism becomes also a street style, it builds a metropolitan scene, meaning “the momentary and dynamic agglutination and interest of individuals, as swarms, around a corpus of signs in movement.”23 Clothing, accessories, music, styles, literary tastes converge into the definition of the urban scene as something beyond fashion. The futurist idea of total art as daily practice and way of “being in the world” is accomplished.

Conclusion: Futurism and Italian fashion Fashion had an exemplary role in Italian futurism, not only because fashion was the primary reference for Balla’s and Depero’s paintings, Volt’s Manifesto or Marinetti’s Contro il lusso (Against Luxury), but also, because through fashion,

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art was related to day-to-day life. For this peculiar characteristic, Italian futurism had the same cultural role as the most prolific and eclectic international avantgardes of the early twentieth century. At the same time, the “golden age” of Italian futurism, roughly from 1909 to 1920, represented a crucial moment for the founding and the development of Italian independent fashion, competing with the international dimension and influencing the industrial and political development of the country. The bases for Italian fashion as an industry competing on the international scene, bonding fashion and art as the futurists proposed, were there from the end of the nineteenth century. Emblematic characters, both couturiers and artists, had been, for example, Mariano Fortuny—a Spanish man living in Venice since 1889—who invented pleated clothing, and Rosa Genoni, who, at the beginning of the new century, was inspired in her creations by Egyptian, Greek, Byzantine and Renaissance art. The moment was crucial, not only in Italy, for the mature affirmation of fashion as a means of mass communication and as an industry. The Universal Expositions—which celebrated industrial goods—in 1906 in Milan and in 1911 in Turin confirmed this role of fashion. If, especially from the 1930s, Italy had not been under the autarkic limits imposed by the fascist regime, on a both economic and cultural level, the futurist symbolic universe could have been the starting point for fashion experimentations, such as, for example, it happened in France with Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. Still in the 1930s, Thayaht’s work represented for futurism another attempt of bonding avant-gardist research and a stylistic and industrial project: its effects were partially successful, as for “inventions” such as the Italian straw hat. Two futurist Manifestos in particular, one about the hat and the other about the tie, both from 1933, prove the still living existence of an autonomous propulsive push of the movement. However, when in 1931 Achille Starace was appointed secretary of the National Fascist Party, Italian day-to-day life started being “fascistized.” Starace writes Vademecum del perfetto fascista (The Handbook of the Perfect Fascist) and La dottrina fascista (The Fascist Doctrine). He will be putting boots and uniforms on the Italian people.24 The military, the cult of the athletic body, compulsory gymnastics create ideals and beauty standards to which the autarkic fashion has to adhere. The founding of the National Agency for Fashion in 1935 marks a female stereotype partially inspired by the so-called Italian cinema of telefoni bianchi (white telephones), partially to the figure of exemplary mother and wife celebrated by the regime ideology, which were regulated by an actual “catechism” of fascist fashion: the Commentario dizionario della moda (Commentary Dictionary of Italian Fashion), written by Cesare Meano in 1936.25 The war left Italy in ruins: the rebuilding of the country started from the very bases, in all fields. Fashion was reborn through cinema and divas, with artisanal figures such as Salvatore Ferragamo, the Fontana sisters, Roberto Capucci,

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Schubert. These names evoke the clothing of international stars such as Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner, the wealth of the aristocracy in the 1950s, the Roman dolce vita. The year 1951 marked the founding of the Italian style, with Giovanni Battista Giorgini’s Sala Bianca in Florence. But this completely obliterates the “noises of the world” of futurist art. It would be in the 1960s, especially with Elio Fiorucci’s work, that Italian fashion returned to the motifs of velocity, asymmetry of shapes, urban rhythms: these concepts, however, were never related to futurism, but with pop-art. The thread that unites Italian futurism and fashion in its contemporary dimension of massmoda (mass fashion) should be historically and theoretically rebound, as this essay is trying to do.

Notes 1 Patrizia Calefato, “Italian Alterdisciplinarity,” Jomec Journal 8 (2015): 1–14. 2 Antonio Gramsci, Scritti politici (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1973), 182–4. 3 Ibid. 4 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1929–35) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 869. 5 Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Ideologia (Milano: Mondadori, 1982), 271. 6 Rossi-Landi, Semiotica e ideologia (Milano: Bompiani, 1972), 104. 7 Gramsci, Scritti politici, 48–50. 8 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 41 (orig. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955). 9 Ibid.,  42. 10 Ibid.,  41. 11 Ibid.,  42. 12 Luca Federico Garavaglia, Il futurismo e la moda (Milano: Excelsior 1881, 2009), 45. 13 Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, ed. Michael Carter (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 67. 14 Garavaglia, Il futurismo e la moda, 55. 15 Il vestito antineutrale (1914). 16 Manifesto della moda femminile futurista (1920). 17 Werner Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967 [orig. 1913]). 18 Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” International Quarterly 10 (1904): 32–3. 19 Garavaglia, Il futurismo e la moda, 181. 20 Monica Centanni, Classico manifesto (Milano: Fondazione Valore Italia, 2008), 24. 21 Maria Rosaria Dagostino, Pubblicit@rte (Bari: Progedit, 2009), 102.

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22 Claudia Attimonelli, Techno. Ritmi afrofuturisti (Roma: Meltemi, 2008), 108. 23 C laudia Attimonelli and Antonella Giannone, Underground Zone. Dandy, Punk, Beautiful People (Bari: CaratteriMobili, 2011), 22. 24 Garavaglia, Il futurismo e la moda, 226. 25 Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Skirt (Oxford: Berg, 2004).

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3 MODERNISM VERSUS FEMINISM GEORGE SAND, PAUL GAVARNI, AND TROUSERS FOR WOMEN Ulrich Lehmann

Introduction Modernism embraced formal solutions to structural challenges. It endeavored to respond through newly conceived production methods, new materials and creative techniques to economic, social and political changes across the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Within the culture industry these responses were framed in the idiom of formal aesthetic innovation, in repeatedly proclaiming artistic avant-gardes, as well as in the idiom of fashion, by initiating recurring cycles of consumption. Modernism proposed to approximate the new social conditions of labor, which had arisen from industrialization and serial production associated with it, by making everyday objects and occurrences its themes, critically embracing mechanized reproduction and emphasizing rational and conceptual approaches to cultural production. In formalizing structural challenges, modernism suggested an analytical mode of thought and an empirical, implicitly rational approach—although, in apparent contrast, the subjectivism of the individual artist would be established as a modernist hallmark to distinguish creators in the market place. Contemporary problems, for instance, social divisions or ethnic biases, were abstracted into hierarchical structures that were seen to solicit explicitly formal solutions. For example, verticality (regarded as discriminatory) was eschewed in favor of horizontality (egalitarian), by proposing equilateral fields like squares as compositional elements, open floor plans for factories and communal housing,

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or serialized sequences as tonal modulations that asked for recognition of mathematical patterns instead of punctilious motifs. Modernism’s formal and structural efforts were subsumed almost entirely within the bourgeoisie—in contrast to modern political developments that were often generated (albeit not led) by the class-consciousness of the socially and economically disenfranchised and alienated. This bourgeoisie, gaining in economic and political significance throughout the nineteenth century in Western and Northern Europe, developed its own type of social consciousness, which in turn produced repeat self-reflection through the contemporary culture industry. In its modes of production, distribution and consumption the bourgeoisie delineated a narrative of progress for modernism into which revolutionary ruptures—from the working class but also at times from within bourgeoisie itself—would be inserted. Modernism appeared as quintessentially bourgeois in the formation of a culture industry that was consumed by those who liked to see their own class defined as moving and adaptable. Yet the effects of rapid economic progress that underpinned this self-perception had to be tempered through an avowed historical continuity, so that the increasing prosperity of the bourgeois class through new means of production, financial speculation and investment (rather than owning agricultural estates or titles) on the back of alienated and destitute working men and women would not be revealed as a modern phenomenon that could still be subject to social change. Progress had to appear as uninterrupted and unrelenting, and the ideal of bourgeois governance therefore became formulated as continuing “democracy,” based on the historicism of Western antiquity and its political systems in Athens, Rome, etc., which would be represented culturally through an idealized classicism. The very old had to appear in the guise of the very new in order to proclaim a “historic” role of the (liberal) bourgeois as agent of change, when, in fact, his rather recent position had been acquired through industrialization and market speculation at the start of the nineteenth century. The tradition of formalist efforts within modernism was understood quite early on as dialectical. Modernist thinkers appropriated formal methods as critically transposing the rationality that was meant to accompany the positivism of technological and scientific progress to real political challenges. For instance, in the first half of the nineteenth century in France utopian socialists like Charles Fourier used open architectural floor plans as structural guidelines for emancipated family relationships, while the Saint-Simonians applied the formulae of economic and industrial development (e.g., investing and building waterways and canals across Southern Europe and Egypt) to their foundation of sociology as a scientific discipline. Dialectically, formalism contained the method as well as the critique of innovative structures, and it allowed for a self-reflexive transfer of creative methods, for example, in the arts and sciences, to political and social protest and reformation.

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In modernist thought, syntax and narration, binaries or dualism were challenged by this dialectical method, so that arguments could be developed out of a prefabricated structure rather than through the habitual aesthetic proclamation of a new tendency or style that was to supplant the previous one. This was not always a conscious process, in the sense in which G. W. F. Hegel’s or Karl Marx’s materialism was expressed as foundation for a critical method. In modernism and modernity—the latter understood as the temporal conditioning of the modern—notions of ambiguity, fragmentation, ephemerality and transistorizes were postulated by the bourgeoisie as open concepts whose cultural manifestation and aesthetic renditions, for example, in contemporary drama or photography, had to be formalized by individual artists. Such formalization was designed to arrest in time or motion shifting aspects of modern life, not merely as structural interventions or material solutions (e.g., in developing the facilities for motion capture) but equally as creating a contemporary poncif:  the artist’s logo or trademark that distinguished him in the market place. The serialized novels of Honoré de Balzac or George Sand (i.e., Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin), Théophile Gautier’s plays, or the illustrations and caricatures by Paul Gavarni (i.e., Guillaume Sulpice Chevalier) tasked themselves with rendering a fleeting impression into a formal technique or style. Yet products by these artists were also commodities in the culture industry that used the fragmentation and ambiguity within modernism as a free range within which to experiment with their respective poncif that they hoped would become fashionable and profitable. By willfully embracing fashion cycles in their production and, furthermore, making fashion (in speech, transport, food, clothing, makeup, etc.) integral part of their narratives, these mid nineteenth-century modernists performed within a material double-bind. Balzac’s and Gautier’s rather unorthodox fashion journalism or Gavarni’s drawings of bohemian dress styles not only captured modernism’s ephemerality and transitoriness but also revealed their economic precondition. The success of the modernist artwork depended on its ability to provide a congenial form to the speed, ambiguity and fragmentation of the present through an abstracted, aesthetically poignant manifestation; yet it was equally based on the assumption that these manifestations were realized and consumed as supremely contemporary and would be superseded soon by a new wave of cultural products. Fashion provided the form as much as the contents for the modernist artist, and the critical reflection on this double function was achieved in the complex ways by which contemporariness was structured and formalized through the cultural product. Binaries and dualism were set up therein as antithetical formats that subsequently could be subverted by inclusive and multifaceted propositions, as described further below. The nineteenth-century artist was a subjective producer of original works but he became also a consumer of new fashion that objectified his body, movement and environment within an urban crowd. Gone were the days in

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which the “academy” had frowned upon the contemporary and had postulated the historicism of employing classical models in order to continue motifs into the present. Now the present was formally opposed to the classical by way of movement and impression—without, as emphasized above, questioning the fundamental socioeconomic premise of bourgeois capitalism that continued to generate and fuel this very perception of the present. The modernist artist had to critique fashion to allow for an idealist distance and disinterestedness while, materially, he had to adhere to fashion so as to assure herself/himself of financial and critical success in a constantly evolving culture industry. Modernism therefore morphed into a concept that found formal solutions to structural challenges in the zone between the contemporary as material reference point and utopia, or indeed dystopia, as ontological projection. From a materialist perspective, this zone could not be regarded as dialectical, since modernism was embracing fashion on the premise of its joyful existence as agent of capitalism and as a historicist approach that cited past styles but failed to realize them as patterns—of social division and the condition of labor—across history. Yet the avowed fluidity in the zone between contemporary material and ontological projection did carry nineteenth-century European modernism, under the influence of Hegel’s and Marx’s ideas and through new movements in both utopian socialism and concrete revolutionary Praxis, into moving against binaries and dualism that sustained the socioeconomic system of class divides and the division of labor. In such a systemic dualism one concept or element was set against the other in order to found binaries of “left–right” (parliamentary politics), “good–evil” (organized religion) or “right–wrong” (social morality), so that social constituents of a prevailing power structure could display a fixed position according to existing manners and mores. For an alternative premise, modernism had to recognize that binaries and dualism not only coalesced the flow of social movement, which at least to some degree ran counter to the self-interest of a bourgeoisie who was constantly developing its economic influence, but also atrophied epistemological dynamics that could approximate the fragmentation and transistoriness that was felt by artists to coin modernity. Before this background the notion of feminism was staged against a preexistent gender binary. The essentialist dualism between male and female that had been purported by church, state and science in order to sustain the existing class system, family politics, and organization of labor, began to be exposed within feminist discourses of politics and art during the nineteenth century. The material demands by feminist activists during the French Revolution to reform women’s legal status, attain universal suffrage and gain access to higher education were supplemented by efforts to move away from strict biological determinants toward emancipated social positions. For the latter, gender and sex became a much more fragmented construct, based on social behavior rather than physical attributes. Women and men were still considered different from

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one another but no longer regarded as absolute opposites in their significance for societal movement, changing epistemology or fashionable aesthetics. For modernist artists, especially, this allowed for a complex fragmentation of the roles that two sexes were to play in contemporary life. Fictional (and real) narratives of travesty, allegories of emancipation, or childhood memories of educating equally girls and boys, provided material for novels, paintings, drama and poetry that exposed traditional mores to its audience—as much as titillating it with fashionable scenarios of female cross-dressing and sexual transgression. The above-mentioned dialectic in modernism in selecting contents for its selfreflexive criticality applied also to feminist themes and motifs. Feminism was a modern condition that demanded formal solution to a structural problem: men and women were situated on different planes of a hierarchy, so they needed to be spatially aligned along a horizontal axis in order to truly exist in parity. This approach did not proclaim anything yet about societal configurations, about being on the outside or inside of socioeconomic or political power circles, but modernists at least sought to level the field of interplay between genders in order to use the ensuing confusion and fluidity for their stories and manifestations. Modernist artists who were portraying feminists or feminism, and thereby veering between contemporary critique and risqué narratives, continued to remind their audiences of the structural binary of two sexes, in which essential physical and biological difference provided the basis for transgression. Similar to other traditional economic or social patterns of disenfranchising and alienation, art could not invent or radically alter a new structure; it could only posit itself against what had been told or visualized before it. Therefore, emancipation was not seen ontologically as a universal human right but as a concrete maneuver by contemporary women to win concessions from men. Obviously, this recognized the existing political and legal system where men had to be coerced somehow to relent parts of their self-interest for domination. Yet for artists, for whom utopian and free speculation were ostensibly permissible, such repeat acknowledgment of the existing structure appeared as a curious limit that no amount of transgression or travesty could surpass.

Sand and Gavarni In the following I would like to discuss a limit of modernism, first in the figure of George Sand, a French writer who innovated formal patterns to expose and critique structural dualisms for the two sexes but who, in her political activism, readily accepted the binary between women and men and opposed universal suffrage and sexual emancipation across classes. Sand’s modernist writing was centered to a substantial degree on the ambiguity of gender roles, manifest most prominently in the subverting of dress codes of her characters and herself, yet

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she did not open up dialectically this gender fluidity to its own critique, as an aesthetic veneer on the surface of a much more fundamental construction that denied women actual rights. The move of modernism against feminism appeared distinctive, too, in the work of Sand’s friend Paul Gavarni. The Parisian caricaturist and illustrator is therefore the second case study in this essay. He was similar to Sand in his aesthetic method and shared, in particular, her penchant for women’s trousers. This type of clothing, this fashion, was represented by Gavarni in a way that was congenial to Sand, in relying on a material dimension that was not articulated in the artwork itself—neither in its depiction or description by pen or brush, nor in the narrative of the fictional character who was sporting the garment. Gavarni and Sand were born within the space of six months in Paris, and they met through the intervention of Émile de Girardin, the publisher of the fashion magazine La Mode—an original forum for both Balzac and Gavarni—whose wife, Delphine de Girardin was a good friend of Sand, and equally active as a writer under a male pseudonym, Charles de Launay. M. de Girardin, who promoted the format of the roman-feuilleton for the economy of its serialization and its stylistic dependency on recognizable and interchangeable casts of type-characters and formulaic storylines, had recognized early on the affinity between the Sand and Gavarni for their use of typologies and literary formulae as artistic poncifs. The writer and the illustrator both exploited the type-form of the bourgeois (from aspiring grisette, via bored housewife and calculating lover, to errant bohémienne) as a means to rapidly reproduce characters in their imagery, as well as a self-reflexive mechanism to satirize their environment and audience as reactive clichés to fashionable mores. Sand and Gavarni employed their own position within fashion—its social circles and cultural production—to hone their observational expertise and develop narratives through lived experiences and autobiographical details. Yet, at the same time, they had the modernist wherewithal to assume a critical position vis-à-vis their own role in Parisian culture, so that Sand’s correspondence and Gavarni’s ironic captions were providing a counterpoint to the main commercial body of their novels and lithographs, respectively, in distancing them from the all too obvious dependency on contemporary aesthetic and economic structures. Gavarni’s iconic lithograph of George Sand of 1831 is a prime example for this ambiguous self-reflexivity, engendering a very modern type-character and formal solution to a structural problem, while at the same time generating a fashionable poncif that gave rise to consumption, in literature and illustration as well as clothes (Figure 3.1). The image shows George Sand walking arm and arm with her friend, the political journalist Henri de Latouche, who critiqued both the July monarchy as well as the cozy coterie of the latest literary fashion, les romantiques, while helping to promote Sand’s early writings on the Parisian scene.1 The two

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Figure  3.1 Paul Gavarni, George Sand in Student Garb, lithograph, 227 × 173  mm, 1831, Musée George Sand, La Châtre.

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friends affect an almost identical silhouette, aided by the cut of fashionable men’s coats at that time, which favored the radically nipped-in waist (taille de guêpe). Latouche and Sand sport the same combination of woolen trousers and frock coat, silk waistcoat and cravat, top hat and walking cane. The subtle differences as detailed in the lithograph rendered the trousers for Latouche more fitted through bootstraps, his waistcoat tighter through double-breasted button stays and his frock coat more expansive by opening it up. Sand’s top and waistcoats were buttoned up while her trousers were cut much looser, so that the masculine fashion appeared at first more concealing, while actually displaying her sexual characteristics by molding her breasts and displaying the gusset of her trousers. Gavarni would use this interplay between masculine garments and female sex in many subsequent series of lithographs, as I will discuss further below. The given title “George Sand en costume d’étudiant” was very likely to be a later addition, following the narrative that Sand had delineated retrospectively in her autobiography. In the eighth volume of her Histoires de ma vie (1856) she detailed her decision to dress in men’s clothing as a purely economic choice, resulting from the separation of her husband and her relocation from Nohant to Paris in December 1830—in the still fermenting political habitat of the July Revolution. Because there existed no legal divorce between 1816 and 1884 in France and the husband tended to assume absolute control of the wife’s capital upon marriage, Sand had to rely on the stipend that her estranged husband, Baron Dudevant, decided to provide her with. This stipend stood in stark contrast to the money she had inherited from her father’s aristocratic family and had been able to dispense with when living with her husband in a provincial mansion. Therefore, an economic change was imposed on Sand that coincided not only with political manifestations of change at the time but, moreover, with her decision to become a culture worker. I was eager to become deprovincialised and acquainted with all the ideas and forms of my time. Here I sensed the need, I possessed the curiosity; except for the most salient works I knew nothing about the contemporary arts . . . I knew well the impossibilities for a poor woman to indulge in these fancies. Balzac had said: “One cannot live as a woman in Paris with less than twentyfive thousand francs.” And this elegant paradox had become true for a woman who wanted to be an artist. When I saw my young friends from Berry, my childhood companions, living in Paris with as little as I and keeping up with everything of interest to bright youth. Literary and political events, the excitement of the theatre and the museum, clubs, the streets, they saw everything and went everywhere. My legs were as good as theirs, those steady little feet from Berry that had learned to walk on rutted roads, balancing on heavy wooden shoes. But on

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the Parisian pavement I was like a ship on ice. My thin shoes cracked every second day, my sagging stockings tripped me; I did not know how to lift my skirts. I was dirty, tired, sick with cold, and I saw shoes and clothes, not to mention tiny velvet hats soaked by dripping gutters, ruined with frightening speed.2 It was at this point that Aurore Dupin became George Sand, a woman constructing herself according to the contemporary type-form of a male bourgeois. As such the impulse must be regarded first as socioeconomic not psychological. Sand built her persona in response to a material need, not a subjective predilection or ontological dilemma. She did not mean to transgress sexual mores or ask for female emancipation; she required access to the culture industry she hoped would thence sustain her. I had myself made a redingote-guérite of strong grey cloth, complete with matching trousers and waistcoat. With a grey hat and a large woollen cravat I looked exactly like a first-year student. I cannot possibly express the pleasure my boots gave me: I would have gladly slept with them on . . . My little irontipped heels kept me solid on the sidewalks. I  would fly from one end of Paris to the other. To me it seemed like I  was traveling around the world. Furthermore, my garments had nothing to fear . . . Nobody paid any attention to me or doubted my disguise.3 In order to succeed artistically Sand had to secure entry to an arena that was subject to a strict gender binary and economic rule—for example, in separating the bourgeois theater audience into women, who were restricted to expensive boxes, and men, who had access to the less pricier stalls.4 As a modernist, Sand’s method was structural: she took this gender binary and incorporated it within her own self. She became a female culture worker in the form of male attire. Yet, to repeat, this was neither a travesty borne out of a psychological predisposition, nor an exclusive gesture of female empowerment by adopting the sartorial language of the sexual oppressor. As Gavarni’s illustration showed, Sand continued to display the clearly gendered physiology of her body, but she surrounded it by another form: the sartorial one of the male bourgeois. In retrospect, this form was then specified as that of a “student,” an aspirational type-character who had not attained yet the full social role of his gender but was in the process of being inducted into the socioeconomic power structure through specific education and forms of (cultural) consumption. Sand’s solution to the structural problem of the gender binary that had restricted her access was therefore a cumulative one, not a fusion or amalgamation. A few months after Sand’s first outing of her persona, Gavarni would record this event. But he added to it in a significant fashion. The subtitle of the lithograph, and therefore

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the actual, contemporary context constructed for it, read:  “Passons vite” (“Quickly, Let’s Get Out of Here”). This provided, again in retrospect, a very modernist, self-reflexive narrative. Since Sand’s access to the culture industry was shown thus to occur via a very specific event, namely the performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani, proclaimed as the first dramatic instigation of Romanticism in France at Paris’s Théâtre-Français on February 25, 1830. In his lithograph of Sand and de Latouche Gavarni alluded to the fact that the fashionable romantics, among them Balzac in his lured dandyism and Gautier with his red waistcoat and long hair, had rendered the stalls of the theater a performative arena for the critical Bataille d’Hernani, by proclaiming subjectivity against the prevailing classicist drama and thereby instigating an artistic avantgarde and a new fashion. De Latouche was anything but a supporter of this latest modernist trend and his facial expression in the lithographic portrait spoke of his ennui and opposition to the spectacle that surrounded the performance of Hugo’s piece. “Quickly, Let’s Get Out of Here” is therefore also an early critical response to Romanticism (duly noted by the men whose heads are all turned by Sand’s and de Latouche’s early exit). And although Sand’s vague smile appears to indicate that she might have enjoyed the access to the stalls in the company of her male friends, she also left behind the Bataille d’Hernani, in order to move onto her own contribution to modernism, which would come in form of her first acclaimed novel Indiana, written during 1831 and authored by her newly created persona. Gavarni’s lithograph was organized demonstratively around the binary within Sand:  the construct of the male bourgeois author versus the political and intellectual femme du monde, the wearer of the redingote-guérite as opposed to the salon hostess in her silk gown. This binary would come to determine almost all of perceptions that Sand was subjected to across the nineteenth century, and only the most astute of observers were able to comprehend through her figure the much more complex mechanism that operated it in the arena of French culture industry of the time (more on this below). The writer herself gave an early clue as to how she intended her performance as “George Sand” to be understood. She wrote in her autobiography of a first instance when her outer construction of the male bourgeois encountered a less than observant, older member of her class. In the theater—to attend yet another romantic drama with de Latouche—she happened to be seated next to le Père Rollinat, a renowned barrister from her home county of Berry. I was sure that my disguise did not fool this fine gentleman and that he amused himself much with supporting me in my role. To me it thus felt like the conversation at a masked ball, and I did so very little to keep up the fiction that I was very surprised to learn much later that he had had so much good faith in me.5

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For the modernist, such a fictional construct in social life provides a test case for the fiction in art production. The autobiographical detail of the encounter was to be used repeatedly in Sand’s novels, where women dress up as men in order to right a wrong, aide a (female) companion or solve a moral dilemma. All these fictions eventually resolve themselves with the female character abandoning her erstwhile role and returning to the dress code of her sex.6 The construct of the woman in male attire is therefore a narrative ploy and a poncif, as well as furthering the construct of the modernist artist as new and transgressive. Years later Sand remarked to de Girardin, upon being accused of a fictional but less than flattering portrayal of the empress Eugénie in one of her novels: “Any fictional character is stronger and more logical than nature produces, both in the good and the bad.”7 Yet in Sand’s case the material character of dressing up is not only to be found in the making of the artist but in the concrete making of sartorial fashion. Her father, Maurice Dupin, an officer whose grandfather was the Duke of Saxony and field marshal to Louis XV, had married Sophie-Victoire Delaborde from the Parisian working class, whose father had been selling birds on the banks of the river Seine. Sophie Delaborde worked as a seamstress, similar to her sister, and they both made occasional use of a license that has been issued in the aftermath of the French Revolution, allowing women to dress in male attire.8 Again, working through an economic structure, rather than from ideas of emancipation or empowerment, Sand recalled in her autobiography asking her mother how it might be possible to live “in elegance and comfort with a pension of 3,500 francs and how to survive in such an awful weather in even the most modest of attire, if one did not want to remain cooped up indoors.”9 Using her expertise in altering (often second-hand) clothes for her working-class clientele, Sand’s mother offered a most pragmatic solution: It was very easy at my age and with the things I was accustomed to; when I was young and your father lacked money, he suggested that I dress up as a boy. My sister did the same and we went everywhere with our husbands, to the theatre, to all possible gatherings. It was a simple economy of means in our circle.10 The material character of her performance as the male bourgeois culture-worker “George Sand” therefore had a very concrete origin in the remaking of male fashion for female wearers. It was practical, economical and therefore modern in its rational response to a problem posed by a gender binary which, even after the relative liberalization in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, persisted with the traditional economic and moral determinants of the woman’s body. Yet the fashion of the time—and fashion is here a word that encompasses much more than clothing—coined the femininity in a way so that retailoring the sartorial cover

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could be understood as a novelty rather than a protest. The formalism within modernity confined this change to a material one of the surface rather than a materialist one of economic and legal emancipation for women. The political dimension of the defiant gesture to dress up in a man’s frock coat and trousers came into its own a few years later, when Sand participated in the protest against the oppressive July monarchy, having supported in particular the Lyon silk workers in their public trial of April 1835. Sand’s lover at the time, Michel de Bourges, was one of the prominent lawyers defending the activist workers who had been captured during the second révolte des Canuts in November 1834, when more than 600 Lyon silk weavers (including other artisans and families members) had been killed and 10,000 imprisoned by Louis Philippe’s government. Every day, dressed as a man, in the midst of a hundred of other travestis [cross-dressers], whom the National Guard pretended to ignore, and whose presence demonstrated women’s keen interest in prohibited spaces, she entered the chambre des pairs.11 She wrote “letters of the defenders of the accused,” which Michel often edited to make them more radically expressive.12 Sand’s political opinions moved between an enthusiasm for structural reform, for which she espoused Saint-Simonian or even socialist ideas, and a real-political anxiety about rights for the working class. An aristocrat by birth and sentiment and a devout catholic in spirit, Sand did not condone the emancipation of those bound to threaten the socioeconomic and moral status quo of the bourgeoisie and this included, alas, female activism. Her friendship with liberals like the lawyer de Bourges, the parliamentarian Louis Blanc or the art critic Théophile Thoré (William Bürger) did not extend to acknowledging the systemic problems within her immediate political and societal environment. The subjectivism that the modernist artist claimed for herself as a radical gesture against tradition and orthodoxy, simultaneously denied her any collective sensibility that would demonstrate against the ruling socioeconomic and political order. It did not help, of course, that this order after 1830 and 1848 was increasingly recruited from the bourgeois class, which persisted in espousing its own mobility at the exclusion of the working class below it. It seems appropriate therefore to speak of a very particular materiality in the case of George Sand, following her mother in retailoring male dress to suit her own travesty, and developing an artistic persona that cultivated a transgression on the surface only (pen name, the sex of her first-person narrators, commissioned portraits by Gavarni, etc.), yet not within the socioeconomic structure of modernity. So, no new epistemology in critical thought, let alone an ontological dimension in developing her public persona as a political activist, could emerge from this materiality. It remained what it was first and foremost in the very

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materialist nineteenth century: a poncif for the renewed commodity production in the culture industry.

À la recherche du féminin perdue Yet the “radical” surface of this materiality cannot be ignored. It is significant also for the dialectic within Gavarni’s work, having made the objectification of the female form its subject through its ostensible material opposite, male fashion. Gavarni’s overt misogyny and his reactionary political views appeared to make him an odd collaborator for Sand. But, in keeping with the premise of purely formal solutions to structural problems, Gavarni’s motif of women in trousers surfaced as a perfect fit for the motif of travesty Sand’s narratives. It was not so much that the two artists were aligned in formal techniques or congruent in their conceptual setup, but in both Sand and Gavarni trousers for women, although apparent manifestations of parity between the sexes and a dissolution of the material binary of gendered fashions, were exposed as opposite to egalitarian feminism. In the dissolution of the material binary trousers for women constituted a fortiori the objectification of the female body as an object of consumption that stood in absolute opposite to the modernist subjectification of the man’s body, as captain of industry, parliamentarian, avant-garde artist, curb crawler, etc. The feminized trousers were part of an established system of signification rather than an actual formal challenge. Despite the public demonstration by Sand’s mother and by herself of sporting trousers they were first and foremost part of the semantics of representation within modernism. This part became significant since modernism used the critical reflection on representation, artistic as well as social, as its operational mode. Representation was a field in which (creative) subjectivity could be matched openly by reifying and objectifying structures of modern (socioeconomic) production and therefore offered up the instrumental dialectic of subject and object. In contrast to creation that maintained the premise of subjective autonomy, representation denoted mechanical means, serialization, copying and other desubjectifying measures. It therefore was able to acknowledge the grounding of bourgeois cultural production within subjectivity—required to ensure the above-mentioned continuity of the sociopolitical and economic system—and build into it, via objectification, a “speculative mode of cognition” (Hegel),13 which did not simply contradict or challenge subjectivity but sublated it within reifying, formal structures. Hegel had chosen the term sublate (aufheben) as a two-fold meaning that was essential to the epistemological import of his dialectical method. Aufheben means the cancelling or negating of a premise, as much as picking up, setting aside and preserving it.14 His dialectical method posited the process of sublation as instrumental for philosophical speculation and application across the nineteenth century (cf. Marx), in which the determination

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from the moment of understanding both cancels and preserves itself, as it pushes on to or passes into its opposite. This process is instrumental for passing from one position to a subsequent, more sophisticated and complex one, which underpins also the development of cognition within social and political history.15 For our discussion sublation suggests preserving the meaning of the trousers as sartorial staple of patriarchy, as the very garment that envelops the ruling phallus, and dialectically cancelling out this meaning within its erotically charged challenge,16 the donning of the trousers by the sex that did not possess the phallus but was claimed to desire it for sociopolitical emancipation—which, in fact, was not understood as being allowed to wear trousers but rather to vote, file for divorce, be elected for public office, etc. It is important in this context to recognize the phallus not retrospectively as a Freudian/Lacanian signifier but as a historical and psychosocial construct that had been reified in the clothing of the contemporary male bourgeois (Figure 3.2). One of Gavarni’s lithographs of 1837 was entitled “Des habits d’homme” (“In Men’s Clothing”) and presented the aftermath of a one-night stand. The young woman is adjusting the braces on a pair of trousers that she has picked off from the chair where they had been dumped prior to sex. Her mischievous glance back at the bed and the close linear circumscription of her silhouette (despite the oversized trousers) defined her essentially through sex. Sex in both senses of the word: as narrative of erotic encounter, intercourse and furtive absconding, as much as denoting her objectified gender. Gavarni showed the woman as assuming the phallus, when she rejects the female garb that had been discarded by her feet and dons the trousers, to signify her dominant part in the encounter. The man is left asleep after the intercourse, unable to prevent the theft of his nether garment, while the woman remains alert and ready to take on his role. Yet it was understood within the contemporary order that this role was but momentary and ephemeral, aided by costume and masquerade, and as such a theatrical gesture, not an emancipated call to arms. The masculine order was briefly but demonstratively sublated by the way in which the woman on the one hand removes and repurposes the trousers for herself while on the other hand preserving it through a binary articulation, via its form as a male garment for the female body, in the aftermath of a traditional congress of opposite genders. Unlike Honoré Daumier, his collaborator at the satirical republican monthly Le Charivari, Gavarni did not produce universal types that spoke of human ontology, in the manner of a comédie humaine, which Daumier’s friend Balzac chronicled. Gavarni’s types were resolutely contemporary, metaphors of bourgeois follies of their time and very much understood as transitory and insubstantial. They would offer a momentary critique of the socioeconomic structure and could not function as exposing deep-rooted biases or the effects of alienation—as in Daumier’s biting social satire—but operated as instantaneous binaries that could be satirized for their formal absurdity (Figure 3.3).

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Figure 3.2  Paul Gavarni, In Men’s Clothing, lithograph, 183 × 127 mm, from the series Les Petits Bonheurs des Demoiselles, originally published in Le Charivari, April 5, 1837.

The caption for Gavarni’s caricature in Le Charivari for August 3, 1840, comprised of the following exclamation:  “T’morrow morning my sweet fiancé will bawl at me: Ah! But . . . damn! Tonight I am Simonienne: breakin’ down the conjugal and livin’ as Chicard!” The young woman in her trousers declared a short-lived allegiance to Saint-Simonian beliefs—shorthand for socialist leanings and free love—while spending the night as a chicard, one of the contemporary characters at masque balls in Paris between 1830 and 1850, who distinguished himself/herself by exaggerated dance moves. For a brief moment, the liberated movement in trousers appeared aligned with the radical politics of the SaintSimonians, and her costume seemed to permit a transgression of the bourgeois

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Figure  3.3 Paul Gavarni, “T’morrow morning my sweet fiancé will bawl at me:  Ah! But . . . damn! Tonight I am Simonienne: breakin’ down the conjugal and livin’ as Chicard!,” lithograph, 196 × 153  mm, from the series Les Débardeurs, originally published in Le Charivari, August 3, 1840.

norms of marriage and conjugal sex. Yet in its structure it is but a fashionable stance, afforded by the new, bifurcated nether garments, not as evidence of any emancipation or political conviction that would have been frowned upon by her class. George Sand similarly would dismiss radical feminism as aligned with socialist utopia: Quite how do these ladies understand woman’s liberation? Is it as in SaintSimon, Enfantin or Fourier? Do they suggest the destruction of marriage and

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proclaim promiscuity . . . Well . . . I reject it, and I leave it to public morals to do justice proper to such deplorable fantasies.17 When the artistic subject of individual sexual transgression threatened to become an enlightened categorical imperative that demanded social and political action, Sand and Gavarni withdrew behind bourgeois norms; what seemed permissible for the subjective artist could not constitute an objective challenge. Costume should not become custom but had to remain a formal construct without real ontological value or political meaning. Therefore, Gavarni’s series of women in trousers—with the notable exception of his early portrait of Sand—were situated within the confines of the masked ball. His series Les Débardeurs (published as a collection in 1848 but sketched out for journals since the early 1830s) popularized a contemporary “masculine” look for the eroticized and objectified female body. The female débardeuse, in close analogy to her male counterpart, dressed without restrictive undergarments, in black velvet trousers fastened with brass buttons and open-neck shirt, girded only by a flowing sash:  the sartorial equivalent of a gift to be quickly unwrapped for easy consumption. Flat leather shoes and a neckerchief completed a look that was based on the working class dress of the stevedores who unloaded the Seine barges, but had trickled-up to the carnival’s Bal de l’Opéra, which was co-organized by Gavarni.18 The look of the débardeuse became widely popularized when the actress Pauline Virginie Déjazet sported it in 1840 for her role in the vaudeville piece Indiana et Charlemagne at the Palais Royal—which was based on George Sand’s first literary success, her novel Indiana (1832). Les débardeurs were a fashion for a particular space and time:  the nightly masked ball during the week of the Parisian carnival. Within this context, as suggested by Gavarni to the viewer of his caricatures, his imagination could run wild. To him women appeared to desire the phallus not merely by dressing up as men but by demanding promiscuous sex from them. For the bourgeois reader this behavior in the fictional habitat of the ball was a masturbatory projection without any real political consequence:  save in his knowledge that women continued to exist as objectified and marginalized within his culture, he was all too happy to embrace their demand of his attire/phallus for a brief moment of imagined transgression.19 Across the series Les Débardeurs Gavarni presented a narrative of the ball that comprised of preamble, exposé, dramatic encounter and eventual resolution and repose, offering thus a complete fiction of the débardeuse as moving from female to male attire and then back again into the fold of her sex (Figure 3.4). First the viewer encountered two young women still dressed in conventional gowns and corsets, one demanding to know of the other: “Come to the ball tonight! . . . What are you waiting for?” Her reply: “A pair of trousers.” A further caricature in Le Charivari of 1840 showed a carny at an imaginary fairground, displaying a male and female débardeur/débardeuse in identical

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Figure 3.4  Paul Gavarni, “—Come to the ball tonight! . . . What are you waiting for?—A pair of trousers,” lithograph no. 1 (second series), from Les Gens de Paris: En Carnaval in Le Diable à Paris, vol. 2. Paris: Hetzel, 1846, 67–71.

look and posture, and advertised them as:  “The débardeur, manly and womanly . . . alive! . . . brought back from a trip around the world by Monsieur Chicard, celebrated naturalist, with permission of the authorities!  .  .  .  The débardeur is carnivore, smoker, rabid and nocturnal (Figure 3.5). It eats game, poultry and fish! . . . It eats oysters, baked sole, and lobster mayonnaise! It eats anything . . . it is said that it even eats its little ones . . . very distressing.” The ironic heightening of the débardeur’s exotic extraneousness referred back to his/her potential danger to undermine norms of civil conduct (Figure 3.6). Two years earlier Gavarni had depicted another mixed couple of débardeurs in studied

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Figure  3.5  Paul Gavarni, “The débardeur, manly and womanly  .  .  .  alive!  .  .  .  brought back from a trip around the world by Monsieur Chicard, celebrated naturalist, with the permission of the authorities! . . . The débardeur is a carnivore, a smoker, is rabid and nocturnal. It eats game, poultry and fish! . . . It eats oysters, sole au gratin, and lobster mayonnaise! It eats anything . . . it is even said that it eats its little ones . . . very distressing,” lithograph, 198 × 154  mm, from the series Les Débardeurs, originally published in Le Charivari, January 19, 1840.

annoyance, being questioned by a local magistrate who scolds them: “You were not aware that this dance was prohibited by the authorities? Unlikely . . . give me your names and occupations.” If they thus seemed to present a fashionable subculture, the role of the woman was portrayed as supremely confrontational within it (Figure  3.7). Repeatedly, Gavarni explored the similarity of costume across men and woman that rendered

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Figure  3.6 Paul Gavarni, “You were not aware that this dance was prohibited by the authorities? Unlikely . . . give me your names and occupations.—Benjamin Leger, employed at Menus-Plaisirs.—Félicité Baupertuis, of independent means (rentière),” lithograph, 200 × 159 mm, from the series Le Carnaval, originally published in Le Charivari, November 28, 1838.

erstwhile docile girls dangerously egalitarian in their attitudes. The caption for a lithograph of 1847 recounted a couple passing each other on the staircase in congruent dance movement, with one (it does not matter whether it is the male or female) greeting: “At your service, my good Sir!,” while the other echoed: “Your obedient servant, Madam.” Another image depicted a couple’s similar (re)encounter (Figure 3.8), this time the surprised male exclaiming: “Sweet Jesus! It’s my lover from Saturday!”; to which the débardeuse replies with a demonstratively casual “Hullo, mate!” Here, sexual congress among equals for a night was imagined as no longer of moral or social consequence but as repeat dégagé encounters—an outrageous

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Figure 3.7  Paul Gavarni, “At your service, my good Sir! Your obedient servant, Madam,” lithograph, 195 × 166 mm, from the series Carnaval, originally published in Le Charivari, December 29, 1847.

fantasy for the contemporary male bourgeois. Such sexual liberation had to be satirized as a one-off absurdity, and the caption for a drawing of a woman in trousers, throwing her arms up in a simultaneous expression of freedom and despair, while her companion lies prostrate next to a glass of champagne, accordingly varied Madame de Pompadour’s apocalyptic (and possibly apocryphal) cry:  “Après nous, le deluge” with:  “Après le débardeur, la fin du monde” (“After the débardeur, the end of the world”) (Figure 3.9). The revolution in attire and attitude could only end in floods of tears. The conclusion to Gavarni’s serialized narrative offered a resolve and resolution to the potential challenge by liberated, promiscuous women in trousers. His lithograph

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Figure  3.8 Paul Gavarni, “Sweet Jesus! It’s my lover from Saturday! Hullo, mate!,” lithograph, 195 × 167 mm, from the series Carnaval, originally published in Le Charivari, December 19, 1847.

of 1846, entitled Scene from the Private Life of the Débardeur, showed a woman, opening her blouse not to entice a lover but to breastfeed her child, while an older companion (grandmother or nanny, or indeed her husband) engages the viewer with an approving glance (Figure 3.10). Here, the phallus has been restored to male powers alone and the female has returned to the family home, tending to her principal duties as mother. The social balance is thus restored, the woman’s breast desexualized and the black trousers of the débardeuse become a sartorial footnote concealed by the white swaddling of the baby.

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Figure  3.9  Paul Gavarni, “After the débardeur, the end of the world,” lithograph no.  1 from the series Les Gens de Paris: En Carnaval, in Le Diable à Paris, vol. 1. Paris: Hetzel, 1845, 161–5.

Conclusion Eduard Fuchs, perhaps the most astute analyst of nineteenth century’s transitoriness and ephemerality,20 had aligned fashion, avant-garde and bourgeois tradition in Gavarni’s caricatures. The most important aspect is that he created the modern bourgeois within the art of the nineteenth century. Gavarni has monumentalized first and

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Figure 3.10  Paul Gavarni, Scene from the Private Life of the Débardeur, lithograph, 193 × 164 mm, from the series Carnaval, 1846.

most poignantly in artistic terms the unofficial reality, the thousand intimate nuances of the bourgeois . . .Gavarni was a fashion designer, perhaps the most successful who has ever lived . . .21 He knew better than most how the bourgeois lives within his clothes.22 Gavarni’s record of fashion, or indeed its creation (as in the designed look of les débardeurs) functioned not according to an anthropological method but as revelatory index of bourgeois intimacy, codified within the surface that the French middle class had fashioned for itself. Fuchs, like Charles Baudelaire before him,23 linked the particular artistic representation of the bourgeois with the political reality that had permitted his rise to power. Gavarni has often been characterized as apolitical. That is nonsense. Gavarni had political sensibilities, but he was reactionary to a high degree, similar to most Bohémians once they become commercially successful. Gavarni belonged, similar to his two best friends, the much-overrated brothers Goncourt, to the spiritual satellites of the third Napoleon.24

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The dialectic between formalist method—Fuchs also assigned Gavarni the singular skill of being able to create types proper—and its inherent critique was revealed here as a self-sustaining mechanism for the European bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. Fuchs went on to describe Gavarni’s misogyny as a particularly pertinent example of how formal types exposed established patterns of thought precisely in the most fleeting and contemporary of imagery. Yet the succession of formalized aesthetics and fashions that appeared in response to the socioeconomic divisions in modern industrialized societies only addressed them as additive surfaces that were based on stringently maintained binaries, which instrumented precisely such structural divisions. Like Gavarni, Sand suffered from the bias of divesting one sex from another, of contrasting one gender with the other, rather than inquiring into sublating this form of gendered cognition to develop a dialectical relationship that would allow the contemporary oppression of women and gender divisions in general to pass into their opposite. In 1845, writer Jules Amadée Barbey d’Aurevilly, who was partial to using female pseudonyms in his critique of the arts and of fashion, wrote to his friend, the translator and editor Guillaume-Stanislas Trébutien: Wearing petticoats [jupons] when writing, in the same way that George Sand wore trousers with a button fly, is to mock the public and make them swallow the fact that this emerges from a new pen, entirely virginal (alas, this is her only claim to virginity!), wielded by a woman of the world.25 Modernism, in applying across the nineteenth-century novel production methods, new materials, designs and creative techniques to economic, social and political changes, had to comprehend novelty as a structural technique not as an aesthetic innovation. The “woman of the world” who was wielding a pen to activate new cognition had to wear trousers not necessarily in the material sense—although it clearly had distinguished Sand—but symbolically, in reclaiming a fundamental way to conceal the patriarchal phallus. It seemed clear that the primacy of formal and rational responses in modernism, that had echoed the formalized mechanics of contemporary production and the related gender distinctions, were not an actualized conceptual basis but had emerged from modernism’s self-reflexive historiography and the emulation by the culture industry of the socioeconomic structures of industrial capitalism. Formality and gender specificity were not inherent markers for an avant-garde or for fashion they marked an a posteriori contextualization to perpetuate a positivist history. As much as modernist tendencies were not coined by men alone fashionable objectifying trends were not exclusive to woman’s domain. Both genders contributed alike to the dialectic of production and consumption of the modern object in culture industry, with the proviso that they had to mirror the contemporary societal structure with all its rampant misogyny and class bias in view of who controlled the production of

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culture and who was given access to respective manifestations at any given time in any given space—from the Parisian street corner, via the “olympe” of popular theaters to the masked Bal de l’Opéra. So, what does the inquiry into binaries in art, most of all gendered ones, reveal about structural problems within modernity and how can a dialectic method address them? A  rallying call went out by feminists to have Sand selected for the constituent assembly of 1848. In an open letter, published in La Voix des femmes of April 6, 1848, feminist journalist Eugénie Niboyet wrote: “The representative who unites all our sympathies, comes in form of him and of her:  male through virility, female by divine intervention and by poetry; therefore we want to nominate Sand.”26 The constant move between male and female within one character was crucial, as it was congruent to the oscillation between the subjective (poetess) and the objective (political activist) that was germane to both Sand and to her public appearances in male and female attire, respectively, and therefore could distinguish her as the only true modern advocate of women’s rights. In the novel Isadora (1845), Sand, in the guise of the eponymous heroine, played off the masculinity of her pen name against the “femininity” of her literary character. Isadora experimented with the format of the modernist epistolary novel by having the heroine publish a fragmented journal that began with an essentialist problem. The “third question” of this journal (the two earlier questions appeared to have been “lost”) was: “Is woman not equal to man in the designs and thought of the divine?”27 This question, Isadora determined, was badly put. “One needs to ask:  Is humanity [l’espèce humaine] not composed of two different beings, man and woman? But in this edit I  am omitting divine thought, which is not my intention. In creating humanity, did God not form two distinct and separate beings, man and woman?”28 Yet Isadora concluded: “Revisit this edit as I am not satisfied with it yet.”29 Divinity stood here as the superstructure that would exert authority over both cognition and social formation, harmonizing conflicting binaries into an absolute belief system. Although this might have been a solution for the fictional Isadora (or indeed for the equally fictional “George Sand”), for the political actor and writer the evocation of divinity must have felt an unsatisfactory maneuver in overcoming the gendered binary that determined her world. Gustave Flaubert, through his analyses of bourgeois dystopia in Madame Bovary and other works, came perhaps closest to discerning the dialectical potential in the figure and work of his great friend Sand, when he wrote to her in a letter of 1867: There is only one sex. A  man and a woman are so much the same thing that one does not really understand the amount of distinctions and subtle reasoning that feed societies in regard to it. I have seen it in infancy and in the

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development of my children. My son is I, therefore a woman, in the same way that my daughter is in turn a man.30 He proceeded to pose Sand a fundamental question:  “What is your view on women then, you who are the Third Sex?,”31 yet never received a reply. This third sex, in structural analogy to Isadora’s third question, aspired not to formal solution to modernism’s anti-feminism but suggested one founded in the fluidity of cognition—to address in equal measure cultural innovation as much as socioeconomic and political reforms. The third sex was not about formalizing a fusion or synthesis, but embodied concretely the necessary dialectic in proposing to sublate the “second” sex, the socially denigrated female gender,32 into its socioeconomic antithesis, the “first,” dominant sex of the male. This embodiment can be traced in the fashion of nineteenth-century bourgeois women wearing trousers: a residue of the first sex as worn by the second one, so that a reminder of what was to be opposed in order to emancipate was preserved within concealment. For its progressive form of cognition, the second sex had to cancel out the exclusive significance of the first in order to determine freely what had to come; even if it took another half-a-century to arrive formally in the guise of universal suffrage and a whole century in the popularization of women’s trousers. Whereas after one-and-a-half centuries it has still not arrived in terms of equality of gender.

Notes 1 D e Latouche also suggested the pseudonym “George Sand” as alluding to the student Karl Ludwig Sand, who had assassinated the reactionary dramatist and consul August von Kotzebue in 1819 as an early radical gesture for democratic emancipation across the German states. See George Sand, Histoire de ma vie, vol. 8 (Saint-Cyr-Sur-Loire: Pirot, 1999 [orig. 1856]), 341. 2 Sand, Histoire de ma vie, 289–90. 3 Ibid.,  290–1. 4 A working-class audience of women and men could share in many Parisian theaters and music halls le paradis, the cheapest seats high up above the balconies. For a dramatic reenactment and narrative of such a working-class theater audience between 1828 and 1835, see Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert’s film Les Enfants du paradis (1945). 5 S and, Histoire de ma vie, 310. Sand pushed the narrative further in her autobiography when she described how a year later she met the son of the barrister and told him about her role-play, upon which she was presented once again to the father Rollinat who—although Sand was now dressed in women’s clothing—recognized her face from the theater before and declared: “how stupid was I” (311–12). 6 S ee, for example, Pierre Vermeylen, Les Idées politiques et sociales de George Sand (Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1984), 20; or Bernard

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Hamon, George Sand et la politique: “Cette vilaine chose . . .” (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 108. 7 C ited in Annarosa Poli, George Sand et les années terribles (Bologna/Paris: Pá tron/ Nizet, 1975), 24. 8 A decree (“DB 58”), passed the 16 brumaire, an IX (November 7, 1800), asked “all women who desire to dress as men to present themselves to the police prefecture in Paris to obtain an authorization that will be issued only after an examination by a health officer.” See Christine Bard, “Le ‘DB58’ aux Archives de la Préfecture de Police,” Clio: Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés 10 (1999): 155–67. 9 Sand, Histoire de ma vie, 301–2. 10 I bid. See also the great materialist biography of Sand by Wladimir Karénine, that is, Varvára Dmítrievna Komaróva-Stasova, a Russian writer who wrote under a masculine pseudonym and emulated Sand’s life-story in her early novel Musia; she also wrote essays on Sand’s connection to Herzen and Bakunin. Wladimir Karénine, George Sand: Sa vie et ses œuvres [1899–1926] (Geneva: Slatkine, 2000), vol. 1 (1804–33), 317–18. 11 F rance’s equivalent of the British House of Lords, kept in session during two extreme phases of the monarchist restauration between June 1814 (Napoléon’s return) and February 1848, when it was disbanded eventually in favor of the more broadly representative national assembly. 12 M ichelle Perrot (ed.), George Sand: Politique et polémique (1843–1850) (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1997), 16. 13 § 79 and § 82 of G. F. W. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic (part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991 [orig. 1817]), 125, 131–3. 14 S ee §81 and, on overcoming dualism, § 95 of Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 128–31, 150–52; on the “sublation of becoming,” see G. F. W. Hegel, The Science of Logic (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1989 [orig. 1812]), 106–8. 15 S ee Ernst Bloch, Subjekt-Objekt: Erläuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1962 [orig. 1949]), 126. 16 This eroticism is generated as such by the patriarchal gaze, too. 17 Sand, Correspondance, vol. 8, 401; see Pierre Vermeylen, Les Idées politiques et sociales de George Sand (Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1984), 34. The Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) was a political economist who intended to reform the socioeconomic role of the working class. His follower, Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864), developed Saint-Simonianism into a social movement that also rejected traditional marital arrangement in favor of “free love.” Charles Fourier (1772–1837) had been an early socialist philosopher who experimented with new forms of communal living (cf. my introduction). 18 G arvarni intended to expand on the invention of structural types toward the invention of an entire cultural structure—seasonal and fashionable—of display and consumption for his class. Near the end of his life he claimed to have invented the Parisian “carnival” as such; see Georges Maldague, “En Carnival,” Le Petit Parisien 2, no. 3770 (February 23, 1887): 2–3. 19 F or a certain period in the nineteenth century, Parisian prostitutes indeed adopted the male habit of the débardeur as a particular trademark. See

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Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, vol. 1 (Paris: Baillière, 1836). 20 E duard Fuchs was a Marxist historian, curator, collector, and political activist. His interests lay in moral and erotic histories and ephemeral art forms (crafts, caricatures, etc.). See Walter Benjamin singling out Fuchs’s critical approach as instrumental for his own materialist critique of nineteenth-century modernism in the “Arcades-Project: ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian,’” New German Critique 5 (Spring 1975 [orig. 1937]): 27–58. 21 T he catalogue raisonné of Gavarni’s work devotes a quarter of its sections to “fashion and costumes”; cf. J. Amerhault and E. Bocher (eds), L’Œuvre de Gavarni (Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1873), 567–90. 22 Ernst Fuchs, Gavarni (Vienna: Langen, 1925), 19–20. 23 S ee Charles Baudelaire, “De l’essence du rire et généralement, du comique dans les arts plastiques,” in Œuvres completes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975 [orig. 1855]), 1342–52. 24 Fuchs, Gavarni, 18. 25 B arbey d’Aurevilly’s letter to Trébutien, cited in Eugène Grelé, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly: sa vie et son oeuvre (Caen: Jouan, 1902), 175. 26 Letter cited in Perrot (ed.), George Sand: Politique et polémique, 531. 27 George Sand, Isidora: Journal d’un solitaire à Paris (Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1990 [orig. 1845]), 40. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 George Sand, Correspondance, vol. 20 (June 1866–May 1868) (Paris: Garnier, 1983), 297. 31 L etter of September 19, 1868, in Thierry Gillybœuf (ed.), Gustave Flaubert—George Sand: Correspondance (1863–1876) (Rennes: La Part Commune, 2011), 256. 32 S imone de Beauvoir articulated the formalist—and essentialist—positioning of femininity as “le deuxième sexe” much later in her eponymous book of 1949. Flaubert’s “third sex” anticipated, too, the late modernist mediation of women’s roles in Gilles Lipovetsky’s La troisième femme (1997).

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4 MÉNILMONTANT TIME, SPACE, AND URBANITY Louise Wallenberg Translated by Rune Engebretsen

Introduction In the tug-of-war between old and new, between exclusivity and accessibility, which is characteristic of what we call modernity, the media of film occupies a central place. This is perhaps not quite unexpected. From its inception, film quickly became part and parcel of the visual dimension of an expanding mass culture that was accessible to people of all classes. As such it emerged as an art form non grata, at least as viewed by the defenders of the finer arts. From their standpoint, film was seen not only as an art form non grata; it was no art form at all—but a mere popular diversion, entertainment for the masses. And beyond its status as art, or lack of it, film became the object of heated debates also in other respects. As a technical and mechanical innovation attracting large audiences from all social classes, and quickly becoming a big draw in being experienced as representing reality in a contemporary here and now, film would be discussed and criticized in moral terms. In the early part of the 1900s, numerous voices arose from conservative and religious quarters and from various sobriety, educational, and charitable movements of the middle class, blaming film for misleading youth and the working class, or for being opium of sorts for the masses. As a direct consequence of this criticism, controlled film censorship was introduced, partly to regulate the film industry and partly to protect its audiences.1 Moral issues arising from filmic representation included speculative violence, the embellishment of criminality, and the display of eroticism. The gun sights of the moral defenders would especially target the image of the urbane, selfsufficient, fashion-conscious, and sexually liberated woman—“the new woman.” On the screen, it was this new woman as a young and enterprising “flapper,” notably represented by Hollywood stars such as Colleen Moore and Clara Bow,

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who would incite strong, conflicting feelings. The free and easy disposition that these young stars displayed through their emancipatory roles shocked a large segment of the public, whereas another segment found their representations immensely attractive.2 Despite the censorship, the medium of film continued to grow at a rapidly accelerating pace, both as entertainment and art, in the 1910s and 1920s. With the onset of the 1930s—and film undergoing a revolutionary technological innovation and change, first by the addition of sound and then color—it turned tremendously popular. Conservative and religious voices in America, however, kept persisting in their attempts to censor film production, which, by then, had bolted out of hand with daring representations, notably of violence and sex. In 1930, an attempt to come up with a production code met with little success. In August 1934, however, the so-called Hayes Code (named after MPPDA president Will H. Hayes) was introduced, and this time, the censoring of explicit representations of sex, violence, drug use, and crime would come to have a significant impact.3 This censorship code was initiated and hailed mostly by conservative Catholics and members of Reformed educational groups, who in their literature claimed that “bad” films clearly led to “bad” behavior. The film historian Thomas Doherty has called this code “a crusade against Hollywood immorality.”4 But how, then, did the cultural critics view the film and its status, or nonstatus, as a form of art? During the 1930s and 1940s, the foremost thinkers of the Frankfurt School—primarily Walter Benjamin (to be sure, only loosely affiliated with the Frankfurt School, otherwise formally known as Institut für Sozialforschung) and the duo Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer—chose to take a somewhat critical stance toward mass-produced film. They considered it a way for the predominant culture (that is, the dominant capitalistic, and perhaps even fascistoid, culture) to use film as a medium for seducing and dumbing down.5 But they also emphasized its constructive possibilities as a medium, albeit with clear cries of warning. Within this school of thought, there were also strong voices that, directly or indirectly, lauded film for its political potential and even for its status as perhaps the foremost of art forms. Ernst Bloch offered a case in point, viewing film as a great incitement for being able to imagine a better situation, a better future. He maintained that the escapism inherent in film also engenders dreams of another life and of being able to influence one’s own situation.6 In The Principle of Hope, Bloch writes: In general, therefore, film, being capable through photography and microphone of incorporating all real experience in a stream-like mime, belongs to the most powerful of mirrors—and distortions—yet  also through compact images displaying wishes useful to life, a substitute and glossy deception, yet  also information rich in imagery . . . the pantomimic aspect of the film is ultimately

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that of society, both in the way it expresses itself and above all in deterring, or inspiring, the promising content that is presented.7 In her article “Dream/Factory,” film scholar Jane Gaines underscores the usefulness of Bloch’s theory for film studies in ascribing to Hollywood film (and thus also to mainstream film) the potential of helping the viewers to imagine a state of affairs beyond a grim reality. She writes that “if there is hope in the world, if there is an imagining beyond things as they are, this imagining will be found in some form that mirrors Hollywood’s realism, a realism that cannot help but bring us more at the same time that it restricts us to less.”8 Her attempt to introduce a more nuanced understanding of this genre is indeed important for an academic discipline that for decades has dismissed mainstream film as being of no interest, a mere matter of popular culture. Almost contemporaneously with Bloch, the art historian and psychologist Rudolph Arnheim appeared on the scene in 1932 with his influential book Film als Kunst (Film as Art), in which he advances film as the ultimate art form in succeeding to combine all other art forms into one.9 Prior to this time, during the 1920s, it was primarily French impressionistic filmmakers and scriptwriters who wrote about film as an art form while concurrently experimenting with it. They were seeking to create a purely intellectual and poetically nuanced film, that is, a type of film that breaks with the Hollywood approach and the narrative and cinematic rules it stipulates. In the early 1920s, the Hollywood film—the so-called classical narrative film—dominated the film market at the same time as its rules regarding narrative technique influenced the production in most film nations. French film had had its heyday, also in the global market, during the first decade of filmmaking. With the outbreak of World War I, France lost its prominent position, with film production at an ebb for a number of years. It would not recover until the 1920s, and then it was not through the film of popular culture at the fore but through the impressionistic and intellectual type. This period was marked by a growing confidence in the inherent power of film both as an art form and as a conveyor of human emotions, that is, of the person’s inner psyche and her imaginary and creative possibilities. It is to this context and this period that the present essay relates. By focusing on a single film—one that can be said to be a good example of French impressionistic film and its emphasis on conveying human emotions—I will shed light on how, through the medium of film, modernity is expressed and experienced as a kind of Allkonstverk, an all-embracing or total artwork. The film is the approximately thirty-five-minute-long Ménilmontant, produced in Paris by Dimitri Kirsanoff, probably sometime between 1924 and 1925.10 It is a superb document not only of Paris in the middle of the 1920s, but also of modernity, the new status of women, and the role that fashion plays in this status and it is not always unproblematic freedom.

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Kirsanoff (occasionally spelled Kirsanov), whose name actually was Markus David Sussmanovitch Kaplan, was born in 1899 in Tartu, Estonia. As a young man, he emigrated to Paris, and began studying music at École Normale de Musique. Upon completing his studies, he supported himself by playing as a cellist during film showings.11 Besides music, his interest in film grew to the point where, in 1923, on a shoestring budget, he and Nadia Sibirskaïa, his future wife (whose actual name was Germain Marie Josèphe Lebas, and plays one of the sisters in Ménilmontant), produced their first film, L’ironie du destin (The Irony of Destiny). The film has long since vanished, but, according to film historian Richard Abel, this is probably the first French film to be produced without guiding intertitles, something that also distinguishes their next production, Ménilmontant.12 Because of the difficulties in finding a distributor, Ménilmontant did not premier until 1926. That is why the film is often dated 1926. When shown in January of that year at the Vieux-Colombier, one of foremost cinemas of French avant-garde films, it quickly became a major audience success. Kirsanoff’s film production was impressive:  between 1923 and 1956, he made twenty-three films, all with modest means and acting both as producer and director—and not uncommonly even as composer. Ménilmontant is the best known of his productions. It is a superb example not only of French impressionism but also of an avant-garde film which splendidly combines Russian montage, that is, an advanced and fast cutting technique, with poetic narrative language in which beautifully composed static takes are central. But beyond being an example of an avant-garde film belonging to French Impressionism, it is also an example of an Allkonstverk, an all-encompassing or total artwork. Before proceeding with the analysis of Ménilmontant, it serves the task at hand to clarify its context by briefly considering the modernistic cinematic movement that this film is a part of. As already mentioned, it is a superb document on the pulsating life of modernity, the new status of women, and the role that fashion plays in this status. In what follows, the film will thus be approached by focusing partly on its representation of modernity—emphasizing its relation to time, space, and urbanity—and partly on the representation of gender, since the film so clearly and specifically addresses the exposed situation of women in the modern, emancipated world of the metropolis of Paris. As for fashion, this is not a film about fashion per se. It is rather a film in which fashion functions as a signpost for what is modern and for the new emancipatory esprit intrinsic to urban life, especially for women. Within the parameters of the film, fashion can even be interpreted as a metaphor for the transition from the traditional to the modern, as well as from childhood to adulthood—and one step further:  fashion as a democratic yet impossible choice and ideal for women of the working class.

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French film in the 1920s As a leading nation of film in its nascent years, that is, beginning in 1895, France assumed the reins in dictating the forms and structures that apply to film as a medium of display to what film scholar Tom Gunning has called the cinema of attraction.13 As film of the more narrative type slowly came to the fore, French film nevertheless began to encounter competition, among other places from the other side of the Atlantic. Already in the early 1900s, American filmmakers began to experiment with cross-cutting in order to tell stories that take place in different times and locations.14 A  narrative style of film along more technically advanced lines was also developing in other countries geographically closer to France, for instance, in Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. This was instrumental in weakening French dominance. With the onset of World War I, French film production really began to slip, and once it reached a lull, the Nordic countries and the United States—with initial impetus coming from Hollywood—succeeded in establishing themselves and assuming positions as the leading nations of film. With the war ending in 1918, France slowly recovered and so did its film industry. What differentiated it from its earlier heyday was that it now deliberately began to examine its relation to other art forms, linking it to, and even being led by, the French intelligentsia. The 1920s in France are thus a productive and innovative decade for film, both with regard to production, to spirited intellectual discourse, and deliberate theorizing around film’s potential as an art form. In contrast to the popular, classical narrative film arising from a dominant Hollywood, which, to be sure, was technically advanced both in terms of film and narrative, French film emerged as peculiarly distinctive, esthetically advanced, very intellectual—and avant-garde.15 The animated debate about film—not least expressed in writing (we now receive the first theoretical texts about the essence of film)—in no small way contributed to the status and worth of film, raising it from the level of entertainment to an intellectual and artistic level. Several of the thinkers theorizing about film were at the same time practical filmmakers. Thus René Clair, Marcel l’Herbier, Louis Delluc, and Germaine Dulac all wrote about and made films, and they all aspired to unicity and spontaneity of text and image in their films. In texts published in, among other places, Parismidi and in the book Photogénie (1920), Louis Delluc drew up the guidelines that would come to inspire the filmmakers of French Impressionism over the next decade, linking film more to painting and poetry than to photography. Delluc emphasized his strong confidence in the capacity of the audiences—especially the audiences of the working class—to read and understand film, regardless of their national and cultural affinity.16 With the concept of photogénie, he meant film art, “l’art du cinéma,” more specifically the unicity of the film image and the communicative power of the camera and the screen.17 The photogénie of the

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film consists partly in the representation originating in reality, that is, arising from “the real,” the factual, and partly in the representation transforming this reality into something new. Says Delluc: “The miracle of cinema is that it stylizes without altering the plain truth.”18 This stylizing was made possible by the cinematography and the film technique as such, that is to say, the framing, the lighting, and the mise-en-scène. Through the unicity of the film, the viewers were enabled to see reality with new eyes, to envision everyday life as never before. To most of these filmmakers and thinkers, the linkage between film and the psyche—that is, the inner life and thinking of the person—may well have been of utmost importance: film as dream image, film as dream, film as daydream. In his La Souriante Mme Beudet (1922), Germaine Dulac utilizes superimpositions (double exposures) and dissolves in slow motion to picture and visualize the inner longings and dreams of the unhappy middleclass wife, and also of her desire and longing for love. To others, the possibility of creating film as the ultimate total artwork (Allkonstverk) was of the highest importance: in Marcel l’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine (1924), where film image, visual art, music, dance, fashion, and architecture conjoin within a narrative universe, film as art is posited as a synthesis of all other art forms. L’Herbier’s film project included the foremost practitioners of art in their various fields:  Ferdinand Leger, Paul Poiret, René Lalique, Jean Borlin, Ballet Suédois, Alberto Cavalcanti, and Robert Mallet-Stevens.19 Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant has its place in this context, but at the same time stands out in having been created with no assistance from other artists. Like other modernistic film works of the time, Ménilmontant utilizes mental images for conveying states of mind and a rhythmic montage for visualizing modernity and the fast, mutable reality of urbanity. But it does so in a new light (consequently in line with Delluc’s photogénie) and, in its original form, also with a mind to functioning as a total artwork (Allkonstverk) of sorts. Kirsanoff aimed at creating a film in which the experience of music and imagistic narration, that is, the visual experience, went hand in hand as two equal and closely interdependent components in the same narrative. Unfortunately, his original music has been lost; even so, it is possible to sense a musical cadence and rhythm in the film: the cutting itself and the use of slow motion, contrasted with advanced picture speed, combine with the lighting to lend the film a distinct musicality. And the film qua film is an amazing work. But it is also an immensely strong document on the breakthrough of modernity and on Paris as a metropolis in the 1920s.

The city, space, and time Ménilmontant opens with a still image of a white lace curtain behind a window (Figure 4.1). This is the quiet before the storm that is soon to follow. Next, in what

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Figure 4.1  Still from the shocking montage scene opening of Ménilmontant.

appears to be a farm setting, a brutal murder of a man and a woman is shown in a fierce montage. The two of them are fighting for their lives as they attempt to scramble out a door (the window of which is adorned with the white lace curtain) to escape their violent attackers, but to no avail. Out in the farmyard, the man and woman are clubbed down and chopped to death with an axe. The opening of the film shocks the viewer with a fierce montage that can be said to anticipate Sergei Eisenstein’s well-known stair scene in the film Potemkin (1925). Kirsanoff here makes use of crosscutting between close-ups that juxtapose horror-ridden and wrathful faces moving into and out of image, sometimes out of focus, and the rapidity of the cutting underscores the frenzied violence and viciousness to which the two of them are exposed. The murder is followed by three still images taken with a static camera: first an image of the axe falling to the ground; next an equally still image of the scene of the crime, taken from the farmyard toward the house; and then, in conclusion, an image of a burning campfire. All three images convey a certain calmness and standstill. Next, Krisanoff cuts to a contrasting image:  dressed in knee-length lace dresses and with large bows in their long curly hair, two girls are playing carefree in the woods, trying to help a cat down from a tree. Their clothes and hairstyle make it difficult to determine the time period involved. At the end of the 1800s, as well as in the beginning of 1900s, indeed, most likely into the 1910s, girls of the middle and upper classes

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had long (and often curly) hair with bows, and wore clothing of this type. The clothes mark the girls as children while also engendering a clear contrast to the urbane modernity that both of them will soon come to experience and be a part of. The following images—with the younger girl just reaching a group of people who are standing at the crime scene, looking at the two victims and reacting with fright and sorrow—lead us to believe that the victims must be the girls’ parents. We are then transported some years forward in time: in the following scene, the two sisters, played by Yolande Beaulieu and Nadia Sibirskaïa, are standing in dark coats and hats, grieving by their parents’ grave. Here Kirsanoff crosscuts between close-ups of the two sisters, the graves (“À notre père” and “À notre mère”), the greenness of nature, and the rich soil. This once again engenders a clear contrast to what is to come—the two sisters say farewell to their dead parents and set out for the metropolis Paris in order to support themselves. In a transitional scene, we see the two of them leaving the churchyard and wandering along the allée, their journey to Paris expedited through the use of elliptical dissolves. Smoothly and elegantly, the sisters are thus transposed from the country to the city, and via this technique, Kirsanoff also succeeds in conveying them from childhood to adulthood. Their arrival in the big city is portrayed via a rhythmic montage sequence that shows cars, trams, trains, human crowds in motion, clocks, flower arrangers at work, cobblestones, display windows—all of this in motion, and all of it caught by a camera that is also in motion. In this short montage scene, Kirsanoff succeeds in creating a striking image of modernity in line with Charles Baudelaire’s and Walter Benjamin’s descriptions, with their focus on motion, fragmentation, anonymity, decentralization, and volatility. It also offers a picture of Paris and its teeming throngs, of the growth of urbanity, and of the volatile interpersonal relations that the new modern age brings with it (Figure 4.2). These two thinkers stand out among peers in having aptly described and interpreted the breakthrough of modernity, its drastic upheavals and transformative thrust. In Les Fleurs de Mal (1856) and Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863; with the latter including “Éloge du maquillage” and “Le beau, la mode et le bonheur”), Baudelaire reflects on Paris as a place for modernity and “the fleeting moment.”20 In these texts, he describes his own age, how he sees Paris changing, how urbanity emerges, how tradition breaks with the new, and how different fashions are created. He also ponders how human relationships change, more specifically, how the city becomes an important stage for superficial contacts and exchanges among people.21 In his enormous book project, Das Passagen Werk, and also in his shorter text on “Paris, die Hauptstadt der XIX. Jahrhunderts,” Benjamin would subsequently focus on urbanity, the city, the growing consumption, fashion, and the flâneur and the flânerie that Baudelaire describes and incorporates.22 Baudelaire describes in the present tense what he is a part of experiencing, and

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Figure 4.2  Paris—the modern metropolis in Dimitri Kirsanoff’s Ménilmontant, 1926.

Benjamin succeeds, by way of Baudelaire, in interpreting the birth of modernity, as well as the flâneur, and the city of Paris as the capital of the 1800s. And the montage—a term Benjamin adopts from film theory—becomes an important optical tool and a presupposition for his reading of the modern city, of all the impressions experienced by the flâneur (and the flanuese, not to be forgotten), of the motion engendered by cars, trams, trains, and people on the go. The montage sequence described above can thus be read as a metaphor for the Benjaminian understanding of the individual experiencing modernity. Seeing and seeing film here become one and the same. Inspired by Roland Barthes’s ideas about the possibilities of the open text to offer the reader jouissance, or bliss, we may understand this seeing and the modernistic film text itself as indeterminate, as manifold, as flexible in its nature, and thereby also anti-conventional. This is at least the case when it is compared with the dominant text, that is, the kind of text that belongs to the dominant cultural order (to which, for example, the Hollywood film belongs).23 And according to the British film scholar, Annette Kuhn, the modernistic film text can also be described as being anti-patriarchal by dint of its overt resistance to established film conventions, especially, the rule about a text’s conclusion or closure.24 If we choose to understand Kirsanoff’s film in these terms, it constitutes not only a pre-feministic text but also a pro-feministic text—which implies that it

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Figure 4.3  The younger sister played by Nadia Sibirskaïa in a montage sequence.

also could be viewed as a feminine text. Kuhn—inspired by Barthes and Julia Kristeva—defines the feminine text as follows:  “A feminine text, then, has no fixed formal characteristics, precisely because it is a relationship: it becomes a feminine text in the reading.”25 A feminine text offers resistance and it challenges conventions while concomitantly opening up to multiplicity—in this way, coming about in the very relationship between reader and text; that is, it originates in the process of reading. Kirsanoff’s film provides no directives, no guiding intertitles, no dialogue, and it follows no fixed narrative trick. Instead, it offers a modernistic flow of images and a montage that clearly challenge the classical narrative approach while calling for a more initiated and intentional reading. In that sense, it is a demanding film text and consequently also a text that comes about in the process of reading (Figure 4.3). Kirsanoff’s film is not only modernistic and avant-garde in its montage, it is also clearly linked to French Impressionism in its musical way of creating filmic rhythm, alternating between a rapid, almost shock-like montage and long, poetic sequences, often taken with a stationary camera. This is further reinforced by employing dissolves and superimpositions, as well as fades, iris takes, unfocused takes, and the moving camera mentioned above—all of which give the impression of a big, pulsating city where time never stands still. The various types of takes and clippings are employed to show in part the difference between the sleepy countryside and the vibrant big city, and in part to call attention to differences within Paris—the latter pointing to the difference between the noisy, energetic, prosperous, and eventful Paris and the quite desolate, careworn, and felonious Paris making up the arrondissement of Ménilmontant. Having safely arrived in Paris, the two sisters begin to work as assemblers of faux flowers, a trade that is shown as being “feminine” and for the young: in a sequence, we see how all the assemblers are women of the sisters’ age. In

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a short montage, central to the representation of fashion’s significance in the film, we see the two sisters undergoing a transformation from country girls to city women:  the long hair is cut in a trendy bob; they begin to wear makeup (which is emphasized in an image of the older sister meticulously painting her lips so that she gets a mouth typical of the 1920s, with dark, thin lips and a little cupid’s bow); and they dress fashionably à la Parisienne with straight, dropped waistlines, knee-length dresses, and small, bell-shaped hats, so-called cloches, which frame and accent the oval shape of the face. In these short sequences, Ménilmontant succeeds in demonstrating the significance of the “new” woman in the urban milieu; at the same time, these sequences express how both fashion and the medium of film can be said to be modernity’s children. Both are a part of capitalism, that is, of an emerging consumer ideology, and of a visual culture that is characteristic of the new era. And they are further a part of pre-feminism and women’s nascent independence, of the status of the new social classes, of bourgeois dominance, and soon also of a rising working class and its place in public life. These sequences display happiness and point to economic and social freedom, but they also show evident stress in their persistent focus on constant motion, pictured by clocks running, rails, cars and trams passing, in fast motion. Even images of the flower assemblers creating their wreaths and nosegays are shown in fast motion, indicative of the high working tempo. Through this quick montage, the spectators are offered a clear picture and a sense of urban life, and of Paris as a metropolis of modernity. Next, in a counterpoint to the fast life in the city, still images are then shown of the little apartment that the two sisters are sharing. It is a little studio unit with a double bed bathed in sunshine, presented as a safe haven of sorts, away from the pulsating life of the city. Once we have been introduced to the sisters’ life in the city, things take a new turn: a young man (played by Guy Belmont) seduces first the younger sister and then the older. When the younger sister—after having waited for days outside his house after their first rendezvous—discovers that he also has a relationship with her sibling, the two sisters part ways. Soon the younger sister proves to be pregnant, and, in a beautifully filmed montage sequence, considers taking her own life by drowning in the Seine. The other sister turns to prostitution, with the young man as her pimp. Both of the young women thus meet with tragic destinies, and the discourse of the film can be said to have a distinctly educational character: a warning to young working-class women about the dangers that await with the newfound (sexual) freedom entailed by modernity and the city. The film can certainly be viewed as a moral tale, but the fact remains that far into the 1900s, Paris would still have a large population of female prostitutes. Despite the newly found freedom, prostitution continued to be the only livelihood for many women of the working class.

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The dualistic and misogynistic view of woman that had prevailed in the 1800s—woman as an incompatible otherness with man, and being either good or bad—continued well into the 1900s. In this patriarchal conception of woman as a dualistic other, it was precisely fashion that constituted an important and central—albeit paradoxical—part. Made available to a larger populace through mass production and mass consumption, fashion now became a tool of (and an expression for) the new economic and social freedom of women. At the same time, however, the otherness of woman and her assumed inferiority were emphatically attributed to her very interest in fashion. It was thought that this interest could be nothing but a simpleminded and one-track passion for looks, and also for vanity, change, and capriciousness. This duplicitous aspect of fashion was saliently presented in a good many academic texts that, published around 1900, brought the connection between fashion and woman to the fore. Film scholar Anne Friedberg has described woman’s difficult position in the modern, urban society of the 1800s allowing her but two roles, either as la fille honnête or as la fille publique.26 A fille publique—in her public visibility, and not infrequently in her visibility as fashionable, constantly ran the risk of being taken for a prostitute, whereas la fille honnête, secluded from what the grand new social scene of modernity and urban life had to offer, could be safe in her circumscribed situation. In Ménilmontant, this narrow and dualistic position becomes highly palpable:  the two sisters, through their agency and participation in the work and entertainment of modern life, turn into public women in different ways, and sexuality is shown as something that young, unmarried women should abstain from. This while society is becoming more and more sexually liberated and women’s sexuality somewhat more emancipated. Yet Kirsanoff is not judgmental. On the contrary: his criticism is directed toward a patriarchy that does not give women of the working class other possibilities. In this way, Ménilmontant can be read not only as a pro-feministic and feminine text, but clearly also as a feministic film. The closeness to the two main characters and the representation of their thoughts and feelings—especially pertaining to the younger sister (played by Nadia Sibirskaïa)—provides an opening for understanding Kirsanoff’s personal identification with woman. In a beautiful montage sequence after the younger sister has followed the young man home for the first time, Kirsanoff treats the status of women as problematic in the modern and strongly patriarchal society of the 1920s in France. Splicing together images that engender a complex but rhythmic montage, he avails himself of superimpositions, which result in the images not being clearly defined. For example, several images show a nude woman’s body from various perspectives, in standing and prone position, and imposed upon these pictures are images of car wheels in motion and a ticking clock. The montage sequence concludes with a still image of the older sister lying in the

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double bed, anxious that the younger sister has not returned although it is early morning. She reaches out her hand and strokes the sister’s empty pillow. This montage sequence can easily be interpreted as a discreet representation of the younger sister’s sexual encounter with the young man. After the montage, there is a long take of the younger sister leaving the man’s house and walking down toward the river, first in a close-up showing her as pensive and not entirely happy, and then in a cut to quite a long retrospective showing her as a young girl dressed in white lace and playing in the woods in brilliant sunshine. The viewer is given the possibility of sharing in her memory and her mental imagery as an invitation to identify with her. Next is a cut back to the present, with focus on her anxious face, the sequence showing that now her innocence is apparently lost forever. And soon it will become evident that she has had a sexual encounter with the young man: Kirsanoff leaps forward in time through an elegant time ellipsis with the aid of an iris that opens up and shows a still image of a house wall with the sign “Maternité,” which indicates that a child has been born. Through a dissolve, the image and then the sign fade away and a distance image comes into view that shows the younger sister hesitatingly standing on the steps, holding to her breast an infant wrapped in a blanket. She appears to be confused and frightened of the future that now awaits her. And it is a grim future: she is unmarried and poor, and has a child to provide for, a child that in the eyes of others is a bastard. In order to demonstrate her mental (and factual) condition, Kirsanoff at this point projects images of the city’s speed and motion—with cars and elegant people entering and exiting across a close-up of the younger sister’s face. The energetic, modern pulse of the city, initially shown as enticing, inviting, and exciting for the two sisters, is now presented as a hectic, distanced, and excluding world. In a touching scene, Kirsanoff offers a finely tuned visualization of her desperation and exposed situation: with the child in her arms, starving and freezing, she moves along the river and settles down on a bench next to a poor man who is eating a bit of bread. The man sees her desperation and cautiously pushes a piece of it toward her. In a close-up, we see how she first hesitates and then, close to tears and with a thank you, receives the bread and hungrily eats it. In all the misery the two have in common, there emerges a warmly caring kindness and humanity that is movingly rendered in beautiful, long takes, closeups and almost shimmering lighting that infuses hope. The same hopefulness will return in the final scene of the film, in which the two sisters are reunited in their little apartment, and the sun(shine) streams through the window, falling like a silver ribbon upon the face and the narrow body of the younger sister. Prior to this, however, a shocking turn occurs that mirrors the fierce montage with which the film begins. The older sister has become a prostitute, very likely with the young man as her pimp. In a distant image, filmed from the perspective of the younger sister,

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we see her pacing outside a hotel, awaiting customers and now wearing heavy makeup, high heels, and the extravagant clothes that signal availability. The younger sister approaches her older sister tentatively from behind, clasping the child tightly in her arms, and once they have made eye contact, they first stare speechlessly at each other. Kirsanoff makes cuts between the two sisters when they are looking at each other, both of them sorrowful and dejected and with painful shame in their glances. In this exchange of glances, Kirsanoff then inserts quick images of a neon sign blinking:  HOTEL. Blinking like a warning signal, this sign can be said to symbolize everything that has come between the two sisters and kept them separated, that is, the enticements and dangers of the big city. The hotel sign simultaneously signals prostitution—and implicitly also the captivity of prostituted women. After the speechless, shamefaced exchange of glances, the younger sister gingerly and tentatively hands over the child to the older sister, who immediately softens, and at this moment, they find their way back to each other as shown by their embrace. And then an unexpected turn occurs that further contributes to their reconciliation. In the next scene, the young man, the cause of their unhappiness, is attacked by a man and a woman in one of Ménilmontant’s narrow alleys. The young man gets into a fierce fight with the man and is finally killed by the woman who hits him with a big stone. Crosscut into this fight is a static image of the two sisters being reunited and in a secure place. Now back in the little apartment, the older sister is lying with the child in her arms, sleeping in the shared bed, and her younger sister—dressed only in a white nightgown—is kneeling in prayer by their side. The fast, eye-piercing montage of violence showing the young man’s death is thus contrasted with a still, almost motionless image. The intense light falling through the window engenders a shimmering halo of sorts around the younger sister’s face and figure—with the image giving off distinct religious allusions. It would consequently be easy to interpret this quiet, bright image as a representation of the (religious) purification of the two sisters, and as an image of grace. But given the absence of religious references elsewhere in the film, it is perhaps unlikely that Kirsanoff had this interpretation in mind for his viewers. It is instead the power of reconciliation and the twosomeness that stands out in the image and is intensified by the spatial positioning of the characters and by the nearly overwhelming illumination. The light rather symbolizes the purity and goodness that the two of them possess, and that overcomes the evil and the painful inflicted upon them. This image, to be succeeded by two final images, they, too, still and static— one of the Parisian landscape, the other of a streetlamp filmed against a sky filled with white clouds—is amazingly simple and straightforward as a filmic image. The advanced film language that Kirsanoff has employed throughout the film here draws to a close in a static image of sheer pictorial qualities that belongs more to a premodernistic film idiom than a modernistic one.27 But this

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image provides a needed calm and lends a happy ending to the story told. The last images—the sisters reunited, Paris as a city, and the streetlamp against a sky in motion—provide a closure of sorts to a tale that otherwise breaks with traditional narrative conventions. And the distinct modernism of the film— expressed and manifested principally in the rhythmic and varied cutting—thus receives a conventional ending. Here a period is put to it: all is well that ends well. The modernistic, feminine text that has characterized the film from its opening scene and forward now yields to an ending that has more in common with the conventional Hollywood film than with the European art film. The surprising, liberating but also demanding bliss that the viewer has experienced up to this point passes into another kind of quiet bliss, the assurance that, having finally been reconciled, the two sisters will make it.

Conclusion The medium of film occupies a central part in the visual culture that would come to characterize modernity. Besides this visual aspect, its overarching elements are industrialization, growing consumerism, urbanization, and centralization. It is further characterized by the struggle between the old and the new, between mass culture and high culture. Within this modernity, film constitutes a medium that can be employed also to create a modernistic Allkonstverk, a total artwork. Ménilmontant is an important, albeit willful example of this type of film. Its cinematography is advanced and serves both to represent a course of events— the breakthrough of modernity—and to mirror the inner life of the person. It uses a montage that commutes to and fro among long, still, and nearly furiously abrupt takes, beautiful double exposures (superimpositions), dissolves, and a moving camera intermingled with static takes. Via this varied montage, a modernistic work is created that is akin to French Impressionism and to Delluc’s idea of la photogénie—that is, the unicity of the film image and the mediating power of the camera and the screen. This power, that which makes the film artistic, emerges partly in the representation of the “real,” the actual-factual, and partly in the technical transformation of this reality into something completely new. In Ménilmontant, it is the cinematography—that is, the cutting technique and lighting—that gives a direct and intense picture of modernity and of the modern city with its continual motion, fragmentation, anonymity, decentralization, and volatility. The emergence of film as a medium coincides with women’s increased freedom and changing role in society. In the 1910s and 1920s, this change not infrequently shows up in films, whether they be popular or more toward the avant-garde. This is the time period when women’s suffrage is introduced in most Western countries. With their increased capacity for gainful employment

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and for being consumers, women acquire greater mobility and a stronger position as individuals. Women also—at least within certain social classes— attain to greater sexual freedom. The sexual woman occurs quite early as a character within the narrative film. Just like the villain and the hero, who are often male figures, she becomes a stereotype or, alternatively, an archetype of sorts. Consumerism, gainful employment, and women’s sexual liberation are central themes in Ménilmontant. Kirsanoff’s film thus mirrors the reality in which the film took place as a medium. As mentioned above, the film can be read as being pro-feministic in seeking to represent a female reality, which, despite a new freedom, implies a continued and intense dichotomy and few options, at least for women of the working class. The film can be interpreted as a document critical of a historical event, which, on the one hand, makes possible a certain freedom for women and, on the other hand, clearly circumscribes this possibility through a patriarchal and unequal system that still constitutes the basis of modern society.

Notes 1 S ee, for example, Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in EarlyTwentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1905–1925 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1998). 2 O n these two controversial, new types of women in the 1920s, see, for example, Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (New York: Crown, 2006); Lynn Dumenil, “The New Woman,” in The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Gerald E. Critoph, “The Flapper and Her Critics,” in “Remember the Ladies”: New Perspectives on Women in American History, ed. Carol George (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1975), 145–60; Kenneth A. Yellis, “Prosperity’s Child: Some Thoughts on the Flapper,” American Quarterly 21 (1969): 44–64; and William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Revolution in Morals,” in The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 3 S ee, for example, Thomas Dogherty, Hollywood Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 4 Thomas Dogherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 8. 5 S ee, for example, Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana Press, 1972), trans. Harry Zohn (orig. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 1935); and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), trans. John Cumming (orig.

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Philosophische Fragmente, 1944; later revised and published under the title Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1947). The latter does not discuss film per se, but offers a conceptual overview of the so-called cultural industries, to which film belongs. See also Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Fall 1992): 3–14; and Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,” New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 179–224 for excellent discussions of Benjamin’s text. 6 S ee Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986) (orig. Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 3 vols, 1938–47). 7 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 408–9. Quoted in Jane Gaines, “Dream/Factory,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2003), 108. (Editors’ translation) 8 Gaines, “Dream/Factory,” 108. 9 Rudolph Arnheim, Film als Kunst (Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 1932), translated into English under the title Film (1933), later published in supplementary form as Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California University Press, 1957). 10 T he length of the film varies according to the different versions. The one available on YouTube is 37.54 minutes long. The version used in this article is longer. It was found on an old VHS cassette, which I received from a colleague in the 1990s. It is likely a (pirated) copy of an archival version shown on screen in the beginning of the 1990s. 11 S antiago Rubín de Celis, “The Paradoxes of Dimitri Kirsanoff: Within the Avant-Garde Tradition,” Experimental Conversations 6 (Winter 2010). www.experimentalconversations.com/article/ the-paradoxes-of-dimitri-kirsanoff-menilmontant-within-the-avant-garde-tradition/ 12 Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 395. Or is Ménilmontant perhaps the first film that does not use explanatory intertitles? 13 T om Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the AvantGarde,” Wide Angle 8, nos 3/4 (Fall 1986): 63–70. 14 T he first film to employ cross-cutting for generating forward motion in the narrative is generally considered to be Edwin S. Porter’s western film, The Great Train Robbery (1903). 15 I t is generally accepted that Hollywood film after 1917 established itself as a leading film style, in which, for example, continuity cutting is one of the rules aspired to. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristine Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London and New York: Routledge, 1985). 16 Louis Delluc, Photogénie (Paris: de Brunhoff, 1920). 17 I bid. See also Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 18 D elluc, “Cinéma,” in Paris-Midi (March 5, 1919), cited in Abel, French Film Theory and Cinema, 110.

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19 S ee Marcel l’Herbier’s collected texts about film, Intelligence du cinématographe (Paris: Correa, 1946). 20 S ee Charles Baudelaire, “Éloge du maquillage” and “Le beau, la mode et la bonheur,” in Le peintre de la vie moderne (Paris: Fayard/Mille et une nuits, 2010; orig. 1863). 21 A stage on which one can preen—show off and show oneself—or, without further ado, choose to watch others who show off. Baudelaire defines modernity: “By modernity I mean the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable,” in “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964; orig. Le Paintre de la vie moderne, 1863), 13. See also brief excerpts of Baudelaire’s texts on modernity and fashion in Daniel Purdy (ed.), The Rise of Fashion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 22 S ee Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983 [orig. 1925–39]); and “Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts,” published posthumously in Gesammelte Schriften I (1955; orig. 1935). 23 Roland Barthes, Le plaisir de texte (Paris: Edition Seuil, 1973). 24 S ee Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Verso, 1993; orig. 1982). 25 Ibid.,  13. 26 Ann Friedberg, Window Shopping: Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 36. Friedberg proceeds from T. J. Clark’s discussion of how woman in the modernistic painting occurs either as the one or the other female type, that is, as a street girl or as a respectable married woman. See T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris and the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1985). 27 I n other versions, the ending differs. In the version on YouTube, for example (with the latest viewing of it in August 2017), the image of the reconciled sisters in the apartment is not included. Instead, the murder of the man becomes a final image, although this version is rounded off with a shorter and quite slow montage of images of the Parisian sky, a streetlamp, the Seine in evening light, nimble hands tying flower wreaths, images of cobblestones filmed from a car or from a tram in motion. Overall, this ending is more in accord with the modernism and imagistic idiom of the film, but in comparing it with the archival version, I, at least, experienced this ending as being slightly abrupt and “cut.”

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5 DESIGNING THE FUTURE CONSTRUCTIVIST LABORATORY OF FASHION Olga Vainshtein

Fashion and utopia “Does fashion die (as in Russia, for example) because it can no longer keep up the tempo—at least in certain fields?”—wondered Walter Benjamin.1 He stayed in Moscow between 1926 and 1927, hoping to sort out his relationship with Bolshevik girlfriend Asya Lacis. His leftist-minded colleagues—Russian constructivists—would have certainly agreed, emphatically adding extremist arguments against fashion. For them fashion already died because it was no longer needed in the Revolutionary Russia: fashion was a heritage of bourgeois culture, the reflection of class system, while the new socialist society had to find and establish its own style of clothes. “Fashion is replaced by clothes that can be worn everywhere, which have no independent value and are not an art product,” stated one of the leading constructivist artists Varvara Stepanova.2 Alexandra Exter also contrasted “fashion” with practical everyday dress: “Modern fashion, which changes at the whim of merchants, must be resisted with clothing that is efficient and beautiful in its simplicity.”3 This opposition of fashion and functional clothes was a favorite idea for constructivists. The seasonal changes of fashion were also suspicious to constructivist thinkers, because they had in mind the eternal time of the victorious socialism. Fashion-as-art, unique and extravagant, belonged to the culture of the past, much as easel painting. High fashion expressed individual taste, while the new Russia patronized collectivity. And finally, they opposed fashion because it implied additional expenses, impossible luxury at that time. Post-Revolutionary Moscow was a spectacle of incessant shortages and bare poverty, temporarily relieved by NEP—the New Economic Policy—introduced by

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Lenin. The idea of simplicity and economy was in the air. However, the minimalist spirit of constructivism was not an automatic response to the miserable state of Soviet economy, but rather was inspired by utopian ideas. The constructivists were convinced that the geometric forms symbolized the world of technological progress and industrial wizardry that they supposed to develop in the immediate future. Revolutionary effort seemed to be converted easily into technological society. The new constructivist notion byt (material conditions of everyday life) was an integral part of the strategies of utopian “life-creation” and “life-building,” blurring the dividing lines between “art” and “life,” including human relationships and even bodily movements. Clothes as an important and most visible part of byt became one of the first objects of experiment in the constructivist laboratory of the future. Following this utopic vision, Russian constructivists Varvara Stepanova, Liubov’ Popova, Alexandra Exter, Vera Mukhina, and Olga Rosanova were remarkably attracted to clothes and textile design in the 1920s. The constructivist preoccupation with dress was extended to cover other areas, such as photography, posters, theater costume, communal furniture, porcelain, architecture . . . The vibrancy of their collective creativity produced most amazing samples both in theory and in practice (e.g., Tatlin’s flying machine “Letatlin”). The role of clothes in the constructivist aesthetics was analyzed in the series of conceptual writings.

Prozodezhda in the theory of constructivism The theory of constructivism was born during the discussions in the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKHUK) taking place between 1920 and 1924 and later at the Left Front of Arts. The circle of avant-garde artists and architects included Alexander Rodchenko, Vassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Vladimir and Georgiy Sternberg, Aleksandr Vesnin, Vladimir Tatlin, Karl Ioganson and some others. INKHUK, founded by Vassily Kandinsky, conducted a series of seminars on contemporary art. The articles reflecting these debates were printed in the first series of LEF magazine (1922–9), while the first seminal book on the subject appeared in 1922 (Constructivism by Aleksei Gan). The members of the First Working Group of Constructivists Liubov Popova, Varvara Stepanova and her husband Alexander Rodchenko, and Aleksei Gan tried to develop the conceptual definitions of contemporary art, practicing “objective analysis” of modern paintings (e.g., the paintings by Claude Monet, Paul Signac, and Henri Matisse). Varvara Stepanova was especially active in formulating the concept of “Construction.” “Construction demands the absence of superfluous materials

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and elements,” she wrote.4 In this interpretation, “Construction” was opposed to “Composition,” that allowed beautiful and excessive details, intended for decoration. Thus, a flower on a cup is an element of Composition, but not of Construction, as it expresses taste, but it is unnecessary for the constructive purposes. In December 1921, she presented a paper at the general meeting of INKHUK summing up her theory of Constructivism. Stepanova viewed the development of art as evolution from Composition to Construction. “Construction is the making of real things, operating in real space. I  define the Thing as a new form previously absent in nature.”5 Constructivism for Stepanova was closely connected with invention and creation of new forms. The logical conclusion of this is the understanding of art as intellectual production for utilitarian purposes. As a result, constructive art is based on rational schemes and simple geometrical structures. The new things created by an artist-constructor are not unique and can be readily mass-produced. The materialistic and functional understanding of art was hence opposed to the traditional sublime views of art as creation of unique spiritual works. This method of working out the theoretical platform of constructivism points to the fundamental feature of modernism, articulated by Clement Greenberg: selfreflectivity. “The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”6 Following the theoretical premises of constructivism, Varvara Stepanova developed the concept of prozodezhda. She promoted the idea of replacing traditional fashion with rationalized clothing. Developing the notion of prozodezhda—functional everyday working garments, she reformulated the complex symbolism of femininity and gender inherent in a dress. Her article “Present Day Dress—Production Clothing” was a manifesto of functionalism. “The comfort and practical aspect of clothing must match a specific practical function”—declared Stepanova.7 This slogan abolished the entire idea of decorative details. The aesthetic elements were to be replaced with the production process. “One cannot use appliqué decorations on dress, as it is the stitching that will give it shape. All stitching, buttons and so on should be made visible.”8 Thus, the construction became the main visual impact of a dress. According to Stepanova, contemporary clothing must be seen in action— that is, in the functional context. The context defines the shape of a dress. As opposed to “Fashion” that dictates the arbitrary change of shapes, Stepanova’s concept of prozodezhda was wholly determined by the aims of production. Clothes were made for work and its look was determined by the requirements of work and the properties of the material it was made from. She suggested that production clothes most fully expressed the contemporary spirit, as they can be easily mass-produced. This theory, off course, matched perfectly with

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the proletarian ideology of the new Soviet republic, where the workers were a “hegemon”—that is, a privileged class. The cut and the choice of materials for prozodezhda were totally functional: for example, “the clothes have to protect the worker from injuries that could be caused by the machine he works with.”9 The engineer’s outfit must have plenty of pockets to carry the necessary instruments. Drivers of locomotives, metalworkers, typographers, weavers—all should have their own production clothes. Following these ideas, the constructivists created the prototypes of work clothes, which were accepted for mass production, such as overalls with numerous pockets and zippers. There are photos of her husband Alexander Rodchenko wearing such overall. Stepanova herself designed working uniforms for firemen, surgeons, pilots, and a headgear for State Publishing House salesmen. Another type of production clothes, according to Stepanova, is spetsodezhda— specialized garment designed for exceptional conditions. “These types of garments include surgeons’ clothes, pilot’s outfits, and protective clothes for workers who labor in acid environments, firemen’s uniforms, and equipment for polar expeditions.”10 And lastly, Stepanova discusses the type of sportodezhda— sport clothes. For competition games, she suggested bold colors and emblems to distinguish the teams. The fundamental principle for sportodezhda is maximum practicality, simplicity, and ease of wear. These principles could seem selfevident today, but for the early 1920 it sounded quite innovative: “Betty Ryan, a Wimbledon tennis star, recalled that women’s dressing rooms in English tennis clubs up to and during the First World War provided a rail near the fireplace on which the steel-boned corsets in which the women played could be dried:  ‘It was never a pretty sight, for most of them were bloodstained.’ ”11 Stepanova advocated for simplicity of sport clothes with special goal to provide the freedom of movement—for instance, her designs excluded buttons. Much in tune with the efforts of Coco Chanel to allow a woman more freedom of movement, Stepanova’s designs were very thoughtful about the wearer’s unobstructed body. Constructivist clothes were meant to be not only practical, but comfortable in wear—this was essentially modern approach. Similar theories were developed by another prominent constructivist artist Alexandra Exter. “Costume for mass consumption must consist of the simplest geometrical shapes, such as rectangle, square and triangle; the rhythm of the color imbedded in them fully varies the content of form”—wrote Exter.12 Her ideas were clearly influenced by the early views of Vladimir Tatlin, who also advocated for economic functionalism in everyday costume. Again, one could easily notice here how the constructivist program exemplifies the Greenbergian definition of modernism: in his concept modernism rejected the decorative and the ornamental in its search for the purity of media and the essential of forms. The drive to remove excessive ornamentation and leave almost nothing behind focuses the creative process on what the true essential of form may be.13 In

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Figure 5.1  Olga Rozanova, Suprematist ornament, textile design, 1917–1918.

more general terms this idea belongs to the broader concept of aesthetic minimalism. Minimalism can be described as a sign of sartorial understatement manifesting the priority of functional construction and geometry of the basic form stripped of superfluous embellishment. Minimalism became a universal criterion of reserved expressiveness, in which the functional construction and geometry of the basic form stripped of superfluous embellishment come to the fore (Figures 5.1 and 5.2).14

The constructivist body The birth of a new socialist society included the new concept of the clothed body: the human body and its reconfiguration were at the very core of constructivist aesthetic. Varvara Stepanova started to analyze human body in a series of paintings and graphics “Figures” (1919–21). In these works, developing the cubist visual poetics, she aimed at producing the abstract representation of body parts. Her idea was to demonstrate “the mechanical essence” of human body, and she did it by symbolizing body parts through elementary geometrical figures. Her colleague, the critic Aleksey Gan wrote: “Stepanova tried to schematize the

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Figure 5.2  Liubov Popova, sketch of a coat and a costume, 1924.

main forms of human anatomy, the principal movements.”15 Other spectators compared her figures to robots—obviously agreeing with Dziga Vertov who stated that modern man wants to become relative of machine.16 The idea was to achieve the economy of gestures. Ippolit Sokolov argued that since a direct line is the shortest distance between two dots, our movements should be rationally organized by direct lines. He imagined the ideal style of economic linear gestures as the geometry of the new socialist epoch and claimed that the citizens of should “feel physiologically the style of RSFSR.”17 His views were based on the ideas of F. W. Taylor—Taylorism was very popular in Russia in 1920s. So Stepanova’s ideal body was a tribute to the constructivist cult of linear forms. The schematized geometric body appears not only in her paintings, but also in fashion designs: they are all oriented on flat-chested androgyny figure without curves. After all, androgyny and effacement of gender differences had always been part of utopian thinking about clothes. In the constructivist fashion designs the function determined form—rational, streamlined form allowed to avoid the capricious gesture and unnecessary expenditure of energy (e.g., the innovative epidermic and adhesive costumes by Alexandra Exter for a ballet in 1925). “The

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performance context is important because it generated the immediate precursor to the streamlined, mechanical man of Soviet times,” notes John E. Bowlt.18 Developing the notion of prozodezhda—functional everyday working garments, they reformulated the complex symbolism of femininity and gender inherent in a dress. The woman of Stepanova, Rodchenko, and Popova was not to be looked at as an object of individual aesthetic achievement; she was part of integral design including all aspects of the new socialist life. In the constructivist aesthetics women discarded the feminine dependence of decoration, moving into the domain of masculine modernity and reaffirming the aesthetic principles of simplicity, functionalism and austere dignified forms.19 The constructivist desire for transparency, rationality and minimalism was rooted in ideas of permanent revolution and technical progress, yet, that was a totally utopian suggestion, and most clear-sighted contemporaries immediately tracked the dangers of such approach. The Soviet novelist Evgeniy Zamyatin wrote the first anti-utopia novel We already in 1920, describing with painful clearness the totalitarian society of the future. One telling detail: the citizens of this “ideal” future state are all dressed in unifs—blue uniforms with gold numbers at the breast.20 Unfortunately, such timely warnings passed unnoticed by the majority of his contemporaries, enthusiasts of leftist ideas. Describing modernity, Georg Simmel noticed that “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces.”21 The fate of early Soviet constructivism is marked by this typically modernist dilemma—the increasing alienation between individual artist and contemporary Soviet society, the growing political pressure of the Soviet state, that starting from 1930s made the politically forced transition from avant-garde art to conservative Socialist realism. Russian avant-garde artists and intellectuals were thus gradually caught in double bind—commitment to their leftist ideas meant repression of their creative attempts. The dominant tendency was the consistent social construction of a “man of the crowd.” Finally, this vector directed against individual, was tragically experienced by the artists themselves—starting from the 1930s the creative work of former constructivists was increasingly regulated by the state. In the 1930s, Rodchenko and Stepanova, for instance, worked at the official magazine “USSR at construction” and had to abandon fashion and textile design.

Constructivism and production In the 1920s the artists of constructivism were eager to fulfill their manifestoes. They denounced easel painting and looked for the ways of direct influencing

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the production of “real things.” Fashion seemed to be a suitable medium for trying the method. In 1923, the communist newspaper Pravda published an article by the director of the first cotton-printing factory in Moscow Alexander Archangelsky, where he complained about the old methods of work and called for the immediate changes at the factory and the necessity to make new textile designs. Two leading women artists immediately reacted—Liubov’ Popova and Varvara Stepanova. They were invited to renovate the art of textile design at the factory. At that moment, the factory was reproducing the old pre-Revolutionary floral samples—“flowerets.” Both artists suggested using geometrical patterns as a new progressive visual language, and the director agreed. Their innovative designs with contrasting colors, overlapping geometrical patterns and sophisticated ornaments were radically different from everything done before in Russian textile design (Figures 5.3 and 5.4). Popova and Stepanova tried to learn all the technological aspects of textile production at the factory and were keen at controlling how their radical ideas

Figure 5.3  Liubov Popova, textile design, 1923–1924.

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Figure 5.4  Liubov Popova, dress design, 1924.

would be brought to life. They came out with a detailed memo describing the desirable position of the artist at the factory: 1. Artist’s participation in industrial production . . . with the right to vote (on production plans, models for production, acquisition of designs, and the hiring of workers in the artistic sector). 2. Participation in the chemistry laboratory to observe the coloration process. 3. Production of designs for block-printed fabrics. 4. Contact with the sewing workshops, fashion ateliers, and magazines. 5. Access to information at the factories and in the press and advertisements in the magazines.22 This memo reflects the high expectations of the “constructivist artist-productivist,” the readiness to accept responsibility and the wide understanding of their work,

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including both technological aspects and further functioning of their designs in public space. When the factory started to produce the fabrics with constructivist designs, Popova was extremely happy: When she was invited with Stepanova to work at the former Tsindel factory, she was genuinely thrilled. She poured over design for calicos, trying to integrate in a single creative act the requirements of economy, the laws of decoration, and the inscrutable taste of the Tula peasant woman. No compliments or flattering offers could tempt her. She categorically denied employment at exhibitions and museums. To “fathom” calico for her was far more attractive than to please the aesthetic world of pure art.23 This text comes from the Popova’s obituary in the LEF magazine—she died in 1924 from scarlet fever, at the age of thirty-five. But even during one year of work at the factory Popova managed to do a lot. At one of the homemade caricatures she is depicted carrying the cart full of drawings to the factory. However, their designs were often rejected by the conservative artistic council of the factory. Some of their projects demanded technical alterations in conveyor system, others were too innovative. Stepanova had a special notebook, “Registration of Textile Samples,” where she described the remarks at the Artistic Council of the factory. The artists were accused of being unable to create, for using compasses and ruler, as if it signified their “inability to draw.” They were recommended to “cover constructivism with a veil of fancy,” their patterns were compared with telegraphic posts, fences, electric wires and “springs, all tied together and built on mathematics.” But analogies with technical objects were precisely the initial goal of constructivists, and they did their best to explain their position. Gradually, the artists found common language with the managers of the factory. In 1924, Stepanova created more than 150 textile designs. But only twenty out of them were put into mass production. Stepanova got a real pleasure from seeing her calicos worn by women on the streets; she declared that she enjoyed it more than any of her artistic success at the exhibitions of painting. Her husband Rodchenko took pictures of Stepanova’s fabrics in the shop-windows and of herself wearing the dress sewn of this cloth. The first days of market distribution of geometric textiles gave unexpected results. All eponge fabrics were bought by Tatar people, because the patterns resembled the national Tatar ornament and could be used for sewing the Tatar khalat (vest).24 But subsequent sales of other fabrics also proved successful and by 1925 in the streets of Moscow one could see women in geometric dresses. Around the same time in the 1920s there were experiments with geometric design by French artists. Rodchenko saw such examples at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1925 and wrote back home: “I saw geometrical designs in Paris. Tell your colleagues at the factory that they will be again far behind because of cowardice.”25 For an

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attentive observer, such as Rodchenko was, these developments showed that geometric textile ornaments were not unique as a form of socialist art, Russian constructivism. They turned out to be the international style, later developed by Bauhaus weavers and Sonia Delaunay in France. Unfortunately for Russian constructivists, they had little time for testing their ideas in practice. Soon after Popova’s death, Stepanova quitted the job at the factory and started teaching at the Higher Artistic Technical School (Vkhutemas). Also, the limitations of the old equipment at the first cotton-printing factory were an obvious obstacle. One of Stepanova’s colleagues summarized:  “We have constructivist ideologists in Russia, and technological industry in the West. This is the real tragedy.”26 In a typical modernist self-reflective manner, Stepanova theorized about her experience at the factory. She presented a special paper on this subject at the seminar in 1924, where she advocated for elimination of “the high artistic value placed on hand drawn design,” eradication of “naturalistic design” and brought arguments in favor of geometric design.27 It is not by chance that she insisted on the mechanization of an artist’s work. In her drawings, she used only compass and ruler and based her ornaments on three geometrical figures: triangle, circle and rectangle. Thus she “mechanized” her own work imitating the technical aspects of the factory’s production. Later, in 1928, summarizing her work at the factory, she wrote an article insisting on the growing role of an artist in textile production. According to Stepanova, the artist should not only design the fabric, but also participate in producing the new types of fabrics, make the drawings according to the type of fabric, and further connect her work with designing the costume. Her ambition was that an artist should finally be able to influence the whole functioning of costume, to rationalize textile industry and fashion system.28 Stepanova and Rodchenko repeatedly proclaimed negative attitude to fashion as a bourgeois cultural institute, enslaving women and tricking them into unnecessary expenses by changing the season looks. They shared the distrust to fashion with their constructivist colleagues, but nevertheless, Stepanova was too interested in real life and the mechanisms of dissemination of her own designs to ignore the intricacies of fashion. Being a professor at the textile faculty of Vkhutemas, she instructed her students to observe the changing women’s fashions and popular fabrics in the streets of Moscow and take notes—much like contemporary trend-watching. “The so-called fashion,” as she contemptuously labeled it, was haunting the imagination of constructivists.29 Trying to influence the clothes of their contemporaries, Popova and Stepanova designed not only textile, but also costumes and dresses. Stepanova, the only constructivist who had professional training in costume design, made several designs of sports clothes, executed in her typical unisex geometric style in black and white and red colors. Popova made the sketches of summer dresses that

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can be compared to the typical 1920s’ style of the “flapper.” In her window display design of 1924 she used the technique of photomontage. The sketch shows an energetic woman wearing a dress with geometric design made of horizontal stripes. The rhythm of lines creates the optical illusion of motion. It is supported by photo of a car at the background—the symbol of speed and industrial progress. Such commercial design clearly appealed to consumer’s fantasy.30 While some of Stepanova’s designs were sewn and worn on different occasions (e.g., a number of costumes for the performance at the Book Evening), Popova’s designs remained on paper.31 The gap between theory and practice was wide, but quite a few radical decisions suggested by constructivists were amazing. In the area of everyday clothes, the “rational suit” seemed to be the “suitable” decision. “And the question of a rational suit—is it possible to encroach upon the fashion Magazine to which dictates the masses the will of the capitalist manufacturers!”—wrote Sergey Tretiakov, the leading ideologist of LEF.32 The early cloth designs of the architect Vladimir Tatlin—“normal clothes”—were constructed according to the principles of rational dress—a severe coat with streamlined silhouette was organized by biometrical proportions. For instance, the level of pocket placing was determined by the length of an arm. The coat was meant to be practical—it had dark color to conceal dirt and it was made of waterproof materials. It consisted of detachable parts which could be replaced as modular constructions. These clothes were made as prototypes for industrial production. The main idea was to produce what was necessary for the country in the conditions of poverty and post-Revolutionary shortages. Tatlin’s clothes were designed to be warm, to provide the freedom of movement and to be hygienic. Unfortunately, the Soviet industry at that time was in a very poor condition and had difficulties in producing even the old traditional coats. Other avant-garde artists also tried their hand in cloth design, but their ideas existed only in the form of sketches: such as the drawings of suprematist outfits by Kazimir Malevich and Ilya Chashnik, dress designs by Olga Rosanova. Alexandra Exter produced interesting designs of dress-transformers: “The types of clothing represented on this table are fully utilitarian, since they consist of several parts and, by donning or removing them, the wearer can change the type of both the shape itself and its purpose.”33 Executed in “simplest of materials (canvas, satinette, burlap, handmade silk, raw silk, wool), these clothes, as they easily change their type, will never be boring, and the person, wearing them, can always change both the silhouette of his clothing and its color as he wishes, because the composite parts are of different colors.”34 The examples given by Alexandra Exter, include three transformer garments. For instance, the design of a weekend suit: by removing the upper part one gets a holiday dress and finally, by removing the white blouse one gets an underdress—work clothes.

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Analogous projects could be found among the works by Nadezhda Lamanova.35 She designed a dress-transformer based on Russian folk costume. She did not belong to the group of constructivists and her approach was less programmatic in terms of ideology. In fact, she was the only Russian designer (before the revolution Paul Poiret invited her to work for him) who continued the traditions of Haute couture in Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, she tried to adapt to the spirit of the age and reluctantly used the term prozodezhda applying it to the female peasant dress: The functional character of the folk costume . . . could be integrated in our urban clothing . . . The elementary forms of the folk costume are always right. Take, for example, the costume of the Kievian province; it is composed of a jupak (outer jacket), a plashta (skirt) and a shirt with embroidered borders and sleeves. A folk costume like this is a sort of prozodezhda designed for physical work; it is easily transformed from summer wear into winter wear, and from daily clothes into festive clothes, by simply adding a necklace, a decorative headband, or a colored scarf.36 Her logic is pretty much the same as that of Alexandra Exter: variety achieved through the work with layers and accessories.

Text / texture / textile One of the aesthetic requirements of constructivists was the technical clarity of design, the respect to the object’s faktura, its specific material properties. Their favorite category was tselesoobraznos—the correlation between the material structure and its purpose. “What qualifies the artist is a subjection to the demands of the medium, which has become indistinguishable from the demands of truth to oneself”—wrote C. Harrison on modernism.37 This essential aspect of modernist creativity can be traced back to ideas of the famous nineteenthcentury art critic Gottfried Semper. Semper believed that primary ornamental motives derived from textile designs. In his monumental work, he traced the origin of different decorations to the simple art forms of bindings and knots. He regarded textile “as primeval art from which all other arts borrowed their types and symbols, whereas it itself seemed quite independent in this respect.”38 The materialistic theory of Semper was based on two impulses: (1) to string and to bind; (2) to cover, to protect and to enclose. He noted that “linear forms are better suited to stringing and binding or to representing the idea symbolically” and accordingly analyzed different cultural forms of ornament.39 Following this logic, the constructivists searched in the textile ornaments the universal formula of the new socialist society. As

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it was already mentioned, one of the leading thinkers of constructivism Ippolit Sokolov considered the direct line to be the quintessential element not only of constructivism, but of a new revolutionary style of RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic).40 Such ideological abstractions peacefully coexisted in the minds of constructivists with a minute attention to factura—the material aspects of an object (Figures 5.5–5.8).41

Figure 5.5  Varvara Stepanova, poster “Book evening,” 1924. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Night_of_the_Books%22.jpg

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Figure 5.6  Olga Rozanova, textile design with Suprematist ornament, 1917.

Figure 5.7  Liubov Popova, textile design, 1924.

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For Varvara Stepanova the geometry of ornament was to correspond to the structure of fabric. She wrote that “an artist should design the fabric from the inside, basing on the laws of its weave. The drawing should be linked to the standard of the material and would evolve finally in the processing of the structure of a fabric.”42 As a result she developed the geometric ornaments with vibrant optical illusions of the third dimensions. The intersecting rhythm of lines reproduced the structure of textile weave. One of her designs even depicted the weaving—thick threads and knots of the fabric. Stepanova skillfully created op-art effects long before the appearance of op-art movement and computer graphics. Later similar experiments were conducted by Sonia Delaunay in her textile ornaments, by Victor Vasarely in painting and Joseph Albers at Bauhaus. Stepanova was creating the optical effects of combining several spatial projections, following the Constructivist imperative of tektonika, the spatial presence. In the majority of her textile designs for the first cotton-printing factory in 1924 she aimed at creating the impression of dynamic movement, as if her patterns possessed their own secret life. The mysterious message of these vibrating images caused contradictory interpretations. Christina Kiaer, for instance, tries to explain it through the philosophy of Boris Arvatov:  “The vibrating opticality of the pattern, while not integral to the structure or production of the cotton cloth itself, points to—or—to use the semiotic term—indexes—the invention and creativity of the industrial production process. The skilled human labor that produced the fabrics is rendered transparent in its very material form, lending the fabric itself the animation of its makers.”43 This sounds like a beautiful metaphor but is hardly convincing—this logic does not explain why “the animation of the makers” expressed itself at this period particularly in the form of geometrical patterns with optical effects. The answer to this question can be found in the previous creative experiments of Stepanova and Popova—both artists were influenced by cubism in their early works.44 During the Revolution the cubistic methods were fused with proletarian ideology, and this cultural intermixture was the optimal milieu for the formation of Russian constructivism. The passionate concentration of Stepanova on the formal aspects of design and the material properties of fabrics could be also explained if we look closely at her creative biography. Starting from 1915 she was participating in the group of Russian futurists including Alexey Kruchenikh, Velemir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovskiy, and Vassiliy Kamenskiy. Stepanova shared the ideas of Zaum (arcane language)—abstract experiments with pure sounds. She called it “Verses without subject.” In 1918, she made two manuscript books of her own arcane poetry, coining arbitrary combinations of sound and words without meaning. The pages of the book contained colored geometrical patterns and scattered letters of “Zaum,” typical arrangement for Russian avant-garde poetry. This interest to the primary texture of poetry—the phonetical structure of language—was regarded as “liberating by futurists.” “Literature no longer has to

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serve as a clerk of word, it approached a letter and dissolved in its essence”— declared Kazimir Malevich.45 He was not alone in these statements.46 Alexey Krychenikh and Velemir Khlebnikov worked along the same lines: “Writing and reading should be tight—lots of knots, bindings, loops and patches  .  .  .  the rough surface is full of splinters.”47 Such programmatic description of futuristic text could be easily considered as characteristic of textile Factura, the sensual material qualities of a ragged fabric. In the domain of textiles most prominent development of this approach came from Bauhaus school in Germany. Weavers from Bauhaus, such as Annie and Joseph Albers produced “structural fabrics” that were made by combining threads of different facture. Anni Albers worked out a theory of illusions, that was very kindred to the experiments of Popova and Stepanova:  “Drawing or print that shows hatching or stippling, rippled or curved lines, etc., and thus has a structural appearance, can be used to produce, if not actual tactual surfaces, the illusion of them”—wrote Anni Albers about graphic illusions.48 Working with different kinds of art, constructivism explored the rich potential of the synthetic Gesamtkunstwerk, and fashion design was a convenient experimental ground. They easily transgressed the generic boundaries. For instance, Rodchenko, Stepanova and Popova were very fond of the montage method. They freely combined photos and graphic designs in their posters. Parallels between literature and fashion were a favorite trend for Sonia Delaunay. She designed dresses where costume interacted with literature and called them “robes-poèmes.” These dresses had poetic lines inscribed on them, the authors being such distinguished writers as Tristan Tzara and Philippe Soupault. The abundant materials point to the close connection between constructivist fashion and graphics—posters, photomontage and book illustration. The constructivist fashion examined the borders between a dress as a fine art object, a fashion garment, a costume for photographed performance, and a stage costume. The synthetic approach to art found its most natural expression in constructivist work for theater.

Prozodezhda for theater? Many constructivists were invited to do theater costumes. By invitation of Alexander Tairov, Aleksandra Ekster made costumes in the cubist style for the performance “Famira-Kifared” in 1916. Liubov’s Popova worked with Meyerkhold, doing costumes for “Magnanimous Cuckold” in 1922 (Figure  5.8). Varvara Stepanova made costumes and scenery for “The Death of Tarelkin” in 1922 and for the play “Through the Red and White Spectacles” that following year. Working for the theater, the constructivists had to solve the theoretical problem: what is the actor’s work? Does the actor’s costume present a kind of

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Figure 5.8  Liubov Popova, theater costume design for The Magnificent Cuckold, staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1922.

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prozodezhda? Stepanova’s answer was—“No,” the actor simply interprets the plot of a play and has no specific productivist function.49 She made only two prozodezhda costumes in a direct sense: the one for the director’s assistant and the second for stage workers. For the actors, she made abstract constructivist clothes divided into several groups: spots clothes for men and children; uniforms for women characters and military uniform. Stepanova commented in an interview that her task was to show the work and the bending of different parts of the human body. Her theater costumes reminded the geometric sportive clothes she designed later. In this aspect Stepanova again followed the theory of Taylorism as applied to the theater practice: “Theatre can teach us all to walk and gesticulate by Taylor’s system,” as formulated Ippolit Sokolov.50 Theater was considered the artistic ground for training the right economical movements. In her theater designs, Stepanova continued exploring the structure of the human body by introducing sharp color contrasts and dividing different body parts by stripes. In this way, every movement of an actor was accentuated. These experiments were a logical consequence of her series “Figures” (1921–3). Unfortunately, the costumes were sewn out of coarse sackcloth and that did not keep shape and distorted the direct lines of a geometric silhouette. Still they functioned as constructivist objects at the stage, grouping the actors and making schematic abstractions out of the actors’ bodies, demonstrating the functional bending of the body. The stage settings made by Stepanova were also minimalist and moveable: Stepanova made the transforming furniture that could be turned and folded. One particularly impressive piece of setting was a big hybrid construction combining meat grinder and prison. There was also a folding table and a folding chair. These moveable designs were conceptualized as an “acting machine.” They were built following the idea of dress-transformer that was also applied by constructivists in clothes design. Thus, both in costumes and stage settings one could see realization of two principles:  (1) minimalist design revealing the structure; (2) accent on movement and transformation of an object.

Simultaneous with Russian constructivism As Russian constructivists were trying to overcome limitations of different genres, aiming at synthetic work, their western colleagues were moving in the same direction. In conclusion, I will discuss one of the comparative examples. Dress design and fabric design traditionally existed as separate fields. Sonia and Robert Delaunay tried to integrate them by making “Tissu-patron.” The cut of dress was conceived at the same time as decoration. This is how she described her invention:  This is the fabric-pattern (tissu-patron). The dress pattern was conceived by the designer at the same time as the decoration. The pattern, together with

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decorative elements, appropriate to the design, was then printed on the cloth. From the point of view of the standardization, toward which all modern trends tend, the fabric-pattern will enable a dress to be precisely reproduced at the other end of the world at minimal cost and with minimal wastage of material.51 Sonia Delaunay wanted her ideas to be known in the Soviet Union and the Russian translation of her article about fabric pattern was published in the Iskusstvo Odevatsya magazine.52 Little is known if her ideas were received at that time, but in 1970s fabric patterns were mass-produced by the Soviet textile industry and widely sold in the shops. Tissu-patron was used by Sonia Delaunay in collaboration with the Redfern company. Her concept of clothes as art was a fine contrast to Varvara Stepanova’s idea of prozodezhda. Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous dresses were conceived as an extension of painting. The question of parallels between the works of Sonia Delaunay and Russian constructivists is a recurrent theme in critical writings not only because of the Russian origin of Sonia Delaunay, but mainly in view of numerous similarities between their geometrical designs of fabrics. Some of contemporary researchers argue that Sonia Delaunay’s ornaments resemble the textiles of Soviet artists and that she borrowed this style because she had seen the works of Stepanova and Popova in 1925 at the International Exposition of Décorative and Industrial Arts in Paris.53 However, this position is hardly convincing, as Sonia Delaunay began to work in this direction much earlier and had other sources of inspiration. Her first robe simultanée was conceived in 1913 as an experimental model, proving the theories of her husband Robert Delaunay about the visual effects of color mixing. She wore it at the famous Le Bal Bullier in 1913. Sonia Delaunay was further influenced by Piet Mondrian—in one of her late interviews she admitted that Mondrian inspired her to use the squares. One could easily trace the direct allusions to Mondrian in her dresses of made between 1921 and 1923. Her style in fashion developed further accumulating the artistic manner of Raoul Dufy. She wrote about his cloth designs that they were like ray of sunshine on a gloomy day. Sonia Delaunay collaborated with Raoul Dufy several times and her works bear the traces of his influence in working with ornament. First, between 1912 and 1915, Dufy used the technique of leaving blank spaces between geometrical figures, and similar devices could be seen in Delaunay’s textile designs. Second, under the influence of Dufy, she started to apply black and white ornaments—the colors she had previously rejected in her simultaneous works.54 Therefore, we can conclude that parallels between the works of Sonia Delaunay and Russian constructivists should be interpreted as typological coincidences, but not as direct influence. So, the simultaneous fashion of Sonia Delaunay was, to use her term, just “simultaneous” with Russian constructivism.

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Conclusion So, what was happening to fashion in the Soviet constructivism? Was Walter Benjamin right, after all? As we know, the discourse of fashion implies temporality, irony and the imperative for change. On the contrary, the initial constructivist idea of dress was something permanent, practical and comfortable, economic in structure, erasing the gender differences. And in this sense what constructivists did was not fashion—on the contrary, they represented a typical ideology of “anti-fashion,” opposing the temporary trends.55 But the experiments in the constructivist laboratory of the future were fruitful for the next generations of fashion designers. Audrey Hepburn appeared in a jersey mini-dress with red and yellow stripes in the style of Russian constructivism in the movie Two for the Road (1967). Jean Paul Gaultier was inspired by Russian constructivism in his “Russian Collection” (fall–winter 1986–7). His black dress with red quilted breasts and striped elasticized skirt panels is a vivid example. In 2009 Christopher Kane showed collection under the theme of “Russian Constructivism.” He used transparent tulle, cashmere and organza, thus adding a soft touch to rigorous geometrical style. The influence of Russian avant-garde can be traced in some dresses from 2016 Valentino s/s collection, and in J. W. Anderson 2016 “Cruise Collection.” Such examples are numerous—in spite of “anti-fashion” moods, the Soviet constructivism became part of fashion history and recurrently inspires western fashion designers. The door to the constructivist laboratory of the future remains open.

Notes 1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 71. 2 V arvara Stepanova, “Present Day Dress—Production Clothes,” in Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930, ed. Radu Stern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 172. 3 K rasnaya Niva 21 (May 27, 1923), quoted in Georgy Kovalenko, Alexandra Exter, vol. 2 (Moscow: Museum of Modern Art Press, 2010), 297. 4 Alexander Lavrentiev, Varvara Stepanova (Moscow: Fond Russkiy Avangard, 2009), 87. 5 Ibid.,  89–90. 6 C lement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85. For a concise discussion of the contemporary reception of Greenberg’s notion of modernism, see Charles Harrison, “Modernism,” in Critical

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Terms for Art History, ed. R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 142–55. 7 Varvara Stepanova, “Present Day Dress,” 172. (Originally published in LEF 2 [1923].) 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.,  173. 11 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams. Fashion and Modernity (London: I. B. Taurus, 2003), 99. 12 Krasnaya Niva, 21 (May 27, 1923), 297. 13 Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 85–94. 14 B radley Quinn in Fashion of Architecture ([Oxford: Berg, 2003], 64): “modernist ambition to eliminate ‘excessive’ details, purging extraneous features to convey a sense of the essentials. Exposing the structure’s framework imbues the garment with a new sense of integrity based on the transparency it projects.” Quinn analyzes modernist contempt for the superfluous, the ornamental, and the decorative and, metonymically, for fashion and the grotesque. This disdain was most famously articulated by Le Corbusier in the early twentieth century, who, following Adolf Loos’s notorious denunciation of ornament, defined modern architecture by contrast with the decorative, which he linked explicitly to fashion, and women’s fashion in particular. For a discussion of Le Corbusier’s relation to fashion, see Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 15 Aleksey Gan, Zrelishcha 1 (1922): 8. 16 Dziga Vertov, “My: Variant Manifesta,” Kino-fot 1 (1922). 17 Ippolit Sokolov, “Stil RSFSR,” Zrelishcha 1 (1922). 18 J ohn E. Bowlt, “Body Beautiful,” in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 54. 19 “ There is a clear, and strongly gendered, moral element in his aesthetic, with its language of purity, cleanliness and health, that is based in the notion of truth or honesty. It is a logical result of a junction of Post-reformation thought, which regards decoration as lies, and of the fetishization of the machine in the industrial age,” note Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro about the theories of Le Corbusier. See their Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 82. 20 Evgeniy Zamiatin, My, and Auldos Huxley, O divniy noviy mir (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1989), 11. This edition joins two major anti-utopian novels: We by Zamiatin (1923) and The Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1931). According to George Orwell, Huxley’s anti-utopia was influenced by Zamiatin’s novel. 21 G eorg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Modern Life,” in Art in Theory 1900– 1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 130. 22 Tatiana Strizhenova, Soviet Costumes and Textiles (Moscow and Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 136.

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23 “ Pamiati L.S. Popovoy,” LEF 2 (1924): 3. Quoted in translation from Strizhenova, Soviet Costumes and Textiles, 141. 24 S tepanova studied in Kazan, the capital of Tatar Republic, and this biographical fact could have influenced the style of her first textile designs. (Tsindel was the former name of the factory, since before the revolution the owner of the factory was Emil Tsindel.) 25 Aleksander Rodchenko, “Rodchenko v Parizhe,” Noviy LEF 2 (1927): 16. 26 K onstantin Medunetsky. Transcript of the discussion of comrade Stepanova’s paper “On Constructivism,” in Art into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914–1932, ed. Richard Andrews and Milena Kalinovska (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, 1990), 76. 27 V arvara Stepanova, “O polozhenii i zadachakh khudozhnika-konstruktivista v sittsenabivnoy promishlennosti v sviazi s rabotami na sittsenabivnoy fabrike,” paper delivered January 5, 1924, quoted in Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 151. See also Christina Kiaer,“The Russian Constructivist Flapper Dress,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 198. 28 V arvara Stepanova, “Ot kostyuma—k risunku i tkani segodniashnego dnya,” in Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda: pis’ma, poeticheskie opiti, zapiski khydozhnitsy (Moscow: Sfera, 1994), 201. 29 F or a discussion of socialism and fashion, see Djurdja Bartlett, Fashion East: the Spectre That Haunted Socialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 13–63. 30 F or a detailed analysis of Popova’s dress designs, see Kiaer, “The Russian Constructivist Flapper Dress,” 234–6. 31 “ The Book Evening” (“Vecher Knigi”) was a public musical performance staged by theater director Vitaliy Zhemchyzhniy in 1924. It began by demonstrating the technological process of book production followed by the debate between professor and worker about the role of books in society and the scenes in the library. The aim of the performance was to educate the working class on the value of reading and how to choose the right books. Stepanova designed all the costumes for the performance. “The Book Evening” was positively reviewed in Soviet newspapers; see L. Iskrov-Mashkevich, “Vecher Knigi,” Smena 8 (May 1924). 32 S ergei Tretiakov, “From Where to Where?,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. Anna Lawton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 215. 33 Krasnaya Niva 21 (May 27, 1923), quoted in Kovalenko, Alexandra Exter, 297. 34 Ibid. 35 N adezhda Lamanova represents a special tendency inside the Soviet fashion of the 1920s. Her designs are more decorative and do not represent constructivism; they are closer to Art Deco style. In the 1920s she made a series of dresses in Russian style. Her designs received Grand Prix at the international exhibition in Paris in 1925. 36 Nadezhda Lamanova, “The Russian Fashion,” in Against Fashion, 177. 37 Harrison, “Modernism,” 147. 38 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty, 2004), 113.

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39 Ibid. 40 Ippolit Sokolov, “Stil RSFSR,” Zrelishcha 1 (1922). 41 T he term “factura” (from Latin factura—a making, manufacture) is normally used by historians of art and design to describe the physical qualities of art object. More specifically the term means tactile and decorative characteristics of materials: for instance, factura of wood, of stone, of marble, of a fabric. 42 V arvara Stepanova, “Ot kostyuama—k risunku i tkani segodnyashnego dnya,” in Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda (Moskva: Sfera, 1994), 201. 43 Kiaer, “The Russian Constructivist Flapper Dress,” 202–3. 44 S ee, for instance, the cubist paintings by Popova “The Violin” (1914) and “Air+Man+Space” (1912); and similar works by Stepanova “Two Figures with a Ball” (1920) and “The Musicians” (1920). 45 K azimir Malevich, “Arkhitektyra kak poshchechina betono-zhelezu,” Anarkhia 37 (1918). 46 S imilar ideas were developed at the same time in Britain in the movement of “Vorticism,” led by Wyndham Lewis. 47 A lexey Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, Slovo kak takovoye (Moscow: Dankin i Khomytov, 1913). 48 Anni Albers, On Weaving (Mineola: Courier Dover, 2003), 65. 49 Aleksey Gan, “Beseda s V. Stepanovoy,” Zrelishcha 16 (1922): 12. 50 Ippolit Sokolov, “Taylorized Gesture,” Zrelishcha 2 (1922): 10–11. 51 Sonia Delaunay, “The Influence of Painting on Fashion,” in Against Fashion, 185. 52 Iskusstvo Odevatsia 2 (1928). 53 T ulovskaya Yu, “Simultannoye atelye S.Delone i eskizi dlia tkaney L.Popovoy i V.Stepanovoy,” Isskusstvoznanie 1 (Moscow, 2003): 508–26. 54 F or a detailed argument, see Olga Khoroshilova, “Abstraktniy mir elegantnikh veshchey,” Teoria Modi 18 (2010–11): 80–82. 55 See the detailed discussion of anti-fashion by Radu Stern in Against Fashion.

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PART TWO

CREATORS AND CREATIONS

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6 PARIS–NEW YORK 1925 JEAN PATOU’S “ADVERTISING” Caroline Evans

Introduction Through the lens of a single dress, this chapter looks at fashion and modernism in the mid-1920s. A  close reading of its design motif, an embroidered Eiffel Tower, leads to a consideration of its wider cultural, commercial and ideological meanings, in both America and France. In looking at what Paris signified to Americans, and America to the French, the chapter identifies some of the contradictions and complexities of modernist identities across the fields of fashion, commerce and visual culture in the period. The modernism it identifies, however, is not that of the artistic avant-garde but of work, business and popular culture, in particular new forms of advertising and promotion. It links fashion to the streamlined, organizational structures of modern commerce rather than to the seamless, mechanical forms of modernist visual culture. In this, it follows a number of other writers who have elaborated on the relationship of fashion to modernism beyond the realms of art and art history. The architect and art historian Mario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari have argued that early twentieth-century fashion was an engine of modernism, not merely a reflex of modernity; furthermore, they assert, the success of fashion in this respect eclipses other attempts to emancipate the relationship of fashion and modernism from narrow histories of art.1 Similarly, the literary scholar Michael Levenson has argued that modernism is not just what he terms “soft culture” but also consists of “hard, causal powers of modern action” that include habits and routines: “the pace of walking, a style of gazing, a tensing of the muscles. Our bodies become modernized, and there we dwell, in those modernized bodies, in technologies, and also in concepts and images as products of modernization.”2 He describes “men in capes, women on bicycles, modern bodies as opposed

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to modern artefacts, in eruptive and ephemeral events staged by artists and writers.”3 And the cultural theorist Peter Wollen has described “the modernist body” as rational, hygienic and streamlined in his writing about Coco Chanel and Jean Patou’s designs of the 1920s.4 Modernist fashion is linked, too, to the rationalization of the body in spheres such as work and leisure, from the Taylorism of the workplace to the “mass ornament” of the chorus line described by Siegfried Kracauer.5 This chapter extends those arguments into the realm of advertising in the 1920s in its analysis of a single dress designed by the French couturier Jean Patou in 1925.

The story of a dress The garment in question is a navy silk faille two-piece consisting of a long-sleeved blouson top and knee-length pleated skirt. The blouse has two patch pockets, and an Eiffel Tower embroidered in red on the front, with a waterfall of white chiffon falling from its base. At the top of the Eiffel Tower was a tiny light bulb that actually lit up, by means of a battery kept in one patch pocket, operated by a Bakelite switch kept in the other, so the wearer could turn the light on and off at will with one hand in her pocket (Figures 6.1 and 6.2). There are small holes stitched into the pockets from the inside to accommodate the wires that run inside the blouse up to a little scarlet eyelet at the top of the embroidered tower on the blouse from which the tiny light bulb can protrude. The dress survives today in the collection of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and photographs of it, including details of the battery and switch mechanism, can be seen on the Costume Institute website.6 The label, which can also be seen on the website, reads “Cannes/Biarritz/Monte Carlo. Jean Patou, 7 rue St. Florentin, Paris.” This tells us that the dress was a couture model from the Paris firm of Jean Patou which at this period had three other branches at fashionable Southern resorts. The records of the Costume Institute confirm that its owner was a Mrs Mary (“Molly”) Van Rensselaer Thayer, née Cogswell. Mrs Thayer died in 1983 and the ensemble was donated to the Costume Institute in her memory by Eugenie Thayer Rahim in 1995.7 The blouson top of the ensemble bears the four-letter monogram of the owner’s maiden name embroidered in red vertically down the side of the Eiffel Tower: MVRC. Mary Van Rensselaer Cogswell, known as Molly, was born in the United States on June 16, 1902, the younger of two daughters whose mother was a Rensselaer, an old New York family of Dutch origin. In Molly’s childhood the Cogswells lived at 12 East 11th Street, and Molly was educated at an elite society school, Miss Chapin’s School on West 47th Street.8 In 1918 she was Maid of Honour at her sister’s wedding which was reported in the New  York Times9 and when, in 1920, she came out at the age of eighteen, her mother

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Figure 6.1  Jean Patou, Advertising, 1925. The top half of the ensemble.

gave a dance for her at the Ritz-Carlton.10 She continued to live with her parents on Fifth Avenue, pursuing a society life, and acquired this two-piece Patou in 1930, the year before her marriage.11 She was, perhaps, a fairly typical couture client. When she married Sigourney Thayer in 1931, she was described in Time magazine as a “Manhattan socialite.”12 Her husband had been described by the same magazine two years earlier, on the occasion of his first wedding to Miss Emily Davies Vanderbilt, as a “spasmodic theatrical producer, wartime aviator, Atlantic Monthly poet and socially prominent jokesmith.”13 The paper also relates that as an impoverished young man before the war he had travelled steerage to Paris without a ticket but with a silk hat. On his death, it described him, more economically, in two words:  “comical, acidulous.”14 That a joke also appealed to his fiancée could be inferred from her choice of an haute couture dress that came complete with a highly unusual gimmick, a light-up feature that could be operated at will by the wearer. Thayer was six years Molly’s senior. At their wedding he was thirty-four, she was twenty-eight. He died in an automobile crash thirteen years later, in 1944 aged forty-seven. Molly, who was again described as a socialite by the New York

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Figure 6.2  The battery and light switch. Credits: Author’s photographs, taken in the archive of the Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Accession number 1995.212a–d. Five good-quality images of the ensemble and its electrical accoutrements can be viewed online at www.metmuseum. org/Collections/search-the-collections/79883?rpp=60&pg=1&rndkey=20140126&ao=on &ft=*&deptids=8&who=House+of+Patou&pos=48 (accessed January 26, 2014).

Times in Thayer’s obituary, survived him by a great many years.15 She was an author who in the 1930s had been the society columnist for the New York Journal, writing under the house pseudonym “Madame Flutterby.” But she was also a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserves, and one of the few western correspondents reporting from Eastern Europe immediately after the Second World War, before returning to the United States to work for the Washington Post and the Magnum Picture Agency. In 1961 she wrote the first biography of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, published by Doubleday. She died on December 10, 1983, and is buried with her husband in Southborough Rural Cemetery, Massachusetts. We know nothing, however, about how she acquired this dress, or the circumstances in which she wore it.16 We can infer (from both the label and the personalized monogram bearing her initials on the front of the ensemble) that

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the outfit was a couture model made specifically for her, and not a legitimized copy from one of New York’s more upmarket stores, such as the Bonwitt Teller authorized replicas shown in Figure 6.3. But whether, or when, she travelled to Europe, or visited the Paris branch of Patou, is not known. Had she done so, at collection time she would have mounted the staircase of the couture house in the rue Saint Florentin to sit, alongside other private clients, and watch the dresses being modelled in the airy first floor salons lined with giant mirrors. She might have been offered lavish refreshments of the kind described by a man who went to Paris to buy a dress for his wife in 1926: At Jean Patou’s evening show the champagne was of an excellent brand; so were the cigars, and the sandwiches were most delectable. The ladies, I noticed, made great inroads upon the rose-tipped Abdullahs . . . and while champagne cup was a very welcome drink, the lemonade, orangeade and iced coffee with whipped cream came in for a good deal of attention too. As for the petits fours, well, how do women keep as thin as they are nowadays when they can eat so much?17 All this is speculation, however. But even without knowing how Molly acquired her dress, we can reconstruct with some certainty how and where it began its life in the couture ateliers of the house of Patou. All couture gowns were first made up as a “model” or prototype in the workshops above the first floor salons. In 1920s France, the dress was known as the model and the woman who we today call the model was known as the mannequin, or living mannequin. After some fevered weeks in which the models were designed and made in the upstairs ateliers, the finished collection was brought down to be modelled by the mannequins, with some considerable sense of ceremony, in the high-ceilinged first floor salons at the “openings” as the seasonal fashion shows were called. The main biannual collections for summer and winter were shown in February and August respectively; in addition there were mid-season collections between these two dates, totaling four annual collections of which the winter ones were the largest and the most important. A few weeks after these buyers’ shows, a separate set of shows were staged exclusively for the private clients. The model dress was not the one the clients bought, however; for a private client, a copy would be made to her exact specification, requiring several fittings. For a trade buyer, a far poorer quality dress or canvas toile would be supplied with fabric samples and sold with the right to reproduce the dress commercially in the buyer’s country. The model never left the premises. It was a design prototype and the couture house gave each model a number and guarded it closely against copyright infringement. As was common, Patou registered the design of this particular dress, probably just before it was shown to buyers, by means of three photographs that still survive

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Figure  6.3 Authorized Patou replicas from Bonwitt Teller, Harper’s Bazar (October 1925): 4. From the house of Patou’s press cutting album for 1925. Author’s photograph.

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today in the Archives de Paris. They prove that the design was registered on August 21, 1925.18 We also know from press coverage in the Patou press cuttings album for 1925 that the embroidered Eiffel Tower of the model dress bore not Molly’s initials but the name of the designer embroidered in capitals: PATOU. In every other respect, it is identical to Molly’s dress. The model dress was described in at least three press articles, and illustrated in two, in which the embroidered PATOU is clearly visible: The Graphic for November 14, 1925, and the Sunday Pictorial for November 29, 1925 (Figure 6.4). These are the same photographs as those used to register the copyright that survive today in the Archives de Paris. Another cutting, from the American Advertising World in September 1925, has no photograph but it clearly describes the outfit. It is from the registration photographs and from these press articles that Molly’s dress design can be confidently ascribed to the winter 1925 collection. The first appearance of the dress would have been to the press on the evening of July 31, 1925. Patou had initiated special press shows from 1923, called répétitions générales and staged the evening before the first trade shows. Patou’s innovation was to flatter the fashion journalists—previously at the bottom of the food chain in terms of their status at fashion shows—and to make the press shows resemble an elite private party. There is an evocative description of the previous season’s press show left by one of Patou’s mannequins. In late 1924, Patou had recruited six American mannequins in New York; they debuted in Paris on the evening of February 5, 1925, modeling his spring 1925 collection alongside his French mannequins.19 The American mannequin Dinarzade (Lillian Farley) recalled her first public appearance for Patou at the press night: As I went through the door to show my first dress, I had the impression of stepping into a perfumed, silk-lined jewel casket, the atmosphere was so strongly charged. The men in their correct black tailcoats with the sleek, pomaded hair; the women in gorgeous evening dresses, plastered with jewels. It was hot, so hot, and the air was stifling with the mixed odours of perfumes and cigarettes. It was nearly one o’clock when the collection was over . . . twenty of us had shown five hundred models.20 The next day she and the other mannequins modelled to the trade buyers, in a very different atmosphere: The next afternoon was the opening for the American buyers. They came in droves. There was a totally different feeling from the party-like atmosphere which had prevailed the previous evening. These men and women were there on business. The European buyers came the next day and the salons sounded like the Tower of Babel.21

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Figure 6.4  Sunday Pictorial (November 29, 1925): n.p. The caption reads “ ‘ADVERTISING’ is the name given to the model on the left, representing a simple dress with its sole trimming an embroidered Eiffel Tower bearing the word ‘PATOU.’ He designed it. The Tower is topped by a tiny electric bulb lighted from a switch in the pocket.” Cutting from Patou press album for 1925. Author’s photograph.

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Journalists were well fed and entertained at these press shows. Six months later Molly’s dress would have been shown in identical circumstances. The London society and fashion magazine Tatler described the press show at the end of July 1925:  “At Jean Patou’s there were very delectable raspberry ices and his American models—mannequins I mean—were utterly delightful to gaze upon. Raspberry ice upon one’s plate, Devonshire cream, and Sussex roses upon the cheeks of the mannequins . . . it was really a lovely picnic!”22 And a year later the Tatler was still extolling the hospitality of the Patou press shows, when it recounted that “Jean Patou gave us fois gras sandwiches and petits fours and ‘bubbly,’ and iced kafay and rose-tipped cigarettes and ginger-haired mannequins, who were too attractive for words.”23 The Tatler’s prattling account tells us that the collection featuring the dress was modelled by Patou’s American mannequins, who at that time were appearing in Paris for their second season. It is not clear, however, whether Molly’s dress was modelled by one of the American mannequins or by a French one in the August 1925 show. Patou’s cabine was international and the dress could have been worn by any of the mannequins. The press pictures of the dress, however, suggest that the mannequin, who has a straight bob with a fringe, was not one of the Americans, as they all have wavy hair with side or centre partings and no fringe in the press photographs from 1925. The buyers’ shows began on August 1, 1925, and were staged twice daily, at 10.30 a.m. and 2.30 p.m.24 In a large house like Patou’s, there were different shows for the American and European buyers, the Americans coming first to represent their greater spending power; the European buyers came next day. Over the course of the fortnight, gowns that were not selling would be replaced with others.25 It was a highly speculative business; only approximately ten percent of the models shown were sold, and so the unit cost of each model had to include the cost of the nine that had not sold.26 Once the buyers had placed their orders and left Paris, the private clients’ shows took place, and some of the unsold models might then reappear in the individual clients’ shows. These began in September as a rule; they were linked to the society calendar to accommodate the customers returning to Paris in mid-September after the holiday season to buy their winter wardrobe.27 The private clients’ shows were far more informal and adapted for the convenience of the clients, to whom dresses might be modelled individually. Thus if Molly Cogswell had travelled to Paris she might have attended a show any time from late August or September onwards. The fact that her dress appeared in two press articles from November 1925 suggests, however, that it had not sold in the buyers’ collections. Had a buyer bought it, the photograph would not have continued to be released to the press after that date. Its reappearance in two papers in November after its first mention in September suggests that it might have been shown initially to buyers in August, then to

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private clients in September and again, possibly, in November to the press as part of the mid-season collections. It is hardly surprising that this ensemble was not bought by the trade buyers, however, because it is not a design that could easily translate to the mass market. The ensemble was a far cry from what in the industry was called a “Ford”:  a dress that sold in huge numbers because it was amenable to simplification and adaptation for mass production in the American market. Rather, it was a novelty piece, with its battery and light bulb, as the Advertising World cutting from September makes clear, by describing it as characterizing the French love of novelty. Nowadays it would be described as a showpiece, a garment not intended to go into production but to get press attention on the runway. Yet although it is an elite, couture ensemble made for a Manhattan socialite of means, Molly’s dress is not conservative in the traditional sense of a couture dress. Its cut and style invoke the modernity of the flapper fashions generally promoted by Patou, with their emphasis on youth and movement, and this effect is augmented by Patou’s widely publicized use of American mannequins to model his designs. Arguably this two-piece interpolated the subject as an independent, cosmopolitan modern woman. Furthermore, the dress itself was a nexus of both French and American signifiers of some complexity. In one garment, a set of social, commercial and even ideological relations converge:  while the Eiffel Tower, with its iconic status as a symbol of Paris, symbolized “Frenchness” to Americans, the idea of Advertising (the name of the dress) encapsulated a certain ideal of American modernity for the French. That both countries somewhat misrecognized each other in these representations is hardly surprising: for the images they projected, and the stories they told themselves and each other, were saturated with contradictory aspirations and ideologies that were both economic and cultural. Some of these complexities can be untangled by analyzing the significance of these two representations—the Eiffel Tower and advertising—in Molly Cogswell’s dress of 1925.

The Eiffel Tower: France through American eyes In September 1925 the Sunday Pictorial captioned its image of the dress thus: “ ‘Advertising’ is the name given to the model on the left, representing a simple dress with its sole trimmings an embroidered Eiffel Tower bearing the name ‘PATOU.’ He designed it. The Tower is topped by a tiny electric light bulb lighted from a switch in the pocket.”28 In 1925 the Eiffel Tower was the tallest building in the world; it was overtaken in 1930 first by the Chrysler Building in New  York at 319 meters high and then, also in 1930, by the 449 meters tall Empire State Building. But in 1925, the date of Molly’s dress, it was a potent

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image of Parisian modernity. As Agnès Rocamora points out in her chapter “The Eiffel Tower in Fashion,” the tower has long been used as a symbol of Paris and, like the idea of the city itself, is a key sign of fashion discourse: both the tower and the city “contribute to the construction of Paris as a fashion centre and capital of fashion.”29 Rocamora invokes Roland Barthes’s essay of 1964, “La Tour Eiffel,” in which Barthes argued that the tower is pure signifier, one that “attracts meaning” so that the Parisian imaginary can be grafted onto it:  “Its very emptiness designated it to the symbolic, and the first symbol it was to create, through logical assertion, could only be that which was ‘visited’ at the same time as the tower, that is, Paris: The tower became Paris by metonymy.”30 Rocamora goes on to review some of the many ways it “becomes” Paris, particularly with regard to how it has been anthropomorphized as a woman by virtue of the feminine gender of the French word for tower (la tour) and therefore, also, associated with fashion and dress. Analyzing Robert Delaunay’s enormous painting of 1910, La Ville de Paris, in which the gigantic faceted forms of the Three Graces are fused with the Parisian cityscape, Rocamora argues that “the tower is in effect the fourth grace—or maybe three graces fused into one—in this vision of Paris where womanhood, tower and city meld.”31 Surveying a range of examples, including Sonia Delaunay’s advertisements for her fashion and textiles of 1925, she concludes: “A sign of Paris, a symbol of elegance and femininity, but also modernity, the tower might well be the ultimate Parisienne, one more monument to a feminine Paris.”32 Rocamora looks largely at what this symbol has meant to the French, particularly through the work of French authors, artists and image-makers. Such imagery was also projected by the French for foreigners, however. The Paris fashion trade was an export one of an unusual kind: it exported not goods but ideas, in the form of model dresses which it sold to overseas buyers with the rights to reproduce them on a mass scale. Hence the bombastic tone of so much of its fashion rhetoric. The idea of Paris as a uniquely cultural and artistic city was an important part of the city’s symbolic capital that it deployed to sell its goods; time after time, couturiers claimed that Paris fashion could not survive long away from its native soil. It withered, they asserted, if taken out of its native city, for its essence depended on its proximity to French culture and ambiance. Thus the idea of French cultural superiority was written into the commercial codes of the industry. It was these ideals of Frenchness on which Patou drew to make his most important sales, not to his domestic market but overseas, and in particular to North America. And it worked. The same rhetoric was parroted by American journalists and industry insiders the other side of the Atlantic.33 The American fashion industry bought this myth wholesale, just as it bought the designs. Paris was pictured as a vital fashion centre for the cosmopolitan American typified by Figure 6.5, an illustration in Harper’s Bazar showing a fashionable woman leaping across

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Figure 6.5  Fashion drawing from Harper’s Bazar, c. 1925. Undated cutting in Fashion Institute of Technology/SUNY, FIT Library Department of Special Collections and FIT Archives, New York. Author’s photograph.

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the Atlantic from New York to Paris.34 In 1928, Carl Naether’s advertising guide Advertising to Women devoted an entire page to the meaning of the by-line “Paris” and described how the word itself sufficed to sell luxury goods to women in particular.35 In 1925, Robert Forrest Wilson wrote: Paris, to the average woman, means, primarily clothes. All her life she has read about Parisian clothes and Parisian styles. The names of the creators of Parisian clothes are familiar to her also. She knows about Worth and Lavin and Paquin. In the fashion pages of the magazines she has seen the names of Jenny and Vionnet and Patou. These are the names that thunder an imperious authority in America, and throughout the rest of the world, too.36 But if Patou’s name did “thunder an imperious authority in America,” Patou himself was not complacent about his success there. On the contrary, in 1925, recently returned from a high-profile American publicity trip to recruit his American mannequins, Patou continued to work hard for his American success, wooing his transatlantic customers in all sorts of ways, flattering their sense of Americanness and promoting his own particular brand of Frenchness through ideals of chic, Parisian modernity. Molly Cogswell’s outfit is designed in the French colors of red, white and blue, and made even more specifically Parisian by representing the Eiffel Tower topped with an electric light. Its waterfall of finely pleated white chiffon bordered in a red and blue stripe resembles a revolutionary cockade. Its unstructured and casual cut were typical of the athletic, rangy elegance of mid-1920s’ sportswear so suited to what one American newspaper journalist in 1926 described as the “greyhound silhouette” so dear to American customers.37 The cultural myths of Paris, allied with the modernity of the dress’s design, gives Patou’s dress “Advertising” a certain contemporaneity. The tower both connotes the city’s history and transmits that history into the future. As Rocamora writes, “it is because the tower has survived time, its modernity still celebrated, that it represents a useful, iconic metaphor for fashion: tradition, the past, the present and the future are all inscribed in it.”38 The Eiffel Tower had been erected for the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition (Exposition Universelle) and it featured prominently in the 1925 Paris International Exhibition too (Exposition Internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes). Early that year, in preparation for the exhibition opening in April, the tower had been fitted with 200,000 electric lights, requiring ninety kilometers (fifty-five to sixty miles) of electric cables, so it could glow in the night (Figure  6.6).39 The embroidery of the tower on Patou’s dress, augmented by its tiny light-up battery with its on-off switch concealed in the wearer’s pocket, is a clear reference to this phenomenon. The little electric light bulb atop the embroidered Eiffel Tower in 1925 brings the old association of Paris as city of lights bang up to date by picturing the electrification of the Eiffel Tower in 1925.

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Figure  6.6  The Eiffel Tower in 1925, illuminated with the name CITROEN. Anonymous photographer.

As the frontispiece to her book on the 1925 Paris exhibition, Tag Gronberg reproduces a detail of a photograph from the twelve-volume exhibition guide, the Ecyclopédie des arts décoratifs et industriels moderns au XXème siècle.40 It shows the Eiffel Tower from the Pont Alexandre III which had been especially remodeled for the Exposition as the rue des Boutiques, a modern-day Rialto with a row of Parisian luxury goods shops spanning the Seine. Gronberg describes how the light that streamed from these shop windows at night evoked a “city of light” in which the main function of light was to produce “the phantasmagoria of the commodity.”41 She cites the description from the 1924 American edition of Baedeker’s guide to Paris as la ville lumière, “especially

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known for its ‘articles de luxe’ of all kinds.” And she goes on to argue that “Paris, as ville lumière, world centre of luxury shopping, was heavily predicated on notions of femininity.”42 “Paris is a women’s city,” wrote Wilson in 1925.43 His book, Paris on Parade, reveals the inner working of the Paris couture business to American readers. He describes the American buyers who live in Paris and work for large American clothing retailers, and the 1,200 buyers who biannually cross from the United States to France on buying trips “bringing with them into the leisurely city [of Paris] a breeze of American zip and bustl.”44 Twice a week, transatlantic liners disgorged the excited buyers at Le Havre where they clambered on board the trains for Paris.45 There, in the big couturiers’ salons, they would place numerous orders for different samples in varying sizes. These samples were destined for the large American stores who then made their own design alterations for the American market. The system did not encourage originality or distinction. Didier Grumbach argues that “For America, haute couture represented no more than a luxury prêt à porter requiring the commissioners to choose according to the tastes of a traditional clientele little inclined to excess.”46 Yet for all the popularity of the Paris couture shows, from 1925 onwards the French couture houses “haemorrhaged sales” in Grumbach’s phrase, and in an attempt to curb their losses they intensified the sale of reproduction rights of couture models to sole buyers from overseas.47 They wooed the overseas buyers in every possible way, the American commissioners most of all.48 Even Madeleine Vionnet, a virulent anti-copyist and defender of exclusive design, entered into a contract with an American importer, Eva Boex, to produce a range of garments for the United States.49 This context adds weight to Gronberg’s assertion that “The discourse of Paris as a ‘woman’s city’ was thus a powerful means of promoting French economic interests during the post-war years of reconstruction.”50 And in their promotion of French economic interests, the French often resorted to the very American methods which they affected to despise. The illumination of the Eiffel Tower was sponsored by the French automobile magnate André Citroën. In 1925, Francophile German writer Joseph Roth wrote from Paris: “all the way up the Eiffel Tower, you see the name of a famous manufacturer, rich enough to afford one of the symbols of the world—and America is over Paris again.”51 The name was French, but the spirit of advertising, which Roth deplored, was American. In the Frankfurter Zeittung for August 26, 1925, he declared: “This summer Paris is neither hot nor cold nor rainy: it is American.” He excoriated the way Americans dressed, with their lanky figures in flat shoes, “extrawide suits” and their general vulgarity:  “Only in summer do you see so much gold and silver on clothes. The elegant and subtle line of French designers and couturiers in summer becomes lavish and ostentatious:  American, in a word.”52

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Advertising: America through French eyes It was an American advertising journal that first reported Patou’s dress in September 1925, rather than a fashion one. Advertising World wrote: The French are undoubtedly advancing more in advertising. Mons. Jean Patou, the famous French dressmaker, has uniquely named one of his models for the season “Advertising,” and one can conjecture all manner of things from this. The unique part of the gown is that a small bead ornament on it flashes at intervals as the mannequin (or perhaps we should say, the wearer) walks along. This again exemplifies the “unique” which appeals to the French mind. Novelty seems to come first in all things.53 This account tells us that the dress was called “Advertising,” in English, and that its appeal to an American audience might be that of a typical French novelty, characterized by its uniqueness. The ideas that uniformity and standardization were “American” while individuality was “French,” and that these values could be grafted onto images of women, were important national stereotypes that lay behind Patou’s marketing and promotional stratagems.54 Advertising itself, too, was thought to typify a certain stand of American business acumen and entrepreneurial modernity. In 1925, however, advertising (in French, la publicité) was also included for the first time in a French international exhibition. Gronberg argues that advertising appeared in the 1925 exposition as a “crucial index of modernity,” and she cites the exhibition guide’s claim:  “the art of advertising must be modern or cease to exist.” This, she argues, “was vividly underscored by Citroën’s appropriation (timed to coincide with the exhibition) of the Eiffel Tower as giant billboard. By night the Tower—wired up with electric light bulbs—was transformed into a kind of giant firework. Citroën’s logo appeared along with a stream of shooting stars against the city’s skyline—yet another manifestation of Paris ville lumière.”55 In the illuminated tower, itself feminized as Rocamora discusses (la tour), the ideas of Paris as both city of lights and city of women came together. The tower advertised the idea of Paris itself, a feminine city, as much as it advertised cars:  the Citroën name emblazoned down its side thus incorporated the automobile manufacturer and his brand into the metonymic representation of the city. And, as Gronberg argues in a separate article, while the Citroën illuminations drew on a specifically American model of advertising, the Seigel-manufactured dressmakers’ mannequins of the Exposition embodied the principles of French advertising with its tendency to use the figure of a woman to sell anything at all.56 Mimicking the way that Citroën emblazoned his name down the side of the real tower in a sign big enough to be seen at a distance of forty kilometers, Patou

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emblazoned his own name down the side of the embroidered tower. Never before had a designer put her or his name on a garment quite so blatantly. A few years earlier, Poiret had embroidered his wife’s name in the form of a rebus on a nightdress he made for her, and Patou had included handkerchiefs embroidered with his initials on the wardrobe he designed for the Dolly Sisters’ tour of America in 1924, but for a designer to splash his name across the front of a dress was a new departure. In this instance, Patou used his name as a form of branding, long before it became acceptable for designers to scatter logos over the surface of their products as they do today. The letters PATOU embroidered on the Eiffel Tower of the dress impose one signifier of chic and exclusivity (haute couture) on another (the tower and, by extension, Paris) so that the two become fused. Furthermore, the entire conceit of the dress, with its illuminated tower and tongue-in-cheek name, Advertising, suggest that it is an entirely knowing reference to Citroën’s illuminations. As in metal, so in cloth:  from cars to couture. Produced just a few months after Citrëen’s innovation, in a Paris whose night-time skyline was dominated by the image, Patou’s embroidered tower is an amusing, perhaps an amused, riposte to Citroën’s megalomaniac erection. But it also suggests an ambition and ego to match those of Citroën: an equivalence between the automobile magnate and the fashion czar. Patou, too, was an industrialist of sorts. Far from presenting himself as an artist, according to the traditional rhetoric of haute couture that sought to dissociate itself from industry, Patou’s branding of the tower with his own name suggests a commercial zeal commensurate with his export ambitions and, particularly, his American sales. “Patou’s spectacular expenditure of money in adroit advertising” was notorious, according to Wilson.57 In February 1925 the appearance of Patou’s American mannequins on his Paris catwalk had generated enormous publicity; in April, Citroën’s self-advertisement appeared on the tower, and the theme of Paris/New York was much in the air. Patou seized the moment. Both the motif of the Eiffel Tower with its electric light, and the name, Advertising, suggest that this dress may have been designed for dissemination as an image and an idea first and foremost: a witty joke for both the French, and for the American visitors to Paris in 1925, who could hardly have missed the city’s night-time illuminations. Just as Roland Barthes claimed that the tower became Paris through metonymy, so Patou’s naming of his dress Advertising became a metonym of his advertising practices and processes. It was normal couture practice for a designer to give each model in a collection a name. Unlike Chanel, who only numbered her dresses, Patou habitually gave his dresses French names, another way of imbuing them with the aura of Parisian chic. After his American mannequins debuted in Paris however, a New  York Times journalist suggested that Patou might one day switch to American names:

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M Patou has the custom of giving distinctive names to his more important creations. When his four great showings of the year take place an imposing butler stands in one corner of the salons and calls out the name of each costume as the mannequin wearing it enters. If M Patou succeeds in living down the strong opposition to his American mannequins, very probably he will give distinctly American names to the creations he will make for them to display. At the next Patou showing perhaps the butler will be heard making announcements like these: The frock “Votes for Women” is presented. The “Golf Girl” sports suit appears as number two. A particularly youthful creation, “Let flappers flap” is our third offering. For the fourth offering, we take pleasure in presenting “Dry America,” a chic street costume christened specially for the weather here.58 In this humorous account the journalist derives his suggestions from stereotypes of the American woman: the suffragist, the sportswoman, the young flapper. The latter was a type that had already featured among Patou’s American mannequins in Paris, two of them being no older than sixteen and seventeen, and Patou had declared himself captivated by their “flapper walk.”59 And indeed, at his next collection Patou did use an American name for a dress:  Advertising. Advertising itself was widely believed in both Europe and America to be something at which Americans had excelled since the beginning of the century.60 But in the 1920s, argues Alan Weill, advertising changed more than in any previous decade because it began to be affected by economics.61 Victoria De Grazia describes how, after the First World War, “American businesses invaded Europe” and, building on nearly five decades of merchandizing expertise, began to sell new goods using “novel techniques and methods.”62 She shows how American advertising agencies with offices in Europe were relentless critical of the artisanal way of working in Europe, and were convinced that consumption could be “Taylorized” just like production.63 French advertising changed considerably in the 1920s, but it remained very different in conception and in fact from American advertising. Marjorie Beale aligns French post-war advertising with modernism in a provocatively titled chapter, “Advertising as Modernism,” that opens her book on inter-war France. She writes that “advertising had already permeated the realm of quotidian urban life,” instancing the appeal of its visual clarity to the group of writers, artists, filmmakers and designers who collaborated on the purist journal L’Esprit nouveau, and its influence in Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris of 1926.64 She argues that surrealists André Breton and Aragon saw modern commercial life as potentially poetic, and in Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris “commerce was surreal because it filled the world with fragments of language” that could be detached from their context and reframed or reused at will.65

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Beale focuses on the structural similarities between surrealism and advertising in a way that the American advertisers of the 1920s would have had very little time for. Indeed, she argues that it was characteristic of more enlightened French social commentators that they understood the interrelation of business and culture, and the impossibility of separating them. But she takes issue with the claims of “several generations of economic historians” that the French are a people “whose culture made them resolutely opposed to modernization.”66 She argues that in reality the French were not so conservative, and the battles between modernizers and traditionalists over Taylorism and Americanization simply served to cloak modernist designs that were taken on board by both camps:  the modernizers directly, the traditionalists only once they had been recast in a form more compatible with French culture.67 And she points out that the postwar “desire to regroup and embrace modernity” was not limited to art and culture but extended to business practices too, as French advertising of the 1920s developed in tandem with contemporary advances in psychology and psychiatry.68 Patou was of this modernizing tendency and ran his house according to the most up to date American business methods that amounted to a form of Taylorism.69 Unlike the more conservative French couturiers, he enthusiastically endorsed both American business methods and leisure pursuits. His advertising budget was large, his salaries high, and his prices relatively low.70 He installed an American bar in his couture salon, and played American music at his fashion shows.71 In early April 1926, New York fashion writer Miss Helen Landon Cass gave a talk to the Indianapolis Advertising Club at the Chamber of Commerce: “Buying is the touchstone, the magic hope we all have that existence will be wonderful when we have a Patou dress, a geranium lipstick or a whiskery Airdale puppy.” She added, in prescient coda on the relationship between consumer culture, desire and identity, “The store is one of the few places in the world where we can exchange what we have for what we wish.”72 If Miss Cass understood the totemic power of Patou’s name, Patou understood consumer desire equally well. Not himself a designer, like Jacques Doucet before him, and many other couturiers, he employed others to design the clothes to which he added the finishing touch and final seal of approval, providing the allure and glamour to sell them internationally, to the point where a Patou dress could become “the touchstone for desire,” as Miss Cass put it. Advertising, publicity and marketing were crucial in the promotion of his couture business in the United States. Ninety percent of the cuttings in the Patou press books for 1925 are from English language newspapers. Figure  6.7 shows a page from Patou’s press album from March 1925 featuring a single article on the Paris debut of the American mannequins and all the newspapers across the United States in which that article was syndicated. To measure this success he used an American press agency to track

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Figure  6.7  One page from a Patou press album, showing an article from March 1925 on Patou’s American mannequins and forty-nine different US newspapers in which it was syndicated. Author’s photograph.

it, and his staff carefully pasted the evidence of every single publication of the article throughout the United States in his press books. Thus did the very French Jean Patou, who himself spoke not a word of English, succeed in disseminating his name across the entire United States.

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France and America: Reciprocal visions After the First World War, the relationship between France and America was complicated, and often contradictory. As Cindi de Marzo writes: The complex relationship between Paris and New  York City, which served as the crucible for integrating and adapting designs before trends and styles filtered to the rest of the country, involved admiration, sometimes grudging; jealousy, occasionally fierce; and opportunism, frequently economically rewarding. The cross-currents touched nearly every aspect of life:  fashion, architecture, home and work spaces, cuisine, performing arts, advertising and even town planning.73 America had led the July 1919 victory march through Paris to celebrate the end of the First World War. Despite the original plan for the Allies to be represented in alphabetical order, which would have put American at the end, the United States was given first place by France and her European Allies to recognize both its contribution to the war effort and “its new role as the world’s leading industrialized nation, as well as the power and prosperity that accompanied that position.”74 Donald Albrecht relates how, in the interwar years, New York and Paris went on to develop “an increasingly competitive and reciprocal relationship in many arenas that had historically been considered Paris’s domain.”75 Notable among these was fashion. New  Yorkers began to shed their sense of inferiority visà-vis French culture, while the French looked to America for “vibrant” modern culture.76 France recognized the economic superiority of America, but French attitudes to America in the 1920s were mixed. Despite the conservatism of some French critics, the late 1920s saw a French vogue for all things American. Elliot Paul, the Paris correspondent of the Chicago Tribune who lived in Paris from 1923, recalled that “The younger French, some intellectual and others not, made a fetish of everything American and ‘modern,’ ”77 and French writer Paul Morand described the vogue for jazz, the Charleston, dominoes, Mah-jongg and cocktails as “Americanophili.”78 Other French writers of the 1920s, however, such as André Siegfried and Georges Duhamel, were ambivalent about America, and contrasted French individualism with American conformity. Siegfried was the author of a best-selling book on America that he had researched in New York in 1925. It was published in 1927 in France as Les Etats-unis d’aujourd’hui and in the United States as America Comes of Age: A French Analysis.79 Georges Duhamel’s less reasoned and rather more hysterical account of American society and culture was published in Paris in 1930 as Scènes de la vie future (scenes of the life of the future) and in the United States as America the Menace.80

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Siegfried mistrusted the affluence of American society:  “so much luxury within the reach of all can only be obtained at a tragic price, no less than the transformation of millions of workmen into automatons. ‘Fordism,’ which is the essence of American industry, results in the standardization of the workman himself.” He argued that this standardization affected not only the individual’s manner of working but also his subjectivity and style of consumption: “can it be possible that the personality of the individual can recover itself in consumption after being so crippled and weakened in production? Have not the very products, in the form in which they are turned out by the modern factory, lost their individuality as well?”81 And he went on to assert that “in the maximum efficiency of each worker  .  .  .  lies grave risk for the individual. His integrity is seriously threatened not only as a producer but as a consumer as well.”82 Both Siegfried and Duhamel linked American conformity to mass production and the production line, and argued that American productivity had an effect not only in the economic realm but also on culture and subjectivity.83 Duhamel felt that advertising had destroyed the capacity for independent thought, and saw it as “the ultimate insult of American culture to the French sensibility.”84 But at the same time, these writers admired American productivity. The rabidly anti-American Duhamel remained impressed with the long legs of American women, just as the pro-American Patou had been in his selection of the American mannequins, even if Duhamel did describe the American woman at the wheel of her car as if she had come fresh off the production line: she is, he wrote, “the modern goddess, published in an edition of two or three million copies.”85 David Kuisel describes this tendency to polarize the two countries’ characteristics (American conformism and uniformity, as opposed to Gallic individualism) as a postwar phenomenon. He argues that, prior to the First World War, the two nations had little to do with each other, either culturally or economically, and that it was America’s military intervention in the war, and briefly in post-war reconstruction, that led America to become a major actor in European affairs.86 This was not so, however, in fashion. From the nineteenth century, America had been a customer for French fashion and luxury goods. American retailers made regular buying trips to Paris, and there was a routine and frequent commercial exchange between both countries from at least the second half of the nineteenth century, if not earlier.87 The exchange generated an atmosphere of mutual ambivalence, envy, admiration and fear between the fashion professions of each country and, as Albricht asserts, in fact “the interchange between Paris and New York was never simple, comprising in equal measure admiration and envy, respect and rivalry.”88 The fashion and labour historian Nancy Green cogently describes the, sometimes mismatched and contradictory, ways in which each country saw

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the other from the nineteenth century onwards under the rubric of “reciprocal visions.” French garment manufacturers have been wary of growing American industrial strength since the nineteenth century, while American designers have been anxious about creating a distinctive American style since the early twentieth. Such comparisons, by manufacturers and industrial reporters, reveal transatlantic understandings of the garment “other” which fall into the realm of what I call reciprocal visions.89 She notes that in fashion writing “French observers often had a double discourse” arguing internally for greater industrialization and competitiveness, but, to the outside world, asserting French elegance, taste, and artistry.90 This “fight between two nations” was both ideological and commercial—and always riven by contradiction. It was conducted in a “turmoil of charge and counter charge.”91 Each country’s spokesmen might declare the fashionable taste of the other country “freakish” in one breath; yet in another they sang each other’s respective merits, if through gritted teeth. Both Americans and French colluded in the construction of the stereotype of the superiority of French taste, and the American garment trade promoted the idea as actively as the French press did. The American designer Elizabeth Hawes who worked in Paris in the mid-1920s describes how the American department stores “spent hundreds and thousands of dollars building the French legend . . . the department stores of the United States made an enormous capital investment in the names of the French couturiers.”92 Green argues that while the French were convinced of their own good taste, they reluctantly conceded the superior economic power of the United States, and had to “reconceptualize their art in the face of growing industrialization and increased competition . . . French garment manufacturers worried about their place in the world market and about how to increase productivity.”93 After the war, American business practices permeated the French fashion trade in the form of increasing homogenization. “Just as Ford has been imitated by Citroën, the tendency to merge smaller units into large ones, which is associated with American business methods, has left its mark upon the hitherto highly individualistic trade of the Parisian dress designer,” wrote the New York Times in 1928.94 In the 1920s many independent Paris couture houses were subject to mergers (Doeuillet and Doucet) and takeovers (Poiret, Drecoll, Beer, and Agnès) as one-man or one-woman businesses sold majority shareholdings and became joint stock companies. Yet the American influence did not extend beyond business practices to creative design identities and talents. Despite some vigorous American initiatives to promote American fashion that had begun

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before the First World War, France retained its hegemony in the United States.95 Phyllis Magison describes how New York retained: total reliance on Paris for creative leadership in fashion trends well into the early twentieth century. Until the early 1930s, there was no question that Paris was the sole arbiter of style: infallible, eternal, sacrosanct. American fashion was the impatient kid brother: cunning, adaptable, frequently smart . . . but never chic.96 New  York had the manufacturing capacity, she notes, but not creativity; its dressmakers “who mostly interpreted Paris fashions” were largely anonymous until the early 1930s. Things were already beginning to change however, and, as the 1930s progressed, New York would come to find its own identity as a world fashion city, as Rebecca Arnold charts in her book The American Look.97 But in 1932 the American business magazine Fortune could still look back on the new century and assert: Before 1914, only the extremely wealthy among American women looked to Paris for their fashions . . . After the war, the couturiers of Paris began to dress the whole Western world. Their ideas, much diluted, but still theirs, filtered down to the cheapest grades of dresses and flowed out over all Europe and both the Americas. Paris became, and has remained, the keystone of the whole arch of international fashion. Of late, this supremacy has been challenged by New York, where the American school of couture, long held in anonymous subjection by Paris, is fast becoming articulate. But Paris, for a while at least, is still Paris.98 It was, but in Patou’s couture dress with its Eiffel Tower embroidered with Molly Cogswell’s monogram, it was a Paris made over by—and for—Americans.

Notes 1 M ario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari, seminar at Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University, April 15, 2011. In the English language edition of their book, this is translated as “reflection” rather than “reflex.” They write that, “as an autonomous cultural expression, fashion—on a par with the visual arts and other spheres such as design and architecture—was one of the driving forces behind modernism and not a reflection of modernity.” See their Fashion at the Time of Fascism: Italian Modernist Lifestyle 1922–1943 (Bologna: Damiani Editore, 2009), 8. 2 M ichael Levenson, “1913 and 1914: Two Years in the History of Modernism,” presentation at the London Modernism Seminar, Senate House, University of London, June 2, 2007.

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3 L evenson argues that “What once seemed the exclusive affairs of ‘modern masters,’ the ‘men of 1914’ (as Wyndham Lewis called them), now stands revealed as a complex of inventive gestures, daring performances.” See Michael Levenson, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2.  4 Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 20–21 and 44. 5 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1955), 75–86. On fashion in relation to Taylorism and the mass ornament, see Caroline Evans, “Jean Patou’s American Mannequins: Early Fashion Shows and Modernism,” Modernism/ Modernity 15, no. 2 (April 2008): 243–63. 6 A ccession number 1995.212a–d. See www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/ 79883?sortBy=Relevance&who=Patou+Jean%24Jean+Patou&ft=*& offset=0&rpp=20&pos=1 (accessed June 22, 2017). 7 T he dress is dated 1925 but, according to the museum website, was only acquired by the client in 1930. The museum’s object files contain a copy of a typed note that the curators presume was provided by the original owner. It says “piece Patou with my monogram on tour Eiffel—electric light bulb—this was the year of Exposition Colonial (spelling?) in Paris—1930–1931. It was called ‘Advertising.’ ” This note is a puzzle, since the dress design is unarguably from 1925, and it is most unlikely that Patou would have remade such a typically mid-1920s’ design for a couture client in 1930–31 when it would have seemed very out-of-date compared to the fashionable line of the early 1930s. Perhaps Molly Cogswell misremembered the year of her visit and confused the 1925 Paris expo with the 1930 Colonial expo. The typed note would appear to be dated anywhere from June 20, 1977, to sometime in 1978, the time when the ensemble went into the museum’s collection as a long-term loan. The ensemble was formally accessioned 1995. 8 Time (March 19, 1934). 9 New York Times (March 17, 1918). 10 New York Times (December 25, 1920). 11 T he New York Social Blue Book for 1930 records that she was unmarried in 1930 and resided with her parents, Mr and Mrs Cullen Van Rensselaer Cogswell, at 1020, 5th Avenue. 12 Time (April 6, 1931). 13 Time (December 17, 1928). 14 “Milestones,” Time (November 13, 1944). 15 New York Times (November 13, 1944). 16 See  n. 7. 17 Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (August 14, 1926). 18 A rchives de Paris, accession number D12U10 281. Registration number (depot) 8645, registration date August 21, 1925, photograph no. 1. I am indebted to Johanna Zanon for discovering these photographs and generously sharing her research with me.

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19 F or a full account of the event and its significance, see Caroline Evans, “Jean Patou’s American Mannequins: Early Fashion Shows and Modernism,” Modernism/ Modernity 15, no. 2 (April 2008): 243–63. 20 E dna Woolman Chase and Ilka Chase, Always in Vogue (London: Viktor Gollancz, 1954), 166. 21 Ibid. 22 Tatler (September 2, 1925). 23 Tatler (August 25, 1926). 24 P ress announcements were placed on the advertising pages of Moniteur de l’exportation (July 29, 1925); Vogue (France) (July 29, 1925); DepèNew che Commerciale (August 6, 11, 18, 1925); Paris Telegramme (August 2, 9, 16, 20, 30, 1925). 25 “ King of Gowns Due Tomorrow,” Chicago Daily Tribune (October 5, 1913). “Paris Fall Openings,” Chicago Daily Tribune (October 12, 1913). 26 G eorges Le Fèvre, Au secours de la couture (industrie française) (Paris: Editions Baudinière, 1929), 59. In fact the percentage varies according to the account. In Le Moniteur de l’Exportation (October 1920: n.p.), Patou is reported as saying he makes about 1,000 models per annum of which only about 10 percent are successful, so he makes his profits out of 100 models per annum. He sells the 900 off at relatively low prices, at a loss of 720F each (he gives figure for manufacture 1,200F per model sold at 400), and he calculates that to make his profit he has to sell the remaining dresses at 2,000F. He says that were it not for copyists he could sell cheaper. Both Roubaud and Poiret also put the proportion of successful dresses in a collection at 10 percent; see Louis Roubaud, Au Pays des Mannequins: Le Roman de la Robe (Paris: Les Editions de France, 1928), 12; and Paul Poiret, My First Fifty Years, trans. Stephen Haden Guest (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 43. However, one American journalist suggests not 10 percent but 7 percent: “Paris Yields to None in Fashion World,” New York Times (December 2, 1928). 27 Philippe Simon, Monographie d’une industrie de luxe: La haute couture, thèse pour le doctorat (Paris: Université de Paris, Faculté de droit, 1931), 85. 28 Sunday Pictorial (November 29, 1925). 29 Agnès Rocamora, Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 156. 30 Roland Barthes, La Tour Eiffel. Photographies d’André Martin (Paris: CNP/Seuil, [1964] 1989), 19. Cited in Rocamora, Fashioning the City, 162. 31 Rocamora, Fashioning the City, 167–8. 32 Ibid.,  169. 33 Robert Forrest Wilson, Paris on Parade (Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1925), 58. 34 Undated cutting in FIT Special Collections, New York. 35 Carl A. Naether, Advertising to Women (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1928). 36 Wilson, Paris on Parade, 34. 37 Saturday Evening Post (October 16, 1926). 38 Rocamora, Fashioning the City, 179.

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39 Ibid.,  164. 40 V ol. 11, plate XIX, Encyclopédie des arts décoratifs et industriels moderns au XXème siècle (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, Office Centrale d’Éditions et de la Librairie, c. 1925). Also available as a reprint by Garland (New York and London, 1977). 41 Tag Gronberg, Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the City in 1920s Paris (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 6. 42 Ibid.,  23. 43 Wilson, Paris on Parade, 113. 44 Ibid., 294, cited in Gronberg, Designs on Modernity, 26. 45 Poiret, My First Fifty Years, 43. 46 “ Pour l’Amérique, l’haute couture ne représente alors qu’un prêt-à-porter de luxe qui exige des commissionaires un choix susceptible de satisfaire une clientele traditionelle peu inclinée à l’excès.” Didier Grumbach, Histoires de la mode (Seuil 1993), 2nd edn (Paris: Editions du Regard, 2008), 90. 47 T he phrase in context is “Pour endiguer, par example, l’hémorragie des ventes don’t elle souffre à partir de 1925, elle intensifie la commercialisation des droits de reproduction de ses modèles aux seuls acheteurs étrangers.” Grumbach, Histoires de la mode, 7. In 1922, Poiret, who acknowledged that since the beginning of the war many women could no longer afford haute couture (“les moments sont difficiles pour quantités de femmes cocottes dont la situation a du changer depuis la guerre”), designed some dresses en série, that is, ready-to-wear, costing between 1,200 and 1,600 francs. Vogue (France) (October 1, 1922): 11. 48 O n the role of the “commissioner-exporter” (le commissionnaire-exportateur) in the Paris dressmaking trade, see “Le rôle du commissionaire,” 440–41, in Albert Tronc, “Paris, capitale du commerce,” L’Exportateur Française (May 22, 1923): 437–41. 49 E va Boex and Madeleine Vionnet are listed separately in the same schedule of fashion shows for buyers for Spring 1922 in the trade paper L’Exportateur Française (January 30, 1922). Boex, at 14 rue Castiglione, is listed as having “exclusive rights to sell Madeleine Vionnet models which appear gradually as they are designed” (qui paraîssent au fur et à la mesure de leur création). In fact since the early 1920s Vionnet had licensed Boex to sell no more than three copies of each design (à moins de trois exemplaires): Grumbach, Histoires de la mode, 225. Vionnet’s listing on the same page of L’Exportateur Française gives her address as 222 rue de Rivoli and does not give a show date, stating this “will be fixed later”; the paper announces that Vionnet sells “neither to commissioners nor to dressmakers, all her designs are registered according to law.” This was an abbreviated version of the statement Vionnet attached to much of her publicity after her first announcement in an advertisement she took out in L’Illustration in October 1920: see Christine Senailles, “Lutter Contre la Copie,” in Madeleine Vionnet: Les Années d’innovation (Lyons: Musées des Tissus, 1995), 18–21. Vionnet signed deals for exclusive rights to reproduce her models wholesale; one deal involved production of one-size-fitsall ready-made dresses that were briefly produced and marketed as “Repeated originals”; see Mary Lynn Stewart, Dressing Modern Frenchwomen: Marketing

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Haute Couture, 1919–1939 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 130. 50 Gronberg, Designs on Modernity, 26. 51 J oseph Roth, “America over Paris,” in Report from a Parisian Paradise, trans. Michael Hoffmann (New York and London: W. W. Norton, [1925] 2004), 30. 52 Ibid.,  30–31. 53 Advertising World (September 1925). 54 Evans, “Jean Patou’s American Mannequins,” 250–53. 55 Gronberg, Designs on Modernity, 114. 56 G ronberg, “Beware Beautiful Women: The 1920s Shopwindow Mannequin and a Physiognomy of Effacement,” Art History 20, no. 3 (September 1997): 375–96, especially 379. 57 Wilson, Paris on Parade, 71. 58 New York Times (April 30, 1925). 59 New York Herald Tribune (February 6, 1925); New York Telegram (February 6, 1925). 60 F or a pre-war example, see “The United States Is the Home of Ingenious Advertising,’ Illustrated London News (August 12, 1911): 269. For histories of advertising in France and America in the post-war period, see Marjorie A. Beale, The Modernist Enterprise: French Elites and the Threat of Modernity, 1900–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 11–47; Siân Reynolds, France between the Wars: Gender and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Victoria de Grazia, “The American Challenge to the European Arts of Advertising,” in The 1920s: Age of the Metropolis, ed. Jean Claire (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1991), 236–48. 61 Alan Weill, “Advertising Art,” in Claire, The 1920s, 226. 62 Grazia, “The American Challenge to the European Arts of Advertising,” 236. 63 Ibid.,  237–8. 64 Beale, The Modernist Enterprise, 11–47. The quotation is from p. 27. 65 Ibid.,  44. 66 Ibid.,  73. 67 Ibid.,  76. 68 I bid., 13. But see also De Grazia in Claire, The 1920s, 236–48. Beale and de Grazia differ drastically in their characterization of American and French advertising styles and approaches. Beale writes that American advertisers appealed to the emotions by contrast with the rational French who based their advertising precepts on neurological data (19–20), whereas de Grazia’s article characterized the Americans as more scientific in their approach, and the French as more influenced by ideas and visual tropes from the fine and applied arts. 69 P hotographer and columnist Adolph de Meyer describes Patou as a “bright young man . . . with a rare sense of business that is almost American.” Baron de Meyer, “Paris Collections Seen by a Connoisseur,” Harper’s Bazar (November 1922): 39–43 and, for this quotation, 132. 70 Wilson, Paris on Parade, 71–2.

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71 New York Times (July 31, 1926). 72 “Buying Is Existence’s Hope,” Indianapolis News (April 8, 1926). 73 C indi de Marzo, exhibition review, A Creative Transatlantic Tango Shapes the Modern World: Paris/New York, 1925–1940 (Museum of the City of New York, October 3, 2008–February 22, 2009). Studio International, December 29, 2008. www.studio-international.co.uk/reports/paris_new-york.asp (accessed February 28, 2011). 74 D onald Albrecht, “Introduction,” in Paris New York: Design, Fashion, Culture 1925–1940 (New York: Museum of the City of New York and the Monacelli Press, 2008), 10. 75 Ibid.,  11. 76 Ibid.,  10. 77 Paul Elliot, The Last Time I Saw Paris (1942; repr., London: Sickle Moon Books, 2001), 97. 78 Paul Morand, New York (1929; repr., London: William Heinemann, 1931). On the vogue for Amé ricanisme, see Comoedia (September 14, 1928). On the Americanization of Europe, see Evening World, New York (November 28, 1925). 79 André Siegfried, Les Etats-unis d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Colin, 1927); published in English as America Comes of Age: A French Analysis, trans. H. H. Hemming and Doris Hemmings (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927). 80 Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future (Paris: Mercure de France, 1930); published in the United States as America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future, trans. Charles Miner Thompson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931). For a discussion of Duhamel’s book, see Beale, The Modernist Enterprise, 77–80. 81 Siegfried, America Comes of Age, 348–9. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid.,  348. 84 Beale, The Modernist Enterprise, 79. 85 O n American women’s “delectable” legs, “uniform like those of the chorus girl,” see Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future, 64; on the “edition” of the modern Goddess (“even her charming laughter simulates that Hollywood actresses”), see ibid., 66. 86 R ichard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993), 2. 87 Françoise Tétart-Vittu, Au paradis des dames: Noveautés, modes et confections 1810–1870 (Editions Musées-Paris, 1992). 88 Albrecht, Paris New York, 10. 89 Nancy Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 106. 90 Ibid.,  108. 91 “ American Women Responsible for Sensational French Styles,” New York Times (July 5, 1914). 92 Elizabeth Hawes, Fashion Is Spinach (New York: Random House, 1938), 94.

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93 Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work, 107. 94 “Paris Yields to None in Fashion World,” New York Times (December 2, 1928). 95 O n the pro-American fashion campaign before the First World War, see Marlis Schweitzer, “American Fashions for American Women: The Rise and Fall of Fashion Nationalism,” in Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 143–4. For twentieth-century American fashion in general, see Patricia Mears, American Beauty: Aesthetics and Innovation in Fashion (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). And for the development of American fashion in the 1930s, see Rebecca Arnold, The American Look: Fashion, Sportswear and the Image of Women in 1930s and 1940s New York (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009). 96 P hyllis Magison, “Fashion Showdown: New York versus Paris 1914–1941,” in Paris New York: Design, Fashion, Culture 1925–1940 (New York: Museum of the City of New York and the Monacelli Press, 2008), 104. 97 Arnold, The American Look. 98 “The Dressmakers of France,” Fortune VI, no. 2 (August 1932): 72.

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7 THE SLIT SKIRT FASHION AND EMPATHY IN THE TANGO ERA Alessandra Vaccari Translated by Gian Paolo Chiari

The slit skirt in the early 1910s The slit skirt made a significant appearance in the European and American high fashion at the beginning of the 1910s, in conjunction with the diffusion of the modern social dances, and the new experience of seeing and showing women’s legs in motion. Among these dances, tango was the most sensual and controversial fleshly dance and, at the height of its fame, fashionable tango teas spread worldwide. The tango appropriated the slit skirt, which remains a provocative sign in its iconography. More than a century later, the slit skirt continues to be an emblem of sensuality and eroticism. Investigating the slit skirt helps to understand how the women’s body has been seen and constructed in the 1910s. As a single sartorial element, the skirt’s slit has played an active role as a visual apparatus and allows the exploration of the relationships between fashion history and the history of modern vision and looking. The reference for the latter is to the domain of visuality, or, according to Whitney Davis’s definition, the “culturality of vision,” as it is conducive to the investigation of the vicissitudes and contradictions of making the female body visible.1 It allows to reflect on how the slit skit has activated the gaze and how it produced—and being produced by—the body gestures and movements of the women who have worn it. This approach seeks to overcome the dichotomy between covered and uncovered legs by questioning, instead, how legs have become visible, and how they have been looked at. It allows to reflect on the historical distance between our eyes and those of the person who looked for the first time at feet and ankles through the early 1910s’ skirts. Finally, it allows

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to highlight how fashion actively contributed to modernism. Fashion is here referred to as both cultural industry and multisensorial subjective experience. According to this interpretation, a modernist fashion did exist, as it did a modernist art. The slit skirt prompts a series of methodological issues that are particularly interesting in order to reflect on how it was worn and to test our ability to understand its past use. For example, the slit is not visible when the skirt is displayed on a mannequin in a museum. Even the visual sources do not always help, and the design of the slit skirts is impossible to be analyzed when they are depicted on the pages of fashion magazines, though they allow us at least to consider the poses of the legs. This sort of frustrations is common in the work of fashion historians, since historic clothes cannot usually be worn. But frustration becomes more acute in the case of the slit skirts, as the legs that put them in motion are absent and the view of their opening and closing during the walk or dance is limited to the available sources. Among these, textual descriptions and fictional and nonfictional films of the time provide an invaluable help to the fashion historians. The sources examined here include newspapers; fashion and high society magazines; sketches and drawings made by fashion houses of the time; clothes and accessories in museums and archives; dance handbooks; films and popular images such as postcards and music sheet covers. The latter are particularly interesting because they show the satirical light that was cast on the slit skirt as this made its entrance in the tango iconography.

Tango as a synonym of fashion The tango was a fashionable and cosmopolitan phenomenon in the years before the First World War. It was born in Argentina and Uruguay in the mid-nineteenth century from the merging of different dance and musical cultures developed since the sixteenth century through the key contribution of slaves of African origin and European immigrants.2 The tango thrilled European socialites with its exotic, low-class, and licentious appeal, and dancing it became a social obligation, as many lifestyle articles of that time keep saying.3 British writer and author of The Tango and How to Dance It, Gladys Beattie Crozier, began her 1913 manual stating that: Fashions, like waves, sweep over continents. Sometimes it will be a dance, sometimes a food, sometimes a song, sometimes a freak of fashion, sometimes a game; but the year 1913 might be called “The Tango Year,” for the dance has provoked more conversation and evoked more clothes and teas and music than anything else.4

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Tango teas were urban entertainments extremely popular for the afternoon hours, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.5 They were taking place in cafés and restaurants, and their afternoon occurrence allowed women to attend them alone or with female friends. Women perceived tango teas as spaces of conquered freedom, in spite of their often being publicly considered as licentious and places of perditions. This is the case, for instance, of the afternoon tea tango scene of the Argentinian film Nobleza Gaucha, directed by Humberto Cairo, Ernesto Gunche, and Eduardo Martínez de la Pera in 1915, shot in the elegant Buenos Aires Armenonville restaurant and dance hall. In Paris only, there were hundreds of places where to dance tango, as Robert Hénard highlighted in his inquiry on tango that appeared in La Renaissance in 1914, and among them he reviewed the Apollo; the Magic City; the Luna Park; the popular Bal Tabarin, which every afternoon organized a free Aperitif-Tango6; the Olympia, which after midnight renamed itself as Le Palais de la danse; and the Sans Souci, which he described as a high-society rendezvous: It is five o’clock. The Rue Caumartin is cluttered with cars that stop one after the other in front of a small door with an electric sign above it. Women wrapped up in expensive fur-trimmed capes and, in most cases, beardless young men hurry through that door. Let’s follow them . . . Around flowered tables, loaded with cakes and cups of tea, we see a mix of women of the foreign community, actresses of the Comédie-Française and other theatres, duchesses and bourgeois women, sale managers of department stores, and demimondaines, who all look pretty much the same for their soberly and refinedly luxurious frocks and the long black aigrette that towers above their hairstyles.7 The text supports the idea that tango teas functioned as social workshops in the years before the First World War, as people of different classes and professions gathered and mixed in the dance, wearing similar clothes. French writer Jean Richepin, co-author with the wife Cora Laparcerie of the comedy Le Tango first staged in Paris at the Athénée Theatre on December 30, 1913, claimed that the tango was the “symbol of the ‘nouvelle mode,’ both for today and tomorrow. The tango lover is . . . a modern man, a man of 1913, who is consumed by the need to be active, to live, to refresh himself every day.”8 The tango, like fashion, was also the promise of a new body and new aesthetic and cultural values based on flexible torso and legs. In the 1903 film Le cakewalk infernal, Georges Méliès depicted that modern dance as a devil dancing unbridedly, whose limbs broke off and took on a disarranged life of their own. Tango movements, on the contrary, are slow and only engage the lower part of the body, as can be read in the Pocket Tango Guide and Guide to the Other Dances, in which the “Parisian Dancer Par Excellence,” Volinen, explained

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that “one of the most important points to remember when doing the Tango is to dance it as smoothly as possible, also as quietly and gracefully as possible. There should be no violent movements of the arms and shoulders, all the movements must be done with the legs” and that “the whole of movements must be done from the hips downwards.”9 Similarly, in a 1914 article on fashionable professions, French poet and writer Marcel Pays said about the professional dancer that “Europe and Americas have their eyes fixed on the slightest movement of his lower back.”10 Pelvis and legs are the contact points during the sensual tango performance, which hinges on the abrazo, in which the two dancers embrace each other, and the paseo, a slow promenade. According to the fashion designer Lucy Wallace Sutherland Duff-Gordon, known professionally as Lucile, these contact points were interdependent. Celebrating herself as a 1910s’ fashion pioneer, Lucile explained in her autobiography how fashion innovation focused on “softly-rounded breasts  .  .  .  in opposition to the hideous corset of the time” and on “draped skirts which opened to reveal slender legs” to replace “woollen stockings and voluminous petticoats.”11 This idea of interdependence between flexible torso and unveiled legs recurs many times in contemporary criticism. Jean-Michel Rabaté, for example, highlighted the abandonment of the corset and the revealing skirt with knee-length slit-worn on stage by actress Réjanne— as the revolutionary aspects of the 1913 fashion.12 Robert Hénard, in his above-mentioned inquiry on the 1913 Parisian tango scene, credited the tango with the abolition of the corset, “replaced by a squamous belt that gave the waist a mermaid’s suppleness.” Hénard also credited tango with the creation of “generous and adroit decollates” and “revealing openings” that “under the pretext of facilitating the movements of the dancers, allowed them to show what they previously used to keep for the clandestine rendezvous.”13 Among the dresses that met the tango’s requirements Hénard included Lucile Yo-te-quiero, a silver-gauze and chinchilla-trimmed shining tunic “slit to above the knee” to be worn on grands soirs like those at the Magic-City and Luna-Park in Paris.14 Tango was not only fashionable, but also, and overall, a key resource for the fashion industry. The word tango came to designate a red-bright orange color and dance dress designs. A photograph of a Redfern evening dress appeared on the French magazine Les Modes at the beginning of the 1914 with the caption explaining that the draped skirt was made of “crêpe satin tango.”15 Also designed by Redfern is the “robe tango” at the center of the illustration Le frisson nouveau made by Ludvík Strimpl and published in La Gazette du Bon Ton in February 1914. In his book Cosas de Negros (1926), Uruguayan writer Vicente Rossi commented on the Paris fashion of the harem skirts that he defined “vestidotango,” and emphasized how it “allowed to separate feet more freely” because it has the shape of a “chiripá that easily clung to the body.”16 The term chiripà refers to the traditional way that the gaucho—another icon of the tango—has

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of wearing a square woolen blanket passed between the thighs and wrapped around the hips. In 1914, Jeanne Paquin created a new line that went down in history as the tango collection, purposely designed for facilitating movements in the modern dances.17 Paquin’s tango line was a response to the “inharmonious silhouettes [of women] when, in the dancing, the skirt tightly enveloped their ankles . . . And it is even more deplorable when the skirt is slit to the knee, as if someone had wanted to give some freedom to a poor hindered woman by a stroke of the scissors at the last moment.”18 Around 1910, the slit featured in the enveloping afternoon and evening dresses worn in the high-society rendezvous, as well as in the dance frocks specifically designed for the tango performances that actresses and professional dancers gave in the theaters. These dresses were often made of light satin and worn with delicate and light loose-fitting tunics, which were inspired by the classical world. The slit also stemmed in part from the same stylistic sources. The skirts were ankle-length, narrow at the bottom, draped, and in many cases, split: at the side, front, or back, to reveal the shoes and the lower part of the legs when dancing or walking. Paquin, Doeuillet, Callot Soeurs, Premet, Drécoll, Worth, Chéruit, Redfern, Lucile, Poiret were some of the most renowned fashion houses creating afternoon and evening dresses, the images of which were disseminated in 1912 and 1913 international magazines on fashion, such as Femina, La Gazette du Bon Ton, La mode illustrée, Les Modes, and Vogue; society and lifestyle, such as The Tatler; satire, such as Fantasio; and theater, such as Comœdia Illustrée e Le Thêatre. The slit skirt is a metaphor of how fashion designers’ innovations gained visibility in the years before the First World War not only in the events organized by the fashion industry, such as fashion shows, but also in other forms of entertainment including comedies and ballroom dances (Figure 7.1).

Visible legs as a modernist dogma Modernism was a global, cultural phenomenon that stretched from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s approximately, and put emphasis on new ideas, new forms of arts, and new modes of thinking. In the Modernist discourse and iconography, the visibility of female body has mostly been focused on legs, and the progressive shortening of the skirts was strongly linked to physical and social freedom, youth, sexuality, health, and beauty.19 This was a response to the normative and visual restrictions that have constantly affected women’s legs in the cultural and social practices of the previous centuries. As Elizabeth Wilson suggested, women’s legs have always been considered as an element to hide.20 “Sartorially speaking, only men had legs,” Susan Vincent emphasized while commenting on the difference between the bifurcated clothing that characterized

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Figure  7.1 Actress Léone Devimeur as Clothon in La semaine folle, Athénée Theatre, Paris, 1913. Dress by Margaine-Lacroix. PBT 10, no. 449 (July 5, 1913).

the male gender and the leg-covering skirts that were the defining garment of the female gender.21 Knee-length skirts and visible legs were the attribute of the mid-1920s’ flapper girl, one of the most iconic images of modernist fashion. With cropped hair and androgynous look, her image was usually associated with the key modernist values of freedom of movements, and sexual and sociopolitical emancipation. The flapper girl was the outcome of a cultural process that involved the relationships between vision and modernity and that dated back to the mid-nineteenth century, when—according to the art historian Jonathan Crary—the body ceased to be invisible.22 The association between visible legs, transgression, and gender identity was particularly manifest in the industry of entertainment of that time. Until the end of nineteenth century, however, legs were never naked and it was not the gaze of flesh to be perturbant, but the silhouette of the moving legs dressed in dark or flesh-colored stockings to strengthen the illusion of nakedness.23 Even the performances of the can-can dancers, characterized by the lifting up of their skirts, visually hinged on the underwear rather than the exposed legs. What

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the male audience found seductive in those dances, as the striptease historian Jessica Glasscock emphasized, was not the nakedness, but the fact that lifting the skirt up “mimicked the disrobing which preceded a sexual encounter.”24 It is the image of the “flash of light” that Charles Baudelaire used in To a Passer-By to describe the sudden gesture by which an unknown woman lifts her skirt up and exposes her “statuesque legs” in a Paris street.25 In the first decades of the twentieth century, women’s legs were still usually dressed in stockings, though these became lighter. Magazines’ fashion plates and photographs document the beginning of the uncovering/exposing process, which from around 1905 involved feet, ankles, and the lower part of legs. A comparison between the fashion illustrations and photographs published in 1902–3 in the L’arte e la moda insert of the Milanese magazine Natura e Arte shows shoe tips almost always peeping out the skirts in the photographs, whereas they are absent in the fashion illustrations. This choice reflects how fashion illustrations still idealized the image of the female body depicting it without feet and shoes. Shoes became fully visible toward the end of the 1900s, when the tight-fitting skirt known by the French term jupe fourreau, or “sheath dress,” became fashionable. This was tapered at the ankles and marked a new hemline. In the same period, the slit made its appearance in the jupe fourreau, and, in the modernist discourse, it allowed this skirt to be particularly narrow at the bottom. In the chapter significantly entitled “Modern Dances as Fashion Reformers” of their 1914 manual Modern Dancing, the American dancers Vernon and Irene Castle described the introduction of “a little slit into the skirts” as “the beginning, the opening gun in the war of the Dance upon the Designer.”26 Their conclusion is that “the Dance has won” against fashion, because “we are making ourselves lithe and slim and healthy, and these are things that all the reformers in the world could not do for us.”27 In their modernist-oriented view, the dance played a key role to promote the slit skirt as a “comfortable” and “natural” approach to the body, in opposition to the irrationality of fashion. As pointed out by dance historian Julie Malnig, that modernist-related “natural” interpretation of the dance dress can be “traced back to the late nineteenth-century dress reform movement and the influence of Delsarte.”28 In visual terms, clothes were a key issue for modernist culture, which goes as far as to theorize their disappearance. The idea of a progressive liberation of bodies from clothes and underwear has played a major role in fashion literature since modernism. Chad Ross, for instance, based his analysis of the role that nudism played in Germany on the experience that Kafka had of it in 1912.29 Nudism as alternative lifestyle movement drew on the same utopia that engendered the reduction of the number of layers and the length of clothes in the field of high fashion. The absence of clothes as a vision of the future and objective for humanity is the thesis that ends the book The Psychology of Clothes, which the British psychologist John Carl Flügel published

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in 1930. In his vision, humans will evolve a more “developed” and “rational” way of life, as Michael Carter wrote.30 The modernist discourse, however, promoted the unveiling of the female body in evolutionist and functionalist terms. Evolutionist because, as mentioned earlier, it explained the gradual uncovering of women’s legs as a form of progress; and functionalist because of the close relationship that it established between the shortening of the skirts and a dynamic and healthy lifestyle. However, what is interesting to analyze here is how fashion participated in the modernist construction of the women’s body’s vision. Such analysis is made possible by the case of the slit skirt, whose visual implications vis-à-vis the female body have been generally neglected in the context of fashion history. On the contrary, the slit skirt found itself at the center of a fierce moral debate in 1910s’ Europe and North America. It was often condemned as indecent because it revealed women’s legs, to the extent that wearing it became a self-assertive, challenging action that could entail serious consequences. News stories of 1913 tell how girls were arrested for wearing the slit skirt on the streets of New York, and report how this type of skirt was banned in some US cities.31 Investigating the slit skirts highlights some contradictions inherent in modernist fashion, such as the values of rationality and irrationality attached to clothing: they were designed as uncomfortably tight-fitting, but with the slit that facilitated walking; they were condemned because they exposed the legs of women, but enjoyed a great popularity on the streets and dance halls.

The slit skirt as a visual apparatus The slit skirts contributed to that “growth of vision,” which Michel de Certeau among others has stigmatized as the dominant characteristic of the modern societies that measure “everything by its ability to show or be shown.”32 The sartorial element that made this possible was the slit—a vertical opening in the lower part of the skirt—which intercepted the male and female gazes and converged them on feet, ankles, and calves. By the opening and closing of the fabric, the slit introduced a dynamic aspect in the 1910s’ fashionable dancewear. The slit skirt offers, therefore, a peculiar perspective to understand the modernist experience of the relationships between the body on show and the gaze on it. The slit skirt enables the establishment of a relationship between fashion history and history of vision and looking, and, for this reason, it can be considered a visual apparatus. The postmodern critique elaborated the concept of visuality in the 1980s to analyze the psychic components of images and the cultural construction of vision.33 Here, the concept is adopted to investigate the historical and cultural aspects that have influenced the view of legs through the skirts. According to Giorgio Agamben’s broadening of the Foucauldian concept of apparatus, this

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encompasses not only prisons, schools, madhouses, etc., but anything—for example, cigarettes, computers, cellular phones—that has “the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”34 Following Agamben’s assertion that the interaction between the human being and the apparatus produces subjects, the slit skirt as an apparatus allows to analyze the process of subjectification that involves its wearer and, thus, to investigate her relationships with the slit skirt, and the cultural, social, and moral norms that influence the ways in which the female body has been exposed, visualized, and represented. The analysis also benefits from the concept of “visual focal point” that art and fashion historian Anne Hollander introduced in 1978 in regard of the female torso. A vast feminist literature exists on the visibility of the female body as an object of desire, the continuity between the woman’s body and the dress she wears, and the overlapping that the viewer’s gaze creates between the woman and her image, as Jane M. Gaines pointed out.35 In this regard, Judith Williamson wrote about the occurrence of an “elision of image and identity which women experience all the time: as if the sexy black dress made you be a femme fatale, whereas “femme fatale” is, precisely, an image; it needs a viewer to function at all.”36 Caroline Evans has investigated the female “body on show”37 in the specific context of modernist fashion by choosing, among other cases, the early twentieth-century slit skirt and by analyzing its relationship with the view, gestures and movements. The slit could be frontal, posterior, or lateral, and when legs were moving it offered a “vision in motion.”38 With their opening-closing surprise effect, the slit skirt has created a new perspective on legs by focusing on movement, as cinema did in the same years. By doing so, the slit skirt-apparatus has contributed to create and disseminate the visual codes and norms that the women’s movements and gestures echoed.

Framing the legs and feet According to the Italian fashion magazine Regina, the slit was approximately twenty centimeters long in 1913.39 Their length seems scarcely significant today, but the perception had to be very different at that time, as the precision with which the length of the slit was measured demonstrates. The diagram of the Lucile 1911–12 afternoon dress included by dress historian Norah Waugh in her book The Cut of Women’s Clothes, shows a thirty-five-centimeter-long slit, therefore approximately knee-length, even though, in that design, the legs are partly hidden by a lace-inserted panel behind the slit.40 The slit’s length became very variable with the revival of the Directoire fashion and its high-waistline draped skirts. In the latter, the side seams were absent and

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the front panel was just lapped over the back one, so that the slit’s opening varied according to the stride length. This is the case, for example, of the ivory silk satin evening dress that Lucile designed in 1913 and donated to the London Victoria and Albert Museum, in which it is preserved. The dress’ physical description published on the museum website says that, as the front panel is lapped over the back, the long slit skirt “is not too revealing.”41 The description relies on this “not too revealing” to refute what Lucile had claimed in her memoirs, that is, that she had “loosed upon a startled London . . . draped skirts that opened to reveal the legs.”42 The innovative role that Lucile claimed is, instead, plausible, as the perception of the skirt’s slit has changed visually and morally since then. It is nowadays difficult to assess the opening of the draped evening dresses without knowing, for example, the stride length or the flection of the knees and the extension of the legs when the tango steps were performed. The slit skirt entailed a wide range of options of how to vary the type and degree of exposure of the legs according to the social and urban context. Irene Castle explained how that type of skirt could be adapted for wear in both the street and the ballroom. She wrote that: The openings in a skirt of this sort can be fastened with tiny glove-snaps, so that on the street the wearer may appear to have the usual narrow costume, while at the same time she has a practical one for the daily thé dansant.43 The draping often hid the skirt’s slit, whose capacity to reveal the legs was reduced by the use of light petticoats, spats, and odalisque-type trousers. Some skirts featured false slits; in other cases, the slit was real, but hade a layer of tulle underneath. The latter allowed a longer slit, but it still “respects the conventions,” as Les Modes magazine explained in 1914 by ironically claiming that resorting to a layer of tulle has more to do with “divination” than revelation.44 A key role was played in this sense by the newly fashionable decorated stockings, which in this period were thin, light colored, and featured a wide range of thigh-long patterns, including swallows, snakes, and lace inserts. The large decorated area is evidence of that fact that legs could be visible up to the knee and above (Figures 7.2 and 7.3). A 1913 issue of Femina reported the new North American fashion of having the decorations directly painted on bare legs and published a portrait of dancer and actress Miss Mado Minty with her legs painted, the magazine says, by a modern François Boucher.45 The 1910s’ slit offered a partial and intermittent view of the lower part of the legs, very distant from the full view that the short skirts would offer in the mid-1920s. In a tango scene of the North American film A Florida Enchantment (1914), produced and directed by Sidney Drew, a dancing background actress wore an afternoon dress consisting of a short tunic and a tight-fitting skirt. The back slit was generous and rose above the knee, offering visual fragments

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Figure  7.2 Flesh-colored embroidered stockings with lace inserts, c.  1910. Photo Alessandra Vaccari. Courtesy Gorizia Museum of Fashion and Decorative Arts, Ente regionale per il patrimonio culturale della Regione autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia.

of moving legs and feet. Walter MacQueen-Pope described in his memoirs Goodbye Piccadilly how fashionable was among “ultra-smart women” wearing “a slashed skirt,” which “a leg could be glimpsed through.”46 The “elusive legs” were the defining element of the 1913 feminine silhouette, as French writer Michel Georges-Michel (the pen name of Michel Georges Dreyfus) remarked in his book L’époque tango.47 In this sense, the slit contributed to the culture of the fragment, the ephemeral, and the transitory that characterized fashion and modernity. As Ulrich Lehmann pointed out:  “It is in each quickly observed detail that the true character of modernity lies.”48 The detail of the skirt’s slit allows to visually and conceptually frame the growth of vision that affected modernity, with its implications in terms of fetishistic gaze on women’s feet and the lower part of legs. An outstanding example of such a gaze is the Italian silent film Amor Pedestre (Pedestrian Love), directed and performed by the comic actor Marcel Fabre in 1914. The film reversed the silent cinema’s tradition of focusing on actresses’ and actors’ faces and facial poses by constantly pointing the camera toward their feet and legs. In spite of what the film’s title might lead one to think, Christel Tsilibaris remarked how it is the woman’s shoe to be at the center of the film, and not her feet, as all the “seductive powers” of the female character “are transferred to the footwear.”49 It is worth highlighting, however, that the other key eye-catching

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Figure  7.3  Les honneurs du pied. Fantasio 8, no.  157 (1913). Courtesy Alma Mater studiorum Università di Bologna—Rimini Campus Branch Central Library.

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object is the slit skirt, which starts functioning as a visual apparatus that draws the gaze of the male character and the audience during the morning walk and when the desire reaches its peak, that is, in the love declaration that precedes the final scene. It is through this perspective that the love affair between the two characters is narrated, from their casual encounter in the street until the very moment before their love is consummated. That moment is descripted by depicting the woman showing her leg in sheer-stockings through the slit skirt opened in front of the man on his knees. The skirt then falls to the ground, exposing a knee-length white petticoat. Though the male gaze is dominant, the film offers the female viewer the pleasant sight of shoes, seductive legs in stockings, and a fashionable furtrimmed slit skirt. Amor Pedestre anticipated Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Theatre, and, particularly, Le basi (Bases, 1915), in which only the actors’ feet are visible.50 Interestingly, one year before the film’s release, the Italian magazine La donna had published the article “La filosofia del passo” (“The Walk’s Philosophy”) by Lucilla Antonelli, with a series of photographic images that only depicted the legs of men and women.51 These images might have inspired the director of Amor Pedestre, but, what matters most, they reflected the new obsession for feet and shoes and the way it was medialized and incorporated into the early 1910s’ consumer practices (Figure 7.4). The magazine Femina stressed how in time of “languid and trembling” tangos, all the attention was drawn by feet, which the magazine described as “fascinating and always in motion.”52 Feet were made especially attractive when covered by “thin stockings that fit like a glove” and clad in “shoes with slender heels.”53 Shoes were fastened at the ankles, which, in turn, were highlighted by ballet shoe-like ribbons. Femina told its female audience in 1913 that shoes “stand out a mile,”54 referring to the new high visibility that shoes acquired by means of their bright colors, rhinestones, and gilded leather. Fashion magazines of the time increasingly displayed pictures of legs to their female audience, thus breaking with the tradition of legs exposed only in vaudeville shows. Fashion and entertainment magazines portrayed actresses, singers, and dancers in “dramatic poses,” of dance derivation.55 Magazines graphically represented the coming into view of feet and legs by giving them large space on the page and even positioning them outside the typographic grid. For example, in 1912 Femina published a photograph of the actress and dancer Gaby Deslys with her partner Harry Pilcer while performing a step of Grizzly Bear Dance. The layout of the page emphasizes the stretched legs of the two dancers. The grid around the photograph opens up for the dancers’ feet, which seem to leave the page.56 A  similar image, which appeared on Fantasio magazine in 1913, depicted the French Comédie-Française actress Cécile Sorel while performing a dance step.57 The actress’ arm and leg, elongated in the dance step, protrude from the typographic grid, while the text is moved back. What

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Figure  7.4  Passo a due. Photo by Itala-Photo-reportage, Torino, 1913. La Donna 9, no.  201 (May 5, 1913). Courtesy Alma Mater studiorum Università di Bologna—Rimini Campus Branch Central Library.

strikes in the pose of the two above-mentioned actresses portrayed in the magazines is the attention paid in highlighting the freedom of leg movement that the skirt allowed.

The corte and the tango’s slow cotion In the tango dancing, the Spanish term corte (cut) refers to a classical step, codified at the end of the nineteenth century. The corte indicates an interruption of the promenade, or a figure in which the dancers create a moment of suspension by leaning to each other. It is the only tango step to deserve a photograph in the Pocket Tango Guide, a choice that the caption explains by the fact that it is “the principal Movement in the Tango.”58 In the photograph, the tango teacher Mrs Barclay significantly wears a slit skirt, with a petticoat underneath—opened by the left leg elongated backwards. The slit is the detail that constructs the gestures and orients the steps of the wearer, while catching the attention of the viewer. Also, the famous tango dancer Maurice Mouvet agreed to consider

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the corte the most important step for its key contribution to the tango’s fluency, a quality that he opposed to the stiffness and velocity of the machine era. Mouvet wrote in 1915: A proper execution of the Cortez [sic] will not only make either a man or a woman a pleasing Tango dancer, but it will give to all their walking, sitting and moving about a lithe suppleness. And in these days of much motoring, to attain a supple carriage is a gift for which one should pray to the gods!59 An article written by the French actress and dancer Régina Badet in 1913 highlighted the sluggishness of the tango danced by “the current generation of slow dancers,”60 in opposition to the athletic dynamism and rapidity of the waltz, and in the same year the magazine La Vie Parisienne wrote about “endless tangos.”61 The above-mentioned interpretation given by Mouvet contradicts the association very frequently established at that time between tango’s glide and non-human automatism. This interpretation has been often put into relation with the growing denounce against the modern dances, and tango in particular, as a manifestation of the Western cultural and values crisis. According to the French art critic Waldemar George, this crisis was characterized by the desire of escaping the industrial progress, which was blamed for having turned “men into automata.”62 Both interpretations concur to define the complexity of the 1910s’ tango, which, on the one hand, was the expression of a blasé humanity, and, on the other hand, a tool to vivify it by offering new feelings and triggering new cultural ways of experiencing modernity. The cover illustration of the book L’époque tango by Michel Georges-Michel depicts a couple of dancer marionettes moved by the hands of a tango-string puller with feet dangling and elbows extended in dance position.63 Tango dancers have often been associated to the image of hypnotized people or automata, as in the description that Robert Hénard gave in 1914 of a woman who “walks, turns, jumps, dives with the automatism of a sleep-walker.”64 Among those who criticized the tango for its decadent nature and blasé characters, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti stands out for his 1914 Abbasso il tango e Parsifal! (Down with the Tango and Parsifal!). The text is a caustic interpretation of the tango’s fascination for emotions, sentimentalism, and sublimated sex. As the subtitle says, it was dedicated to “cosmopolitan women friends who give tango-teas and parsifalize themselves,” explicitly referring to Richard Wagner’s musical drama Parsifal.65 Marinetti did not love tango, which he considered to be degenerate and decadent. His text shows what a tangoing couple was looking at—a description taken from their eyes as seen by a subjective camera. They gaze at each other, in a mirroring effect between eyes, teeth, and shoes. Marinetti also despised the dramatic dance poses and elongated legs, and he considered them expressions

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of the futility of the tango, in which the sight of shoes seemed to be the most seductive act. In his words: Is it so much fun to arch desperately over each other, then try to jerk each other back up, like uncorking two bottles and never succeeding? . . . Or to stare at the points of your shoes, like hypnotized shoemakers? . . . My soul, do you really wear a size seven? . . . How they fit well to you, my dreeeam! . . . Yours toooo!66 Then the dancers looked up from their shoes to their mouths and Marinetti ridiculed the intimacy of the couple and the tango-induced close gaze: “Do you think it’s so amusing to look each other in the mouth and ecstatically examine each other’s teeth, like two dentists having hallucinations? To yank? . . . To fill a tooth?.”67 Marinetti described the tango movements as “Delirium tremens. Alcoholized hands and feet”; and with regard to legs, he complained that tango was “diplomacies of the skin!” and concluded—in a very male chauvinist way— by saying: “A knee between the thighs? Come! They want two!.”68 The corte step, however, demonstrates the opposite, for is the woman who pushes her leg between the man’s leg. As Mark Knowles remarked about the tango “she symbolically invaded his domain and in doing so, suggested his vulnerability.”69

Conclusion The slit skirt became fashionable when it began to challenge visual and clothing conventions at the beginning of the 1910s. In spite of the key role that it has played in terms of politics of gaze and body on show, it has historically been overshadowed by the fully visible legs discourse and iconography that fashion produced in the 1920s. This chapter has analyzed some of the conceptual shortcomings of this historiographical approach. The slit skirt has introduced a vertical perspective that broke with the tradition of an ideal horizontal line of revelation—ascending from feet to ankles, and knees—that has usually been brought into play to explain the skirts’ shortening process. The modernist fashion discourse has relied on this horizontal line to account for the women’s wardrobe renewal and to represent their emancipation. The analysis of the slit skirt as a 1910s’ modernist structure and tango icon has allowed to deal with the relationships between showing and voyeurism, and between transgression and control over the vision. The skirt as a visual apparatus has been a useful approach to analyze how, through it, the gaze—either male or female—has met women’s legs, instead of considering the extent to which women have exposed their legs. This approach has allowed to highlight how, at the same time, the slit skirt fashion created new

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female subjectivities; amplified the representations of the women’s legs in fashion magazines and films; stimulated the fashion demand of stockings and shoes due to the increased visibility gained by the lower part of the legs; and promoted the emergence of new spaces where to see legs performing, as in the case of dancing rooms and tango teas. Finally, it has allowed to preliminary explore the contribution of the slit skirt to the scandal culture, which is a key—though still scarcely investigated—aspect of the relationships between fashion and modernism.

Notes 1 Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 8. 2 Horacio Ferrer, El Siglo de Oro del Tango (Buenos Aires: Manrique Zago, 1996); Matt K. Matsuda, Memory of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Nardo Zalko, Paris-Buenos Aires. Un Siglo de Tango (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2001). 3 M ary Davis, “Tangomania,” in Dance & Fashion, ed. Valerie Steele (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 167–79. 4 G ladys Beattie Crozier, The Tango and How to Dance It (London: Andrew Melrose, 1913), 7–8. 5 R obert Hénard, “Une enquête sur le ‘tango.’ Ceux qui l’enseignent—OùNew on le danse” (1), La Renaissance 2, no. 1 (January 3, 1914): 5. 6 H énard, “Une enquête sur le ‘tango.’ Ceux qui l’enseignent—Où on le danse” (2), La Renaissance 2, no. 2 (January 10, 1914): 19. 7 H énard, “Une enquête sur le ‘tango’ ” (1): 8. All English translations by the author, except otherwise specified. 8 J ean Richepin, interview with Antona Traversi, Il Teatro Illustrato (December 15, 1913). Quoted in Davis, “Tangomania,” 171. 9 M . Volinen, “How to Dance the Tango,” in Pocket Tango Guide and Guide to the Other Dances (Melbourne: E. W. Cole, 1914), 5, 6. 10 Marcel Pays, “Professions mondaines,” La Vie Parisienne (March 14, 1914): 190. 11 L ucy Wallace Sutherland Duff-Gordon, Discretions & Indiscretions (London: Jarrolds, 1932), 66. 12 Jean-Michel Rabaté, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 81. 13 Hénard, “Une enquête sur le ‘tango’ ” (1), 5. 14 Ibid. 15 “Robe du Soir, par Redfern,” Les Modes 14, no. 158 (February 1914): 7. 16 Vicente Rossi, Cosas de Negros (Buenos Aires: Hachette, [1926] 1958), 163. 17 Dominique Sirop, Paquin (Paris: Biro, 1989), 38; Exhibition catalogue: Paquin, une rétrospective de 60 ans de haute couture (Lyon: Musée historique des tissus de Lyon, December 1989–March 1990).

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18 Paquin, “Chez Paquin,” Le Matin (March 21, 1914): 6. See also Sirop, Paquin, 38. 19 M ary E. Davis, Classic Chic. Music, Fashion, and Modernism (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2006). 20 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams. Fashion and Modernity (London: I. B. Tauris, [1985] 2003). 21 Susan Vincent, The Anatomy of Fashion. Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 97. 22 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 150. 23 Bernard Sobel, A Pictorial History of Burlesque (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1956), 12. 24 J essica Glasscock, “Striptease,” in The Berg Companion to Fashion, ed. Valerie Steele (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 656. 25 Charles Baudelaire, Baudelaire: The Complete Verse, trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil, 1986), 186. 26 V ernon Castle and Irene Castle, Modern Dancing (New York: World Syndicate, 1914), 145. 27 Ibid.,  146. 28 J ulie Malnig, “Athena Meets Venus. Visions of Women in Social Dance in the Teens and Early 1920s,” Dance Research Journal 31, no. 2 (Autumn 1999): 40. See also Julie Malnig, ‘Two-Stepping to Glory: Social Dance and the Rhetoric of Social Mobility,” in Moving History / Dancing Cultures. A Dance History Reader, ed. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 271–87. 29 Chad Ross, Naked Germany. Health, Race and the Nation (Oxford: Berg, 2005). 30 Michael Carter, Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes (Oxford: Berg, 2003); John Carl Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes ([s.l.]: Hogarth Press, 1930). On Flügel, see also Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema. Clothing and Identity in the Movies (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). 31 Mark Knowles, The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances. Outrage at Couple Dancing in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2009), 113. 32 M ichel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), xxi. 33 H al Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988); Charles Tryon, “Visuality,” in Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, ed. Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winguist (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 419–20. 34 G iorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus,” in What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, ed. Giorgio Agamben (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 15. 35 J ane M. Gaines, “Introduction: Fabricating the Female Body,” in Fabrications. Costume and the Female Body, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 1. 36 J udith Williamson, “Images of ‘Woman’”, Screen 24, no. 6 (November–December 1983): 102. Reprinted in Judith Williamson, Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture (London: Boyars, 1986).

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37 Caroline Evans, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 207. 38 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947). 39 Fidelia Labruna, “La Moda,” Regina 10, nos. 11–12 (December 31, 1913): 34–5. 40 Norah Waugh, The Cut of Women’s Clothes: 1600–1930 (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1968), diagram LXVII. 41 V &A Collections, Archive of Art and Design, Lucile Evening Dress, 1913, T.31– 1960. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O74941/evening-dress-lucile/ (accessed November 20, 2017). 42 Sutherland Duff-Gordon, Discretions & Indiscretions. 43 Castle and Castle, Modern Dancing, 139–40. 44 “La mode et les modes,” Les Modes 161 (May 1914): 26. 45 “Les jambes peintes,” Femina 3, no. 289 (February 1, 1913): 5. 46 Walter MacQueen-Pope, Goodbye Piccadilly ([s.l.]: Joseph, 1960). Quoted in Waugh, The Cut of Women’s Clothes, 297. 47 Michel Georges-Michel, L’epoque Tango (Paris: L’Edition, 1920), 23. 48 Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000), 400. 49 Christel Tsilibaris, Marcel Fabre’s Amor Pedestre, in Between Stigma and Enigma, curated by Christel Tsilibaris and Marketa Uhlirova, Fashion in Film Festival, 2006. www.fashioninfilm.com/essay/marcel-fabres-amor-pedestre/ (accessed December 30, 2017). 50 Ibid. 51 Lucilla Antonelli, “La filosofia del passo,” La Donna 9, no. 201 (May 5, 1913): 21–2. 52 “Les jambes de l’année,” Femina 310 (December 15, 1913): 1. 53 Ibid. 54 S hoppinette, “Le Shopping the Shoppinette,” Femina 13, no. 291 (March 1, 1913): 66. 55 Knowles, The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances, 113. 56 “Mlle Gaby Deslys Danse le Pas de l‘Ours,” Femina 12, no. 267 (March 1, 1912): 131. 57 “ La Danse de l’Ours, exécutée par M. Mounet-Sully et Mlle Sorel, de la ComédieFrançaise,” Fantasio 8, no. 157 (February 1, 1913): 474. 58 Pocket Tango Guide, 9. 59 Maurice Mouvet, Maurice’s Art of Dancing (New York: Schirmer, 1915), 90. 60 R égina Badet, “Les Vraies Jolies Danses. La Valse,” Fantasio 8, no. 178 (December 15, 1913): 359. 61 Floranges, “Au Bal,” La Vie Parisienne 51, no. 51 (December 20, 1913): 913. 62 Waldemar George, Profitti e perdite dell’arte contemporanea (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1933), 77. 63 Georges-Michel, L’epoque Tango, 23.

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64 Hénard, “Une enquête sur le tango” (2), 17. 65 F ilippo Tommaso Marinetti, Abbasso il Tango e Parsifal! Lettera Futurista Circolare ad Alcune Amiche Cosmpolite che Dànno dei Thè-tango e si Parsifalizzano (Milano: Direzione del Movimento futurista), January 11, 1914. For the English translation, see Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Down with the Tango and Parsifal! A Futurist Letter Circulated among Cosmopolitan Women Friends Who Give Tangoteas and Parsifalize Themselves,” in Futurism. An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 171. 66 Ibid. (translation modified by the author). 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Knowles, The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances, 183–4.

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8 LOOK AT ME! FASHION AS EXPRESSION AND STRATEGY IN ISAAC GRÜNEWALD’S AND SIGRID HJERTÉN’S PAINTING AND SELF-STAGING Andrea Kollnitz Translated by Rune Engebretsen

Introduction What a sight! Madam Isaac in a bright-blue velour hat, white face powder and red-painted lips, Isaac Junior more than ever burdened by being the wonder child, Monsieur Isaac in a violet blazer, a green-blue silk pocket square, grey trousers, and black-chequered cap and a fur coat besides, and if I  were a customs official. This quote from the artist Otto Sköld’s letter describes a captivating visual experience prompted by the colorful and fashion-conscious outfit in which the artist family Grünewald—to wit, Isaac Grünewald, Sigrid Hjertén-Grünewald, and their son Ivàn—make their entrance.1 The phrase “making an entrance,” as in a performance, is no exaggeration. More clearly than in any other previous time in art history, the self-staging of the artist through fashion becomes a must and

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an aesthetic signifier of the artistic life and ideals of early modernism. The artist is supposed to be visible. This is partly for promotional reasons and partly as an important aspect of an Allkonstverk, the all-encompassing artwork, in which the artist’s own fashion is part and parcel of a total experience. The Grünewald family belongs to those who are highly visible in the sensation-driven life of the Swedish arts in the 1910s and 1920s. During this period, they assume the role of playing avant-gardist, as well as provocative, lead stars and icons of fashion (Figure 8.1). Not only in written testimonials from contemporary observers but also in photographic images, these artists are portrayed as being “on stage.” This is, for instance, evident in a photo from 1915, showing Isaac Grünewald and Sigrid Hjertén in Grünewald’s new studio. At first glance, the focus of the picture appears to be on the white walls, densely hung with framed paintings of various sizes. Attention is, however, quickly drawn to the two artists on the left-hand side of the picture; small in relation to the background, they nevertheless stand out by their dress and their self-assured poses. Both are standing in contrapposto or a kimbo position, with one hand on the hip and the weight on one leg. With a long tradition in portrait art, this is an expression of self-confidence. In this instance, it is also a seductively evocative pose that was about to establish itself as a type in the early days of fashion photography.2 The couple is stylishly and deliberately dressed in an elegant and modern fashion—Isaac, with his well-groomed black

Figure 8.1  Isaac Grünewald and Sigrid Hjertén in their studio, c. 1916. Photographer unknown.

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hair and distinctive profile, wearing a black suit, Sigrid, with a modern pageboy coiffure, wearing a flounced dress, with daring contrasts, exposing her ankles and elegant shoes. The artists’ glances do not meet the camera’s eye or each other, but are focused on an undefined far-off point, making them appear as separate beautiful objects d’art on exhibit for a distant observer. We are watching a fashion photo taken in an art studio.3 What then, is it that the photo and the artists are staging? On the one hand, the studio exhibition of 1915 is being shown along with the vast creative activity of the two artists who are already well on their way to acquiring iconic status in the Swedish and Scandinavian avant-garde movement. On the other hand, emphasis is given to the modernity of the artists, their personal fashion/style, and their eminently eccentric personalities. In other words, they visually demonstrate their extraordinary status, both by the many artworks on display and by way of their physical appearance. It is the finesse of haute couture that is their signature, not the practical smock of the painter’s studio. It is the confident style of the affluent that characterizes their personal appearance, not the attire of the Romantic outsider or the poor Bohemian. Proceeding from these observations, I  wish in this article to elucidate the self-staging of Isaac Grünewald and Sigrid Hjertén. The two artists (who were married to each other) separately and jointly became iconic to the Swedish modernistic avant-garde. This, I propose, is due not only to their more or less innovative, modernistic experiments in style but equally to a personality myth that was propagated by means of photos and images in the contemporary Swedish press, especially in the case of Grünewald. In what follows, selective works and photographic pictures from the artists’ production and private lives will be analyzed in a performative interpretative perspective. In the paintings, fashion plays an important part in the selffashioning that belongs to the traditional effectual means of portrait art, but it also appears as an expression of modernity and stylistic innovations.4 In their private photographs, Grünewald and Hjertén present their lives, or rather their lifestyles, in the accepted terms of the moneyed class, by deliberate posing in various milieus and clothing. These pictures testify to the couple’s participation, not only in the artistic setting of the day, but also in multiple aspects of modern life, from grand auto tours through Europe to dance nights and sundry pleasures of the big city. A first impression to inspire my selection of the interpreted picture material has come from the illustrations in the book, Sigrid & Isaac (2007), a presentation written in a popular vein by Anders Wahlgren. Coming in the wake of Wahlgren’s film of the same title (2005), the book depicts an already legendary love story between two famous and well regarded artists.5 In my analysis to follow, Wahlgren’s in part fictional narrative about the artists will be weighed as a more recent contribution to the myth-making discourse on Grünewald and Hjertén,

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with the abundance of photographic illustrations considered one of its most effective means.6 In this book, the illustrations document the artists’ modish style through time on a visual level with the author concurrently commenting on their fashion-conscious enactments. In other words, the artists are presented as fashion icons both in picture and in text. Grünewald’s and Hjertén’s self-performative strategies and use of fashion can be interpreted from the perspective of their collaboration as a couple but also from the perspective of each one individually, with a separate set of attendant issues. Seen as a joint project, their strategies are illustrated through the many photographs showing the couple together, later complemented by their son Ivàn, in the telling of their shared artistic life, the story of their love and their family.7 Seen as separate cases, Isaac Grünewald’s public conduct can be linked to three factors:  his openly strategic self-promotion, the strong anti-Semitic reactions and persecution by mass media arising from his Jewish origin, and the grand success of his artistry. Sigrid Hjertén’s case evokes questions about the relationship between her role as a female artist and fashion, the latter being viewed both as a liberating and a confining performative marker.8 Given their separate backgrounds, how, then, do the two artists differ in their approaches to fashion?

Isaac Grünewald’s fashion journey—The Bohemian turns elegant Isaac Grünewald was born in 1889 as the child of a poor, Jewish, workingclass family at Södermalm in Stockholm. His biography can be viewed not only as the life-story of an artist but also as a journey from the working class to the cultural elite and the well-heeled bourgeoisie. It is a journey with various stations and signatures that comes into view not least through fashion. Grünewald’s first biographer, his friend J.-P. Hodin, speaks of “the transformation from begging Bohemian to grand seigneur.”9 This transformation becomes palpable if one compares photos of Grünewald as a young, budding artist with later selfportraits, both in painted and photographic form. A photo from 1905 shows the artist “on a painter’s journey.”10 Dressed in simple, course clothes, with a rucksack, tousled hair, and somewhat of a lost glance, he is here presented as the Bohemian nomad, a vagabond standing on a country road (Figure 8.2). The picture and the caption chosen by the author confirms the role of a young dreamer seeking good fortune and artistic success.11 In a later picture from 1909, his persona (“character role”) has evolved, and he has arrived at his journey’s goal, “the capital of the arts,” Paris. Grünewald is here shown sitting among Swedish artist-colleagues outside Café de Versailles. In keeping with the general café culture and architecture in Paris, the chairs are

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Figure 8.2  Isaac Grünewald together with artist friends outside of Café de Versailles, Paris. Postcard posted to Isaac’s sister Anna on January 21, 1909.

facing the street, giving the café visitors an excellent opportunity to observe and be observed. With a slouched hat, a dark suit, a coat, long and curly bangs, a three-day-old beard, and a white scarf nonchalantly flung around his neck, he and Leander Engström, seated next to him in similar clothing, signal two veritable Bohemians who blend perfectly with the iconic Parisian milieu of the artist.12 Their placement in the foreground of the picture communicates the frontal roles they are playing, whereas the rest of the group and the café staff are standing in the background. The prominence of the two is also underscored by their carriage, which is almost demonstratively relaxed, an impression that is reinforced by the formlessly loose clothing. As J. P. Hodin wrote in 1949, Grünewald would walk “in clothes that others had used, and in a photograph from this time, he looks like a living illustration lifted from Henri Murger’s La Vie de Bohème.”13 Soon, however, Grünewald’s dress style would change, something that undoubtedly was influenced by his sojourn to Paris, known not only as the capital of the arts but also as the unrivalled hub of (modern) fashion.14 Paris played an important role as a performative arena, not least for an artist who was expected to participate in collective appearances, or rather “performances,” such as gallery openings, social events in various salons, café life, and masquerade balls. Inclusion in these collective entities called for adjustment to specific dress codes, with styles suitably ranging from worker-inspired asceticism to elegant and exclusive fashion.15

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The latter alternative would become Grünewald’s favorite style, as soon as he could afford it. In reflecting on the second joint exhibition of the artist group De unga (The Young) in Stockholm in 1910, his artist-colleague Birger Simonsson had this to say: “Isaac will go home for the exhibition and then return here [to Paris]. Why, he is nowadays quite a wealthy man—and elegant.”16 The word elegant is expressive of a category, at that time in common use to differentiate a more refined artistic type from a less distinguished one and, in like manner, a more cultured and successful social position from a lower one. By the early part of the 1910s, Grünewald had abandoned the dress code and stance of “the poor Bohemian,” and ascended to another manner of life and expression, to a higher status and distinction that was readily recognized in his mode of dress. The surrounding (art) world now began to view him as “elegant.”17 In addition to his deliberate strategy of self-presentation, Isaac Grünewald’s choice of elegant and high-quality fashion should also be linked to his relationship with Sigrid Hjertén, which began in 1911. Coming from the upper crust, she had a dress code to go with it, and indeed started her creative work in textile design. As already stated, the two artists did not act and present themselves exclusively as individuals but in various ways also as a couple in tandem. A legendary anecdote pinpoints the quite paradoxical performances to which the male avant-garde artist was expected to adapt. According to Peter Cornell, the artist was referred to a huge “portfolio of scripts” for role-playing.18 The anecdote is about Grünewald’s first meeting with Christian Tetzen-Lund, the Danish collector and patron of the arts. Having made an effort to dress up for this important occasion, Grünewald met with disappointment. “You are well dressed, even dapper,” said Tetzen-Lund. “And you are wearing a watch that keeps time. You can’t be an artist.” Grünewald responded irately: “Here you invite me to ride in your wonderful car, but you demand that an artist should be poor and slovenly. Do you really believe that it is the frayed edges on his trousers that show an artist’s talent?”19 The anecdote shows on the one hand how important the external radiance is for making the artist credible in the eyes of the public and the buyers of art. On the other hand, it makes clear how important the narrative accounts of the artists’ clothing are for constructing the artist’s myth. It is a recurring factor in a number of biographical and scholarly texts about Grünewald and his artistry. Wahlgren’s account, not least, is amply dramatized with references to the clothing style of the artists, their ambitions in fashion, and the reactions of the public to their personal style and lifestyle. The role of the avant-garde artist is corroborated by performative iterations linked to appearance, dress code, and conduct. Grünewald is thus a case in point of an artistic role that is at variance with the romantic notion of the artist as a Bohemian held by Tetzen-Lund: the artist as

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dandy and as a modern elegant urbane agent dauntless in exhibiting a luxuriously inclined lifestyle, good finances, and a successful position. Isaac Grünewald was very conscious of the significance of making a good modern impression and of being seen in public. Biographies about him tell of his declared ambitions in looking good, training his body, and dressing with quality. These traits are visually documented in photos that he poses for, in his self-portraits, and also in his public pronouncements. According to Wahlgren, Grünewald boasted about being one of the first in the Parisian art arena to acquire a car. After having purchased the luxury brand Cord, he painted it blue, named it Bird Blue, and instructed his wife: “It is invaluable as advertising . . . you must buy yourself a blue dress in the same shade!”20 Quotations of this kind are illustrated and confirmed in a sequence of photos showing Grünewald and Hjertén, or the whole family, with their various cars and often on travels in Europe. In these photos, fashion and cars dovetail in a visual whole, gleaming with modernity and modern dynamics, even as the clothing suitable for driving varies from urban elegance to more practical and coarser travel clothes. As a last stop on Grünewald’s (fashion) journey toward bourgeoisie affluence, one can interpret the at-home interviews that were published when Grünewald was fully established as a professor at the academy of art in Stockholm. By then he had been consecrated as a main player in the Swedish arts and, on a number of occasions, presented his home in the weeklies, for instance, in VeckoJournalen. It was a growing phenomenon in late modernism to feature the homes and lifestyles of iconic artists in weeklies. In the blossoming international fashion press, Matisse in particular was known to offer repeated at-home interviews.21 In this venue, however, fashion tended to lose its dominance as a mark of status. It was instead adapted low key to the tasteful home milieu and to the secure position and authority of the aging artist, who no longer needed to demonstrate superiority by conspicuous clothing.

The Jewish dandy—A self-chosen outsider? As his biographers and the media sources of his day have shown, Grünewald asserted himself deliberately, and unabashedly, among the stars in the arena of Swedish and international art. His desire to attract attention through his clothes, his work, his lifestyle, and through public debate, coupled with his open pride in being Jewish, met with extreme hostility in the early phase of his artistic career. Besides legendary pronouncements such as “a day without appearing in the newspaper is a day that is lost!” and a constant, combative presence in the media debate about the arts in Sweden, Grünewald’s awareness of his public

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Figure 8.3  Isaac Grünewald, Self-Portrait, 1912.

showcasing can be traced by taking a closer look at his self-portraits, both painted and photographed.22 In these self-portraits, exquisite clothes are combined with a well-coiffed hairstyle that accentuates the lustrous blackness of the hair and a characteristic profile that he himself called Jewish and was very proud of (Figures 8.3 and 8.4). The self-portrait of 1912 presents the artist as a male beauty with nearly feminine features, big eyes, sensuously full lips and glimmering black hair, dressed in a white shirt with a blue bowtie. His sentient appearance is combined with a glance that the observer may experience as dreamy but also slightly arrogant and condescending. The portrait breathes of Charles Baudelaire’s view of the dandy as the epitome of modern life, as well as of artistic life, in Paris of the late 1800s. According to Baudelaire, the dandy takes: “an inordinate delight in the

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Figure 8.4  Sigrid Hjertén, Portrait of Isaac Grünewald, 1918.

toilette and in material elegance . . . as a symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind. Further, in his eyes, enamoured above all with distinctiveness, the perfection of the toilette consists in absolute simplicity, which indeed is the preeminent way of distinguishing oneself.”23 The dandy is further characterized by “the fervent need above all to engender an originality for himself within the external bounds of social conventions” and “the pleasure of causing surprise and the proud satisfaction of never oneself being surprised.” 24 The portrait can further be compared with paintings done by Hjertén. She, too, depicts her spouse a number of times as a dandy both in clothing and attitude. Her paintings of him have been interpreted as feminizing. The portrait

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from 1918 is a case in point. It shows Grünewald in an elegant light-grey suit with a pink shirt and a black and white patterned tie, leaning back in a relaxed pose. Besides his pastel-colored, femininely suggestive clothing and posture, the portrait may give the impression of the artist wearing eye shadow.25 The phenomenon of the dandy, or the fashion of the dandy, as subverting masculine identity in the direction of traditional feminine domains is brought out in fashion scholar Barbara Vinken’s differentiation between the concepts of Schein (semblance) and Sein (being) as linked to the notions of femininity vis-à-vis masculinity.26 Whereas feminine identity within fashion discourse has been linked to superficiality and artificially created appearance or looks, the traditional male role has ostensibly been associated with authentic being without any need or allowance for fashion, make-up or striking ornamentation. The dandy offers an alternative masculine concept where fashion and beauty are allowed as a part of the masculine self-staging and where “feminine” aesthetics may also be used by the male aesthete. In its overturning of traditional gender roles and its focus on an aesthetically aware self-presentation as a part of the romantically modernistic total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk), the elegant dandy style may be viewed as a suitable choice for the male avant-garde artist (Figure 8.5). Grünewald’s fashionable, almost feminine appearance together with his openly accentuated Jewishness and dauntless self-display were, of course, attacked by his conservative adversaries and the partially anti-Semitic press.27 The discourse around Grünewald is interesting, not least because it shaped a verbal and visual

Figure 8.5  Cover of Nya Nisse, 27, no. 26, 1917.

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caricature of him that to a great extent was based on his physical appearance. As a distortion of Grünewald’s own self-presentation, these texts and images exaggerate and caricature the artist’s most prominent physical attributes:  his profile, nose, eyes, lips, hairstyle, and his elegant clothes. On the cover of the satirical weekly Nya Nisse from 1917, Grünewald is shown in an obviously Semitic setting of bald-headed gentlemen with extreme nasal profiles, all of them in grey suits and eagerly conversing. Grünewald and two other Jewish celebrities in Stockholm, Olof Aschberg and Josef Sachs, are, however, specifically highlighted by their black suits, adorned with bright decorative details. Grünewald is shown with his characteristic profile, quite in accordance with his own self-presentations, black curls, soft full lips, and an extraordinarily elongated and slender as well as willowy body, underscored by the tailcoat he is wearing. The intimated feminine softness (or pliancy) of his dandy-like appearance is further reinforced by the longfingered feminine hand that he presses to his chest and by his shiny, bowed patent-leather shoes with high heels.28 The beauty of the elegant clothing, so highly appreciated for its quality in the artistic collective of the avantgarde and in the world of modern art, has here become an object of negative criticism and a mark of decadence, weakness, misplaced femininity, and arrogant gestures when viewed from the perspective of negative, indeed, anxiety-ridden notions about the “Other.”29 Grünewald’s significance as the “Other” in a Swedish cultural context is based on several characteristics already mentioned: his obviously conveyed Jewish self-awareness, his no small financial aspirations as an artist, his modernity and avant-garde ideals, his combative attitude toward the establishment as well as against his artist colleagues, his desire to demand attention. The last trait in particular may well have been a mortal sin in contemporary discussion on Swedish national identity, which typically emphasized the Swedish folksoul as measured, conforming, democratic, and humble.30 In that context, Grünewald became “the Oriental,” “the trickster,” a dangerous “wizard,” “the Jewish capitalist,” roles that were graphically rendered by the bodily appearance of the artist.31 Grünewald’s physical appearance became a visual mark and, gradually, an easily recognizable part of Swedish visual culture. It was spread and popularized through his and Sigrid Hjertén’s self-staging strategies in public showcasing of fashion, modern props and modern lifestyle, in photographs where these “performances” were documented (even if it is difficult to say how many of them were shown to a contemporary public), and last but not least through the pictures of a polemical press. To play and stage the “Other” in verbal and visual discourse was thus a part of the artist’s active and deliberate promotional strategy and an involuntary burden of serious political significance that led to many attacks, even physical ones, against the artist couple.32

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Sigrid Hjertén and the fashion of the female artist—The desire and the requirement of being visible In the beginning of his book, Wahlgren offers a (fictitious) picture of the opening of Grünewald’s and Hjertén’s joint exhibition in 1913: Isaac is at the centre of it, with a smile; he talks with one and all as they enter. Dressed in a bright-blue suit, red velvet scarf and with coal-black hair slicked back, he walks about greeting some of his friends, such as the sculptor Anna Petrus, the author Pär Lagerkvist, and the critic August Brunius. Sigrid is standing in the background—a cool, fair, and elegantly dressed woman. She is wearing a green velvet dress and a red turban, and is slender and lithe like an English lady.33 What is described here is a concerted fashion-conscious performance in a venue crucial to an artistic career, but some differences between Grünewald and Hjertén are also indicated in their behaviour, roles, and external traits. The colorful, dominating Isaac and the elegant, “fair,” almost aristocratic but even more reserved Sigrid. The couple interact through two seemingly complementary looks and personalities. The contrasts between the two of them are combined into an exciting whole, something that is evident also in Grünewald’s drawing of their double portrait in profile, which Dagens Nyheter published just before the exhibition in 1913. In the foreground the black-haired, dark-eyed Grünewald with his eagle nose and black bowtie, in the background the fair-haired, gentle-eyed Hjertén with her straight or almost upturned nose, and a hint of white ruffles around her neck. The differences between Hjertén and Grünewald are evident not only in terms of their physical features but also in their use of fashion. Hjertén’s ambition for dressing up had reasons other than Grünewald’s. She came from a bourgeois home with high expectations for dressing and conducting herself with style. With an early interest in clothes and fashion, she began her artistic education in textile design. A number of photographs from the early 1900s show her in exceptionally imaginative, well-tailored and unique garments, effectively enhanced by the angle and composition of the pictures. In one photo, showing her sitting and sketching in the couple’s apartment on Katarinavägen, she is wearing an oriental, coil-patterned, dark top with a wide-striped dress and black leather shoes with black-and-white chequered rosettes.34 A boldly conspicuous combination that points to a dauntless, inquisitive, and creative attitude toward fashion, an obvious desire to experiment with clothes and fashion in the genre-transcending spirit of modernism.35

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Photos like the one just mentioned testify not only to Hjertén’s intense interest in fashion, imagination, and playfulness in dressing up, but also to the enjoyment she, as well as Grünewald, found in posing for the camera. Besides playful pictures like the masquerade picture of 1913, with Sigrid and an unidentified friend in an exceptionally relaxed pose and splendid oriental costumes, photos such as “the fashion picture” of 1913 from Gränna show how pleased Sigrid was to be photographed. Here she poses in the aforementioned seductive akimbo position by a field before an undulating Swedish landscape in summer. She is dressed in a magnificent creation, according to Wahlgren “in a dress and hat of the latest Parisian fashion.”36 The clothing, presumably designed and sewn by her, consists of the aforementioned striped dress, a snugly fitting coat of daring cut, set with many buttons, a large satin collar and combined with long, dark leather gloves. And to this, white shoes in Rococo-inspired style and a beret-like hat with a big plume (Figure 8.6).

Figure 8.6  Sigrid Hjertén posing in the area of Gränna, Sweden, 1913.

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The photographs can be interpreted as a testimonial to the artist’s taste in fashion and as an expression of the desire to show oneself by way of photographic posing. Many modern artists followed the practice of creating their own photographic self-portraits and fashion pictures, using themselves as models. Another Swedish example along with Grünewald and Nils Dardel is Siri Derkert. Like Hjertén, her fashion photography incorporated her own creations and should be interpreted as more than preliminary studies for the “true” activity, that is, for painting. For here it is also a matter of enjoying the staging of oneself through fashion, of configuring one’s appearance, and bringing out personal beauty inspired by the aesthetics of the fashion magazines and by means of the increasingly developed photographic medium.37 Advertising and self-promotion offered additional pictorial functions. Like Grünewald’s earlier statement about Bird Blue and a dress to match the color of the new car, Hjertén’s 1915 quotation reflects her awareness of the outward image: “I’ve sewn myself a fine dress. One must be pretty, or else be counted for nothing.”38 The quote pertains to the clothes Hjertén was wearing in the film Is Dancing in Decline?, which Grünewald produced in 1915.39 During their time in Paris, both artists had learned and enjoyed various forms of modern dance, and the film from 1915 was a reaction against a conservative cultural climate in Sweden that denigrated modern dance as foreign decadence. In the Swedish debate on dancing, Paris once again stood out as the breeding ground of modernity and various forms of modern art, and was presented as a foreign metropolis endangering domestic Swedish culture. The film from 1915, displaying both Boston and the one-step dance performances, was perceived as far too erotically provocative by the Swedish public.40 In this context, fashion clearly plays an important role both in the act of dancing and its physical radiance and as part of the modernistic total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) which combines stage art, clothing art, and visual art; and the same was the case in the dance shows of Siri Derkert and Anna Petrus at Intima Teatern in 1917. Last but not least, fashion and clothes, as Hjertén has pointed out, function as a display window for a modern aesthetic that is both avant-garde and yet generally acceptable, a socially established sign that nevertheless communicates modernistic ideals of art. Even the film per se can be seen as a part of the artist’s self-promotion. The newspaper Nya Dagligt Allehanda puts it this way: “The colour juggler Grünewald has now tossed his brushes and donned his dance shoes in order to advertise for himself and his wife in this mating game!”41 As previously indicated, clothes constituted an important part in the selfstaging at private showings. In his account, Wahlgren presents recurring descriptions of clothes that the couple would wear on various public occasions. These descriptions are in sync with what has been transmitted in accounts about

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other international modernists, for example, the couple Delaunay in their artistic apparel of provocative avant-garde bent, not least Sonia Delaunay’s legendary robe simultanée from 1913. In speaking of Hjertén at the Gothenburg Jubilee Exposition in 1923, Wahlgren observes:  “Sigrid wore a long, black-striped velvet dress and a blue, broad-brimmed hat in Spanish style.” She was always particular about how she looked: “I always buy clothes of the highest quality and take care to shop sample dresses from the big fashion houses such as Paul Poiret, the very latest in haute couture.”42 By way of comment on Wahlgren’s account, one could imagine the private showings of this exposition well-nigh as a fashion show by the artists. Selfconsciously dressed to the hilt, the artist here moves at a deliberate pace among many people and art objects, making herself visible, being watched, and attracting attention, more so than the exhibited artworks, which nearly vanish in the human throng. The private showing is more about people and self-staging than about showing the art. In this venue, the artist can, as it were, be interpreted as an object of art. She is dressed up for the public and colleagues in an outfit intended to confirm the expectations and the image that the art on display mediates at a level of carefully chosen detail. With a mind to Hjertén’s statement about her fashion buys, it becomes clear that she purchases clothes from haute couture fashion shows in Paris.43 This speaks to her requirements for high quality and to a curiosity about the newest and latest in fashion. In that regard, Paul Poiret was regarded as the uncontested leader in the 1910s. But it also speaks to her enjoying the experience of fashion shows and to her awareness of where to buy clothes from such shows. The fascination with Parisian haute couture was triggered not only by fashion as such but by the fashion world and the attendant culture in its entirety. This would range from Poiret’s legendary fashion parties and the publication of artist-drawn fashion illustrations to the revolutionary effect of Russian ballet on costume design, kinesthetic patterns, dance choreography, etc. All of Paris can be said to have worked as a stage for artists, designers, models, and intellectuals, who in unison joined to celebrate fashion as the hub of the modernistic movement.44 Hjertén’s awareness of quality and elegance could easily be interpreted more as a part of her “original” identity, both in terms of family and interest, and less as a strategic choice as was the case with Grünewald, the “upstart” and the social climber. It is further important to consider whether and how Hjertén’s role as a female avant-garde artist dictated her choice of clothes and the public expectations of how she looked. Just as Grünewald was constrained to handle and balance his role as the Jewish and rebellious “Other,” so Hjertén can be seen as the ‘Other’ in her role as a female artist in a male-dominated art world, where she had to adapt to the requirements intrinsic to that role. Elizabeth Wilson has shown that many modernistic “Bohemian” women, whether as artists or as muses for male artists, were known for deliberately working their fashionable

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appearances which, in turn, were disseminated through photographs of equally deliberate bent, with some of these becoming iconic.45 It just was not possible for the female artist, often of bourgeois background, to “dress down” to the same workman-inspired Bohemian style as certain male artists and still to be taken seriously. Even so, women’s fashion was on the move toward liberating body ideals, and a fashion star such as Coco Chanel, on the rise with her maleinspired style, had an effect also on the fashion-oriented Swedish women artists who visited Paris and were educated there. Thus, Hjertén’s personal fashion can certainly be regarded as pervasively feminine and elegant, but in a style that is friendly to the body and at times daring, and as such not least inspired by the pulsating life of fashion in Paris. Even the use of fashion in her own painting may be called daring.

Fashion’s expressionism As with Isaac Grünewald, Sigrid Hjertén’s self-presentations in photographs are characterized by elegance and awareness of fashion, by careful attention to pose and at times astonishingly exquisite clothing. Her painting, however, can be said to underscore fashion in a somewhat different way than Grünewald’s. Where he uses an abstract yet also life-like figurative style, making some of his portrait paintings resemble contemporary fashion illustrations, Hjertén has clothes and accessories play a somewhat different role in her expressionistic experiments with form. We can compare Grünewald’s painting of Sigrid and Ivàn, subtitled Muff and Boa, from 1917 with Hjertén’s Self-Portrait from 1914. The difference between the two lies, of course, in having different intents. The first one proposes to render a fashionable image of wife and child in which clothes play a pronounced role. The second one is a self-portrait, with the implicit goal of expressing the self in a more intimate way. Importantly, both types of paintings are found in both artists. They are contrasted here in order to show the different roles that fashion can play in modernistic portrait art, not in order to characterize the styles per se of the two artists (Figures 8.7 and 8.8). In Sigrid and Ivàn, two persons are shown posing, standing next to each other, but without any contact. They are like two separate objects whose aura first and foremost emanates from the colors and forms conveyed by clothing and style. Mother and son are portrayed as in a photograph, but even more stylized and frozen in their stances. Whereas Ivàn’s face is shown facing the artist—a calm, beautifully symmetric face with big, dark, almond-shaped eyes and a small, feminine mouth framed with an equally feminine pageboy cut and a bright straw hat—Sigrid’s face is shown in profile, highlighting her characteristic features, strikingly combined with the fashionable contours of the Shingle

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Figure 8.7  Isaac Grünewald, Sigrid and Iván, 1917.

hairstyle under a light-colored hat. Ivàn is standing still in a cobalt-blue sailor suit, static and obedient as if being photographed, whereas Sigrid’s facial profile is combined with a distinct fashion pose, with one hand on her jutting hip and one of her feet at an outward angel to underscore the slender, well-turned ankle with

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Figure 8.8  Sigrid Hjertén, Ateljéinteriör (studio interior), 1916.

its elegantly narrow pointed shoes. The boy’s intensely blue sailor suit forms a striking contrast to the woman’s mustard walking suit in combination with a fur boa and a muff, which she is holding in front of her pleated skirt. Besides (fashion) photos of the family and the couple, comparisons can be made with contemporary fashion drawings and artistic illustrations that were circulated in fashion magazines. Illustrations of fashion started to play an important role for avant-garde art already during the second half of the 1800s. This is when the impressionists became fascinated with the stylized and modern presentations on fashion posters that dismissed naturalistic representations of people and focused on details of fashion, lines, forms, distinct colors, and silhouettes.46 The abstract idiom of the fashion posters, the focus on the form, patterns, and aesthetics of clothes in general, as well as the absence of human interaction or expression can, for example, be traced in Monet’s Women in the Garden.47 Similar characteristics are evident in Grünewald’s modernistic paintings, where clothing clearly plays a major role and the forms and faces of people, while belonging to individuals, at the same time are idealized and adapted to the aesthetics in its totality.

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As with many fashion posters, the background in Hjertén’s Muff och Boa [Muff and Boa] is indefinable and suggestive of bluish clouds whose play of light lends additional prominence to the figures in the foreground. The role of fashion also comes to light through the subtitle of the painting, where personal names have been replaced by Sigrid’s attributes of fashion. The fascination with fashion is openly announced; fashion is made a legitimate artistic motif. This is a sign of modern aesthetics and an inalienable part of the spirit of the present age, just as with Charles Baudelaire’s The Painters of Modern Life and his tribute to the artist and (fashion) illustrator Constantin Guys. How, then, does Hjertén’s self-portrait work by way of comparison? Here, certain garments dominate as well—long and elegant trousers in bright red, contrasted with a white blouse with faint red dots, a white collar, and a big, palered bow. The artist is seated at an easel, just off the picture; she is not wearing a smock but is dressed in fashionable clothes, with a pose that accents her long legs, narrow waist, and face shown in three-quarter profile. On the light-red hair, styled as in Grünewald’s painting, sits a delightful hat, black with a white band and a large plume. Her mouth is lipsticked, her eyes stand out, big and dark, with clearly drawn black brows. In contrast to Grünewald’s painting, which displays elegant objects and works in an aesthetically pleasant way at a distance, Hjertén’s self-portrait awakens a sense of uneasiness. The face reflects sadness and is not idealized, despite the dramatic makeup. The elongated, slender body with its striking clothes is not classically beautiful but comes closer to being distorted; the red color is too intense and salient to be experienced exclusively as a daring detail of fashion. The association moves rather toward the color of blood, not least because it occurs also in other details of the painting and in the background—on Ivàn’s toy horse and sailboat, on the brush and on the wallpaper. The painting artist is obviously in a domestic setting, surrounded by toys, patterned wallpaper, and with the child in the background. Ivàn, here a toddler, is reduced to a sketch-like painted figure in the abstract, far back in the picture. His curly hair and sailor suit in white and blue, as well as his eyes as two brown points, constitute his most salient aspects. The portrait can be interpreted as reflecting the split role Sigrid Hjertén experienced in her attempts to balance her artistry and creative activity with her role as mother and housewife; she was often on her own while Grünewald was travelling. But what role, then, do fashion and clothing play in this presentation? I suggest that Hjertén uses fashion as an expression more than an object of beauty or a fetish. The blood-red trousers can certainly be experienced as elegant, but also as painfully intensive, as signifying an inner scream, with the female artist sitting in a position of bodily tension surrounded by, or hemmed in by, the walls of the home. The abstract forms of fashion prevailing at the time, along with ornamentation and intense colors, make it possible for the modernists to experiment with style

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and composition, and the aesthetics of fashion further prompts the expression of feelings and inner states of the mind through clothes. Just as one expresses oneself and one’s prevailing mood by what one chooses to wear on a daily basis, so fashion and clothes constitute an expressive means à la expressionism, which, through its inherently abstract qualities, opens up liberating experiments in form and color (Figure 8.9). To illustrate further Hjertén’s use of fashion for experimental and expressive purposes, we can take a closer look at the painting Ateljéinteriör from 1916. It has often been interpreted as an expression of the artist’s split self-image.48 In the foreground, a seductively posing femme fatale dressed in black, with dark-red

Figure 8.9  Sigrid Hjertén, Self-Portrait, 1914.

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hair and dramatically made-up face, is smiling while, farther back in the studio, a taciturn, strawberry blonde woman with expressionless eyes, in a blue skirt and red blouse, is quietly and passively sitting between two animated, conversing male artists, one of them Grünewald. Alongside the dominant woman is a darkred-haired, elegant yet rather expressionless escort in a mauve suit (possibly Nils Dardel, a close friend of the artist couple); behind her is the son Ivàn who, from the right corner of the picture, attempts to come between the two obviously, totally self-absorbed adults. The clothes and the appearance of both female figures here operate as decisive contrasts in a painting that can be interpreted both as a colorful pictorial experiment and as a profound confrontation with the split role of the woman/artist. Starting from the narrow, black heels in the lower left corner, the black dress—with its feathered, conspicuous hemline, the cinched waist, and the slender, gracefully curved arms—forms a dynamic line that extends diagonally almost across the entire surface of the picture. In her article “Modern and Oriental Art” from 1911, Hjertén writes about the expressive worth of the body’s lines: “the consistent simplifying of the lines for achieving the greatest possible expressiveness . . . compressing the movement of a figure within the curve of a single line. The curve is the melody of the artwork, and nothing in the figure is allowed to disturb its consequence.”49 This quotation shows what a great role the body and its clothing has for the expressiveness that Hjertén is striving for. The simplification that belongs to the most important principles of abstraction and expressionism is enhanced by the distinct silhouettes and clear colors of modern fashion. The expressivity and ornamentality of the clothed body characteristic of Hjertén’s figure paintings and portraits speak to abstract decorative values, the intrinsic life of color and line, and, by extension, also the emotional content. In Ateljéinteriör, the dynamics of form of the woman in black is set over against the passivity of the seated woman whose hands are clasped and whose legs are together under the snug dress. The one woman is staging herself, the other one looks as if she wants to disappear. The face of the one is a rosy skin color, the dark eyes are wide open, the red painted mouth is smiling freely, and the hair is coiffed in a dramatic style reminiscent of the traditional image of Cleopatra. The other woman, closer in looks to the actual Hjertén, has a nearly olive face, eyes that consist of subdued dots surrounded by dark shadows, a barely visible mouth, and hair bound tightly to her head. Here is a fast life—and a person who commands plenty of space, both literally and in her conspicuous, almost aggressive outfit—over against a confined existence, in more domestic dress, and formed according to men’s dictates. Sigrid Hjertén uses fashion instrumentally for the breaking of norms in painting and gender. Wherever fashion is used as a beautifying and idealizing tool in the traditional presentation of women, Hjertén’s opts for expressive distortion. A  certain measure of bodily distorting or abstracting is used also in fashion

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posters, and by her spouse Grünewald, with a mind to highlighting the beauty of fashion and its new aesthetic possibilities. But Hjertén’s figure painting involves an interest beyond fashion and the fashionably dressed woman as an object of beauty. In her paintings, fashion as an expression of color and form testifies to the inner being, not least to the divided role of the female artist. She is the creator of her own work, but must concurrently and incessantly create herself as a respectable woman in the eyes of others—be it in the world of art or society. She wants to be a free artist and is at the same time conventionally bound to her role as mother and wife. A last example of the staging of Isaac Grünewald and Sigrid Hjertén as a fashion couple is a photo in the same spirit as the studio picture discussed at the beginning of the present article. In the photograph, Grünewald is sitting on a chair in front of a painting of Hjertén, who is pictured as seated in a similar chair. Both are dressed in hat and coat. The painted Hjertén is bowing her head as if lost in thought; Grünewald, on the other hand, looks into the camera, with a calm and serious look. His fashion details stand out sharply: the snow-white shirt, the dark silk tie, the soft high-quality material of the coat, the skin gloves, pinstriped

Figure 8.10  Isaac Grünewald, c. 1916.

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pants, and the shiny patent leather shoes. The positioning of his wife in front of the elegant picture looks quite deliberate, and can be seen as a striking instance of redoubling. The clothing, the posture, and the chairs they are sitting on are suggestive of one another, and they both have studio walls as background. Grünewald stands out as the main person, of course, and if one so choses, one can interpret the portrait in the background as an objectified presentation of his wife. At the same time, both of them, separately and taken together, are staged as fashion models and thereby objects of beauty (Figure 8.10). The primary purpose of this photograph may well be to bring out Grünewald’s artistry, but I would also interpret it as a deliberate manifestation of the artistic couple sharing in the same modernity, aesthetic radiance, and lifestyle. First and foremost, they are presented as elegant and aesthetically aware personalities. They are legitimized, mainly through their fashion, as modernistic artists devoted to an artistic life in the spirit of the all-encompassing or total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk). It is a life in which the creation of one’s own works, selfcreating, a consciously chosen stage for self-presentation and, last but not least, the staging of the perfect companionship of the couple go hand in hand. That the external aesthetic harmony of their lives together did not always corresponded to the internal situation is another story.

Notes 1 T he quotation shows the rhetoric of disparagement that characterized the discourse around the couple Grünewald. To reduce Grünewald to his first name, and Hjertén, whose name at that time was Sigrid Grünewald, to “Madam Isaac,” fits the antiSemitic intimations and designations about the artist that took on currency in the Swedish press, and it also alludes to the couple’s “French” manners and appearance that so readily lend themselves both to artistry and fashion. On the anti-Semitic aspect, see Lars M. Andersson, En jude är en jude är en jude . . . Representationer av “juden” i svensk skämtpress omkring 1900–1930 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2000); and Bernhard Grünewald, Orientalen. Bilden av Isaac Grünewald i svensk press, 1909–1946 (Stockholm: CKM, 2011). 2 A ccording to Nancy Hall-Duncan, the subsequently standardized pose with the hand on the hip was first used by Baron Adolf de Meyer when he started as a photographer at Harper’s Bazaar in 1913. See Nancy Hall-Duncan, The History of Fashion Photography (New York: Alpine Books, 1979). 3 T he self-staging of artists through fashion photography in fashion magazines is treated in Antje Krause-Wahl, “Between Studio and Catwalk—Artists in Fashion Magazines,” Fashion Theory 13, no. 1 (2009): 7–28. 4 O n the concept of self-fashioning and the artist’s self-staging through dress in selfportraits, see Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 173–8. 5 Anders Wahlgren, Sigrid & Isaac (Stockholm: Prisma, 2007); and the film Sigrid & Isaac (Sweden 2005, directed by Anders Wahlgren).

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6 T he quotations from Wahlgren are used to problematize the narrative about the couple’s fashion, but should not always be considered verified in a scholarly empirical way; they are rather to be considered examples of the predominant discourse on the artists. 7 F or an analysis of the couple’s and the family’s self-presentation and performative strategies in relation to fashion and modernity, see Shulamith Beer, “Moderniteten, familjen och modet,” in Sigrid och Isaac: Modernismens pionjärer (Norrköping: Norrköpings Konstmuseum, 2002). 8 F or the split role of the feminine artist in self-staging through fashion, see my discussion in “Rollspel. Mode som självframställning och experiment under Siri Derkerts 1910-tal,” in Att alltid göra och tänka det olika. Siri Derkert i 1900-talet, ed. Mats Rohdin and Annika Öhrner (Stockholm: Kungliga biblioteket, 2011). 9 Josef Paul Hodin, Isaac Grünewald (Stockholm: Ljus, 1949), 158. 10 Wahlgren, Sigrid & Isaac, 42. 11 T he Bohemian “look,” its origin and its various ramifications, is discussed by Elizabeth Wilson in her significant book, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000), ch. 10. 12 F or Paris and the metropolis as the stage for modern artists and the Bohemian, see Wilson, “The Bohemian Stage,” in Bohemians. 13 J osef Paul Hodin is quoted in Peter Cornell, “Rollhäfte. Konstnärsrollen i fokus,” in Utopi & verklighet. Svensk modernism 1900–1960, ed. Cecilia Widenheim in collaboration with Eva Rudberg (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 2000), 29. 14 P aris as the historical and modern center for production of fashion and discourse on fashion is discussed in Valerie Steel, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 1998). For its construction as the capital of fashion through media discourse, see Agnés Rocamora’s analysis in her book, Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009). Paris and its significance for modernity and urbanism, not least in connection with fashion, is also topical in Walter Benjamin, Paris, 1800-talets huvudstad: passagearbetet, ed. and trans. Rolf Tiedemann (Stockholm: Symposion, 1990). 15 On various artist roles linked to fashion, see Wilson’s and Cornell’s publications. 16 Wahlgren, Sigrid & Isaac, 16. 17 F or Grünewald’s role and strategies of self-promotion in the Swedish art market, see my article “Promoting the Young—Interactions between the Avant-Garde and the Swedish Art Market 1910–1925,” in A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925, ed. Hubert van den Berg et al. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013). 18 See Cornell, “Rollhäfte.” 19 Ibid.,  29f. 20 Wahlgren, Sigrid & Isaac, 103. 21 T he quotation cited in Wahlgren is not entirely confirmed in its formulation, but is indicative of a phenomenon that became current in modern aesthetics, that is, the deliberate combination of clothes and cars in a matching design, something that Sonia Delaunay also carried out in her creative process.

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22 See Krause-Wahl, “Between Studio and Catwalk.” 23 Wahlgren, Sigrid & Isaac, 248. 24 Ibid. 25 C harles Baudelaire, “Dandyn,” in Det moderna livets målare, ed. and trans. Lars Holger Holm (Stockholm: Leo förlag, 2005). In the original French of Le Paintre de la Vie Moderne (1863), the three quotations from Baudelaire read: (1) “un goût immodéré de la toilette et de l’élégance matérielle . . . qu’un symbole de la supériorité aristocratique de son esprit. Aussi, à ses yeux, épris avant tout de distinction, la perfection de la toilette consiste-t-elle dans la simplicité absolue, qui est en effet la meilleure manière de se distinguer,” (2) “C’est avant tout le besoin ardent de se faire une originalité, contenu dans les limites extérieures des convenances,” (3) “C’est le plaisir d’étonner et la satisfaction orgueilleuse de ne jamais être étonné” (editors’ translation). 26 Beer, “Moderniteten, familjen och modet,” 22. 27 Barbara Vinken, Fashion Zeitgeist. Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 17f. 28 F or a comprehensive analysis of the anti-Semitic discourse on Grünewald, see L. M. Andersson, “Isaac och den svenska nationen,” in En jude är en jude är en jude. . ., 370–412. 29 S tereotypical connections between the body of the male Jew and bisexuality are discussed in Sandor Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York and London: Routledge, 1991). 30 A thoroughgoing review of the Swedish Grünewald reception in conjunction with images and pictures of the “Other” is given in Grünewald, The Oriental. 31 T he emergence of this Swedish self-image is discussed in Billy Ehn, Jonas Frykman, and Orvar Löfgren, Försvenskningen av Sverige. Det nationellas förvandlingar (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1993). 32 See Andersson, En jude är en jude är en jude. . . 33 Wahlgren, Sigrid & Isaac, 179f. 34 Ibid.,  9. 35 S ince the photographs used here are in black and white, the color of the clothes is, of course, difficult to determine. What I call “black” may in certain cases be another very dark color. 36 A similar pleasurable relation to fashion and the creation of fashion, both by designing fashion for others and for oneself, is found in the contemporary Siri Derkert, whose early activity combines various forms of artistic expression—from painting to fashion and costume design to dance. See Kollnitz, “Rollspel.” 37 Wahlgren, Sigrid & Isaac, 34. 38 Kollnitz, “Rollspel.” 39 Wahlgren, Sigrid & Isaac, 89. 40 T he film carries Grünewald’s name only and should, therefore, be considered his, and his alone. The four other contributors were not artists, but included dancer Jenny Hasselquist, figure skating champion Ulrich Salchow, editor Hasse Z, and sculptor Anna Petrus.

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41 I wish to thank Bernhard Grünewald who informed me that the dances in this film have been erroneously interpreted as the tango, not least in Wahlgren’s film Sigrid & Isaac from 2005. The interview took place on January 6, 2014. 42 Wahlgren, Sigrid & Isaac, 89. 43 Ibid.,  172. 44 M ore can be read about the Parisian haute couture houses, their fashion shows, and customer relations in Caroline Evan’s article, “Paris–New York. Jean Patour’s ‘Advertising,’ ” in the present anthology. 45 T his view is given prominence in Fashion at the Time of Fascism: Italian Modernist Lifestyle 1922–1943, ed. Mario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari (Bologna: Damiani Editore, 2009). 46 See Wilson, “Women in Bohemia,” and “Feminine Roles” in Bohemia. 47 F or discussions on the role of fashion illustrations in contemporary art, see Steele’s chapter on “Modern Art and the Fashion Plate,” in Paris Fashion; and Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley and London: California University Press, 1993), 314–38. 48 T he relation of the impressionists to fashion posters is analyzed in Mark Roskill, “Early Impressionism and the Fashion Print,” Burlington Magazine 112, no. 807 (June 1970). 49 S ee, for example, Elisabeth Haglund, “Kvinnan och rummet i Sigrid Hjerténs måleri 1912–1918,” in Sigrid Hjertén, ed. Katarina Borgh Bertorp and Lollo Fogelström (Exhibition catalogue; Stockholm: Liljevalchs konsthall, 1995), 171f.

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9 MAGO’S MODERNISM FASHION AND THE MODERN FROM SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT TO HOUR OF THE WOLF Astrid Söderbergh Widding Translated by Rune Engebretsen

Introduction Swedish film and theater director Ingmar Bergman is probably best known for his gloomy and heavy psychological dramas, and for his portrayals of characters who suffer mentally or physically and who are forced—by internal or by exterior pressure—to endure their pain. Yet, Bergman also mastered the genre of witty and light-hearted comedy—as well as terrifying representations of pure anguish. And while the psychological, and hence, human, aspects were crucial to his narratives—so too were the more concrete, visible details that served to make up his characters, such as costume. In Bergman’s rich work, one costume designer in particular stands out, and it is on this designer that this essay will focus.

Breaking through “I was sitting in the outhouse, reading the newspaper. Then I read—‘Swedish film receives award at Cannes,’ ‘Swedish film causes sensation,’ or something like

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that. What damned film is this? I thought; I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it was Smiles of a Summer Night.”1 This quotation comes—of course—from Ingmar Bergman himself. And even if his words are not always to be taken at face value, these lines nevertheless contain a hidden truth. The prize at Cannes came as a surprise—and not only to Bergman. As Mikael Timm has put it—this combination of “pastiche on 19th century theatre and modern irony” had hardly been predicted to be a success.2 But Smiles of a Summer Night would become the turning point in Bergman’s career, the door opener in Sweden that made it possible for him to bring to fruition a project that till then had caught no one’s interest. It would become The Seventh Seal, yet another international success that would establish him as one of the foremost film directors in the world. Prior to Smiles of a Midsummer Night, Ingmar Bergman had not yet become “Bergman.” With his international breakthrough, he would be hailed in the United States as “the first filmmaker to create art”—a cinematic modernist par excellence.3 In spite of already being well established as a director in both theater and film, he had earlier encountered difficulties finding financing for several of his film projects, not least for his own favorite, Sawdust and Tinsel (Swedish: Gycklarnas afton, lit. The Jugglers’ Evening) of 1953. This is a significant film, not only because it was so fondly cherished by its director, but because it was the first time he worked with Mago—Max Goldstein—as his costume designer. It marked the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Bergman and Mago would make no fewer than twelve films together, Smiles of a Summer Night among them. Mago, Max Goldstein, had started as a designer for the stage in the 1940s. He had fled with his family from Germany to Sweden at the last moment in 1939, when he was fourteen years old. At age seventeen, he received his first commission for an operetta. Several commissions followed in its wake—and soon Mago had made a name for himself. This essay is principally about Mago—yet a costume designer is rarely portrayed in his own right. His greatness can certainly be viewed in part as a corollary to the success he enjoyed in being intimately linked to the director of the most prominent films for which he made costumes. At the same time, however, Mago’s participation imparted a striking quality to Bergman’s cinematic universe. For the lack of a better term, this quality could hypothetically be called modern. Regardless of which time period he was working in or what the terms and conditions were otherwise, Mago created fashion; he created something modern; he made costumes for film. This was fashion for stage and screen, which, in many cases, became groundbreaking and inspired others. To be sure, Mago did love the past, he loved the world of the theater—but what he accomplished was simultaneously new and modern, the fruit of a labour ever in search of renewal.

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The Bergman–Mago collaboration In his memoirs entitled Klä av, klä på. . . (Undress, Dress. . .), Mago has described how his collaboration with Bergman began: A few days after Ingmar’s and my brief encounter in the artist lobby, I held a film manuscript in my hand, Sawdust and Tender. I dare say that none of the great many film manuscripts I have read since then have affected and inspired me like this first one. The author had presented the characters of his story so clearly and distinctly, both in a poetic and taut instructive language, that, even if they had never been brought to life on the silver screen, they would have been lodged in my mind forever.4 He proceeds to describe in vivid detail a sequence of flashbacks from the filming itself:  “the green eye shadow on Harriet’s lids, the embroideries on her belt; Gudrun Brost in purple tights, walking up to the old doomed bear and crying real tears; Anders Ek, on whose white clown outfit I had painted a sun with textile paint, and then he had asked permission to take the outfit home with him in order to break it in.”5 And he recalls the circus-dressed actors on their way to the set: “Always walking up ahead, Gudrun Brost was a picturesque sight with her swaying hat and Alma’s basket on her arm.”6 Intensely visual memories such as these constitute verbal correspondences to the expressive and very detailed sketches he consistently developed both for the stage and the screen. They offer a glimpse of his fondness for the chromatic—his sketches often being in color even when he was drawing for black and white film. The beautiful sketches from Mago’s pen would become famous. It is indeed striking how much of a piece they are:  sketches from a range of theater productions could just as well have been drawn for a film such as Smiles of a Summer Night. The similarities evident in his various costume designs for widely differing productions show the extent to which Mago was a unique visual artist who created his own universe. This creative fiat he had in common with Bergman. Mago was in charge of his artistic vision, and hired seamstresses to materialize it, just as Bergman engaged actors to materialize his cinematic vision. To Mago, as well as to Bergman, art was fundamentally visual. Bergman also sketched scenes and characters in his manuscripts, albeit with rougher pen strokes than Mago’s refined and detailed drawings. In the creative process, both artists notably appear to have begun with the idea of an image, a visual intuition. This is where they met, this is where their respective visions met and, as a rule, could be interwoven. This was by no means a given, especially since they shared another basic attitude toward their art: an enormous attention to detail. In other words, there were many aspects to take into consideration in their collaboration.

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Mago, in all of his work, cared about the highest quality, and that held true right down to the smallest detail. Extremely particular about the materials chosen, he was prepared to go through hell and high water to have everything the way he wanted it. This often meant that he had to look long and hard to find exactly the right fabric, and it meant that he had to walk a lot—from one fabric dealer to the next. “Talent and good feet are two prerequisites for my job,” he is purported to have said.7

Smiles of a Summer Night The collaboration on Smiles of a Summer Night began in 1955, when Mago was handed the new Bergman manuscript. He was enthusiastic about the task of “being allowed to dress all the women of the story in a period style I was very fond of and had become quite knowledgeable about.”8 The original plan called for the film to be polychromatic, and true to habit, Mago drew in color—even when the plans for it had to be abandoned with an eye to lowering cost. In his memoirs, Mago noted that by then he had acquired considerable knowhow in how shades of color ought to work in black and white on the screen. Among the many details to which Mago gave special attention, a series of stills in Smiles of a Summer Night are worthy of note. In the film, they appear as a heap of small photos that Attorney Fredrik Egerman, played by Gunnar Björnstrand, first picks up at the photographer and then glances at intermittently in the course of the film. They are pictures representing his wife Anne and him. There could well have been fewer of these, or they could have been more standardized, since they are never shown close up on the screen. But this was Mago at work, together with Bergman. Consequently, they became a series of photographs, extremely carefully composed and organized in a style amenable to the year 1900—the story takes place in 1901—with arranged backgrounds and various kinds of attributes. This must have been a good fit for Mago, since it involved staging—the style is readily recognizable from his various set designs—but it also meant that the costumes as such truly came into focus. Shown from different angles, they bring to light various aspects of the fabrics and the accessories. In one picture, the graceful fall of the silk comes to the fore, in another it is the layer-cake character of Anne’s dress, and in yet another her long gloves, or the beautifully wrought detail of the lace. These pictures must also greatly have pleased Bergman, reminding him of the tableau aesthetics of the silent film, so dear to him, and recreating some of its stage-like arrangements with flowerpots and frames within frames. Mago’s fame is based, above all, on his splendid and glamorous costumes. He loved his prima donnas. But he also designed costumes for men, with ample measures of humor and imagination. Tall hats were a recurring touch,

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as were monocles. Ruffles and a carnation in the buttonhole would add a bit of spice, just as a dab of color would add a playful element. It is known that the dandy belonged to Mago’s imagistic ideals. And even if Fredrik Egerman, Bergman’s role figure in Smiles of a Summer Night, is not exactly a dandy, it is nevertheless evident that he has arisen from Mago’s sketches. Egerman may be stricter and more conventionally tailored, without conspicuous ruffles—but with his extravagant cape and his silver-handled walking stick, he is certainly a child of kindred spirit. It is also striking that most of the production stills of Smiles of a Summer Night give the same feeling of mise-en-scène that marks the photographs. In the production stills, the actors are shown, posing in their costumes—though the additional attributes found in the background of the photographs are missing. Instead, the background is bright. That was Bergman’s idea. Having planned the scenography down to the smallest detail, he insisted on a very precise, bright scale of colors in this film. The production company, Svensk Filmindustri (SF; Swedish Film Industry), had hoped to reduce the cost of production by lowering the quality since the film was to be made in black and white. But Bergman refused to compromise, be it on prevailing décor structures or Mago’s beautiful and costly costumes: “My aim in Smiles of a Summer Night was that nothing should be in black except the priestly outfit of the young son (Figure 9.1). Everything else: clothes, furniture, curtains should be bright. SF had large supplies of furniture in storage, but everything had to be reupholstered. That was expensive and the production office protested.”9 The dispute went so far that Bergman was rumored having to leave SF after the production, since it was generally assumed that the film would become a failure. In his biography on Bergman, Mikael Timm describes the conflict as follows: Surely there was also a certain reluctance toward the topic as such. To stage a well-known operetta for the theatre was one thing, to succeed with a comedy film on a similar theme something else. “They thought that a hell of a lot of money was being poured down the drain, and that it would be of no damn interest to the Swedish people.” Nor did the topic fit Bergman’s image as a youthful rebel. No one could credibly claim that a handful of people born in the 1800s would be a draw for young viewers when Marlon Brando and James Dean filled the movie theaters.10 Even the occurrence of uniforms seems to have belonged to the outmoded features that would scare away a young audience. But uniforms were among Mago’s favorites since they so notably allow for excess and grandeur even as they take in many exquisite details—and then color besides, which otherwise, all too often, was allowed to shine by its absence in men’s clothing.

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Figure 9.1  Still from Ingmar Bergman’s comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) with costumes by Mago. Credit: Sommarnattens leende. © 1955 AB Svensk Filmindustri (Photo: Louis Huch).

In Smiles of a Summer Night, the uniform is worn by the vain Count Carl Magnus Malcolm, played by Jarl Kulle—truly an ideal figure for Mago in creating his clothing. His gigantic epaulets as well as the enormous tassels are two details adding color to these images in black and white. The monocle is, of course, in place, as is the little moustache, another recurrent hallmark in Mago’s drawings. Contrary to the etymological meaning of the word “uniform”—signifying unity of form as in “uniformity”—Mago’s uniforms are multi-form, characterized by multifarious expressivity. Given his fondness for embellishments and glitter both for women and men, one could easily imagine Mago overlooking the maids, or at least finding them less interesting, since their clothing is simpler and less glamorous. Nothing could be more inaccurate. Mago knew exactly how to extract as much as possible also from their costumes. Even their aprons and caps have lace that lends itself to playful use, and in Mago’s hands, a detail such as bloomers could be developed into beaux art. A theater sketch of his shows a lady’s maid in a dotted Swiss dress, whereas Petra in Smiles of a Summer Night, played by Harriet Andersson, is dressed in stripes with ruffles and pleats. With a tad of frivolity added in, or even vulgarity, the maid in Mago’s version appears as anything but boring or prim. In the

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layout of the production stills, her high-necked, modestly buttoned dress gives an intimation of how quickly it could be unbuttoned, and in spite of her dress hanging loosely, she poses, in one of these stills, with a gesture that suddenly makes it appear snuggly fitting. In yet another production still, the implied promise just mentioned seems on the way to being fulfilled. With bloomers and boots and a generous décolletage— she is halfway undressed—Petra here appears as the very emblem of erotic playfulness, alluring and provocative, in the way she conducts herself toward the young Henrik Egerman, played by Björn Bjelfvenstam. At the same time, Petra is an innocent child of the summer night—a dichotomy in character that is thematically typical of Bergman, yet in its visualization it carries no less Mago’s imprint. He knew exactly which measures and steps to undertake in order to achieve the desired effect. In a still image showing the maid dressed for travel, the breadth and richness of Mago’s register is confirmed—the nuances of his vision and the whole panoply of how he uses clothes and fashion to portray various social classes and lifestyles, as well as character traits and moods in one and the same person. With the stricter clothing comes a firmer expression. By way of her dress, it becomes evident that Petra is not only the flirtatious and superficial maid; she also has a more serious, or even darker, side to her personality. She looks out from under the hat—searchingly, inquiringly; nothing escapes that look. Extravagant women’s hats—preferably with flowers, lace, or plumes—were among Mago’s most cherished accessories. Perhaps that comes as no great surprise. But how much easier it must have been to sketch a hat on the paper pad than actually-factually to implement these imaginative creations, which at times seemed nearly to float about or hover freely aloft above the woman’s head. Mago speaks of the many “large, brown custom-made boxes which were carefully filled with all the romantic flower-adorned or feather-adorned hats I had drawn, and which the incredibly skilful and energetic Ruth Westman with her milliners had made in her little French-inspired shop at Grevgatan.”11 Hats were thus procured in wholesale and retail lots, each one more imaginative and fancier than the next. Anne, played by Ulla Jacobsson, is the very incarnation of blossoming youth and innocence. Accordingly, her hat is decorated with white flowers. Combined with her clothing and her long hair peeking from under her hat, this serves to elicit her youth, the nearly childlike in her character. Naima Wifstrand, on the other hand, who plays the elder Mrs Armfeldt, wears a headdress of sorts in lace that looks like a more sophisticated version of a nightcap. It goes well with her white, curly hair, yet its softness stands in sharp contrast to her role as the iron lady who steers the action with a firm hand. On the other hand, it is suggestive of a kind heart, of her not being without a certain softness. In an anecdote, Mago recalls

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the scene with the aforementioned headdress, and describes one of the conflicts about detail that nevertheless would arise in working with Bergman: Ingmar Bergman was very sceptical of the hat that Eva Dahlbeck, in the role of the actress Desirée, was supposed wear when visiting her mother. To complement her hunter-green suit with its bright large feather boa around her shoulders, I  had made a hat that Eva really liked and looked good in. “No,” said Ingmar, “she is not supposed to wear a hat.” Gunnar Fischer, the cinematographer, and I  managed to persuade him. The perceptive Gunnar Fischer created an extremely beautiful image. One might well say that the image of a hat—Naima sitting in her big bed with a small coquette lace cap on her well-groomed curls and her daughter breezing in, wearing that magnificent hat—introduces this swift and artful conversation.12 The dialogue of the hats:  this would become a recurring theme in Mago’s work with Smiles of a Summer Night. The close collaboration between him and Bergman, as well as Mago’s significance to the film as a whole, is particularly evident in one of Bergman’s favorite takes: a frontal shot of two figures sitting next to each other on a sofa, with the one, in certain respects, being the other’s foil. In this scene, the young Anne Egerman is sitting close to her friend, Countess Charlotte Malcolm, played by Margit Carlqvist, who, in her troublesome life with the notoriously unfaithful Count Malcolm, has already become a full-fledged cynic. She has now come as an evil fairy, as intimated by her fairy-like hat, to tell Anne of the infidelity of her husband, Fredrik Egerman. Once again Anne appears as girlish. This is underscored by her hairdo, or rather her lack of a hairdo, something that Charlotte points out as well. The scene underscores the importance of Bergman’s insisting on quality in the wardrobe details. These details tell a story of their own, enriching the action by way of visual connotations—such as the fairy hat—as well as through the texture itself and the interplay between light and shadow. Typically, Mago describes the two women in terms of their contrasting hats: “Ulla Jacobsson’s large hat—typical of the times and abundantly adorned with lilies of the valley— shared space with a little fascinator of gauze and bird wings, which Charlotte wears whenever she calls on her girlfriend.”13 In another scene composed in the same way, Charlotte Malcolm now occupies Anne Egerman’s earlier position to the left on the sofa, this time as the younger and more inexperienced one, which is underscored by her not wearing a hat. Despite her cynical air and her attempt to appear sophisticated by smoking her cigarette with a holder, it comes across, even at first sight, that the truly sophisticated lady is Desirée Armfeldt, played by Eva Dahlbeck. All the refined details of her manner of dress, as well as the elegance of her hat, show that she

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is really the one in control of the scene and the intrigue she is in the process of orchestrating. Without the refinement in Mago’s costumes, with only dialogue and acting to undergird the narrative, the scene would never have worked with the same effectiveness. In his biography on Bergman, Mikael Timm compares Smiles of a Summer Night with The Merry Widow, which Bergman had directed at the theater a few years earlier. Both narratives unfold in the year 1901, and share “the same sensuality and irony, the ring dance of love.”14 Precisely these features—the sensual and the ironic, as well as love’s vicissitudes and confusions—acquire their visual configuration in no small way through Mago’s care, be it in the interplay between hats or in other visual details. Although Mago’s costumes for the stage version of The Merry Widow were black (a color that was banned from Bergman’s film) his sketches for the operetta could well have been lifted from Smiles of a Summer Night. In Timm’s words: “it is about the same world: sham, seductive, and vanished.”15 The black veil from The Merry Widow has turned white in the film, and the fan in the former reappears in the latter during Desirée Armfeldt’s theater performance; here one can rediscover details typical of Mago in their recurrence from one production to the next. They are, again, according to Timm, “the same fragile backdrops and faintly undergirded positions. The other significant inspiration seems to be Shakespeare. Smiles of a Summer Night is about performance and dissimulation, play and games. The form is derived from operetta, drama, and myth.”16 A still photo has captured Ingmar Bergman during the filming of Smiles of a Summer Night. Perched on a ladder, he is dressed in his usual beret and everyday rags—in stark contrast to the elegant Mago—and is looking quite pleased. Actually, that would hardly have been the case, except for the moment when the director was posing before the camera. The shooting of the film took exactly two months, from the end of June to the end of August, and was apparently a hellish affair. It was summer, it was hot—the makeup melting from the actors’ cheeks and the takes being interrupted at every turn. And then Bergman became ill and believed that he had stomach cancer. That is when he formulated his motto: “Every film is my last.”17 In his memoirs, Mago writes: That summer, the heat wave outside was nothing compared with the studios of SF. It was unbearably hot. The turn-of-the-century costumes gave no respite. The men perspired in their fitted overcoats and starched collars, and the girls were trapped in their corsets. We cheated by not tightening them too much, but it was of little help. Eva Dahlbeck fainted when she went to the footlights on the apron of the theatre set, which P.A. Lundgren had built in the barn, the smallest studio in Råsunda, where the doors were standing wide open.18

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The picture of Bergman on the ladder obviously lends weight to the importance of the director; it is an established convention. But film is at the same time a collective undertaking—and Bergman knew this better than most. For his part, Mago knew that there would have been no costumes without the seamstresses; that is why he established a fund to reward them. By the same token, Bergman established a separate prize, which he presented to his staff, in his case mostly the actors. Yet other colleagues, such as Mago, were no less important for his success as a director. Despite extreme differences in background, Bergman and Mago shared a basic insight, which the latter formulated approximately this way: even if security is not non-existent, it is at least continually changing. That it should have been enduring would never have occurred to him. This insight, fundamental to both of them, also made them give their all, every time: “Every film is my last.” The fact that no security was to be had, even with a prize from Cannes in the bag, would soon enough become evident, especially as some critical voices continued to be raised in Sweden. Olaf Lagercrantz, editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter at that time, had this to say about the film: “The paltry phantasy of a pimply youth, the saucy dreams of an immature heart, and a boundless contempt for artistic and human truth are the forces that have created this ‘comedy.’ I am ashamed of having seen it.”19 And Hans-Eric Hjertén, at the time the leading critic in Expressen, posed the rhetorical question whether Bergman deliberately made his films pornographic, and then asserted that Swedish film art could not afford this.20 As for Bergman, he informed his interviewers in the book Bergman on Bergman (1970) to what extent the film already had been considered a failure by the producers: “I remember that, when seeing the film later, the head office told me that they had severely miscalculated. The film was not amusing; it was stylized; it was too lame, too long. They had also discovered that it was in costume and costume films didn’t work.”21 The offended debaters were nevertheless in a minority. After the premier of the film, positive comments prevailed among Swedish reviewers. Nils Beyer in Morgon-Tidningen ascertained that the comedy was above all “the work of a poet,” and Mauritz Edström in Arbetaren wrote:  “To date, Ingmar Bergman has scarcely released a film so thoroughly groomed and, in multiple details, inventive and well told—at least not since and except for Sawdust and Tinsel, which I consider one of the best Swedish films.”22 And Staffan Tjerneld wrote in Expressen that “any bad comments weigh lightly on the scale when balanced against the gratitude for Ingmar Bergman working in Swedish film.”23 Besides, the domestic criticism played a minor role. For, as Timm states:  SF knew that even if the film did not cover costs in Sweden, other countries were standing in line to show it  .  .  .  Contrary to Lagercrantz’s opinion, the public received the film as a mature work of art. The duality in the script and

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the acting-style fit. The film arrived at the breach between an old film tradition and a new film style. It was a costume film made in a studio, but its sense of life belonged to the new generation.24 Afterwards, Smiles of a Summer Night has indeed been judged as an expression of a new cinematic modernism, which had its breakthrough in these years and continued into the 1960s. For the first time in the history of film, this cinematic modernism was able to shape a historically reflective view of the modern instead of merely defining the essence of the media in terms of technical presuppositions. This modernism was thus able to integrate the history of film and the modernity of the media on a meta-level, as a modern past to relate to. Smiles of Summer Night certainly would not have looked the way it did if, for example, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939) had not existed—a film with the same kind of entanglements between gentry and servants, and in its day and narrative approach also an eminently modern film. There is no denying that Mago’s importance weighed heavily in receiving the prize at Cannes. When Smiles of a Summer Night much later—during the 1970s—was staged as a musical at Folkan in Stockholm, Mago was consequently again commissioned as costume designer. His work there established continuity between the original film and the resultant musical staging—a version that in an interesting way would come to foreshadow the many Bergman films that are staged in our day in theaters worldwide. For his part, Bergman had this comment to offer on the final outcome of the film: “Smiles of a Summer Night was the turning point. After that I was totally independent. I have been completely free . . . able to do exactly what I wanted. No one dared say anything, no one meddled.”25 And that is the way it would be for just over ten years, up to Hour of the Wolf (Swedish: Vargtimmen, 1968). Now Bergman again ran into resistance to his project from SF; it was a first since the breakthrough. He wanted to do something personal that the company did not believe in. Mikael Timm has given a detailed account of Bergman’s problems working on the script; it was harder than usual to chisel forth what he wanted to say.26

Hour of the Wolf But Hour of the Wolf did come off, after the interlude with Persona (1966). In both of these films, Bergman as usual collaborated with Mago, who had by now refined his art even more. Mago now worked—as he would later in The Rite (Swedish: Riten, 1969), where he also did the décor—with a small budget. He had gotten used to contemporary apparel. Gone were all the details he loved, all the extravagances. Simple lines instead, everydayness.

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Later Bergman films, such as these, constitute a welcome counterpoint to Smiles of a Summer Night, especially with regard to Mago’s costume work and its relation to the modern. The costumes in Persona have spawned fashion announcements of more recent vintage, with new design inspired by the film.27 As refined as it was simple—yet with the skillful play of lines retained from Smiles of a Summer Night in the contour of a hat or the fall of a dress—Mago’s design here appeared as the very essence of modernism, modern yet also timeless. And Hour of the Wolf originally included, now long since forgotten, a laterto-be-cut prologue, where Bergman is instructing his actors. It ends with Liv Ullmann preparing her entry into the film, which is actually an exit: she is to walk out through a door. Standing ready inside that door, she adjusts the last details— her hair, her posture. As she stands there, her everyday clothes drape beautifully on her, and the light falls upon her figure. Everything seems so very natural to the eye, of course—and at the same time thoroughly prepared, just as when a model stands ready for the catwalk. And if the eye happens to have glimpsed anything in the background of the preceding scene, it would be the meticulous preparations that surround a film production. Jan Holmberg has commented on the prologue: Why this was not included in the finished film has not been clarified. Bergman himself has said that he thought it was a bit too personal. Perhaps it was one of his old demons—sometimes called “the intelligibility gospel,” sometimes “the audience whore”—that caused it. Perhaps he was persuaded by the producer, or the distributor, who preferred to launch the film as a crowdpleasing horror movie rather than a self-reflective meta-film. Who knows? I for one wouldn’t call this rediscovered element a behind-the-scenes film, or extraneous material, but an integral part of the film—a part that testifies to the other Bergman . . . Bergman as experimental filmmaker.28 In fact, one could argue that this experimental attitude was fundamental to Bergman’s filmmaking—and in the final analysis, that, too, was something he notably had in common with Mago. Ideas were tested, rejected or developed, and tested anew. The desire for experiment was the driving force, and the metadimension with its self-reflection was at the same time never far away. The testing, the searching for the perfect image, the right cut was an ever-evolving process, which was concluded only provisionally every time a film had been completed. Mago has described what a decisive factor this experimentation was in practice for both of them while they were working on the costuming and the décor in The Rite: I had made small models of the sparse décor details, and we were sitting in Ingmar’s room, moving and shuffling the small role figures back and forth.

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As always, I had drawn and coloured and cut them out in cardboard. Such moments of serious play are almost the most fun part of preparing a new film or play. Ingmar was the best of playmates. With a sure eye, Ingmar assessed, approved, suggested changes, or rejected. We hadn’t really talked much before I launched the sketching. It should be stripped, simple; that I knew. His text guided me.29 We seem to have come full circle since Mago received his first script in hand from Bergman—but the work process is the same. In Mago’s skillful hands, Bergman’s intensely visual text is transformed directly into images, into concrete sketches. And he adds: “Felicitous hours. Time did not seem to exist.”30 That is: time suspended in the ever-alternating moment of the experiment that had always characterized Mago’s work, regardless of which style or time period he at any given time happened to be moving in. Yet also the shifts in fashion that with Mago’s design are condensed into the timelessly modern.

Notes 1 www.ingmarbergman.se. 2 Mikael Timm, Lusten och dämonerna. Boken om Bergman (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2008), 245. 3 Timm, Lusten och dämonerna, 248. 4 Mago, Klä av, klä på. Tecknat och antecknat (Stockholm: Fö rfattarfö rlaget, 1988), 130–31. 5 Ibid.,  132–3. 6 Ibid.,  133. 7 Svenska Dagbladet, April 7, 2008. 8 Mago, Klä av, klä på, 164. 9 Timm, Lusten och däNew monerna, 243. 10 Ibid. 11 Mago, Klä av, klä på, 169. 12 Ibid.,  170. 13 Ibid.,  169. 14 Timm, Lusten och dä monern, 241. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.,  244. 18 Mago, Klä av, klä på, 166, 168. 19 Dagens Nyheter, March 10, 1956. 20 Expressen, February 3, 1955.

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21 S tig Björman, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima, Bergman om Bergman (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1970). 22 Morgon-Tidningen, December 27, 1955; Arbetaren, December 27, 1955. 23 Expressen, December 27, 1955. 24 Timm, Lusten och dämonerna, 253. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid.,  369ff. 27 Vogue Italia 12, 2008. 28 Jan Holmberg, unpublished, 2011. 29 Mago, Klä av, klä på, 218. 30 Ibid.

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Vogue (France) (October 1, 1922): 11. Vogue (France) (July 29, 1925). Vogue Italia 12 (2008).

Futurist manifests Contro il lusso femminile, av F. T. Marinetti (April 4, 1920). Il vestito antineutrale. Manifesto futurista, av G. Balla (September 11, 1914). L’arte dei rumori, av L. Russolo (March 11, 1913). La ricostruzione futurista dell’universo, av G. Balla och F. Depero (March 11, 1915). Manifesto del Futurismo, av F. T. Marinetti (February 20, 1909). Manifesto del Partito politico futurista, av F. T. Marinetti (February 11, 1918). Manifesto dell’arte pubblicitaria, av F. Depero, utgiven i ett nummer i samarbete med Campari (1931). Manifesto della moda femminile futurista, av Volt (February 29, 1920). Manifesto futurista del cappello italiano, av Marinetti, Monarchi, Prampolini och Somenzi (March 1933). Manifesto futurista del vestito da uomo, av G. Balla (May 20, 1914). Manifesto futurista della cravatta italiana, av R. Di Bosso e I. Scurto (March 1933). Manifesto per la trasformazione dell’abbigliamento maschile, av Thayaht e Ram (September 20, 1932).

Films The Great Train Robbery. Dir. Edwin S. Porter. USA, 1903. Gycklarnas afton / Sawdust and Tinsel. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Sweden, 1953. L’Inhumaine / The Inhumane Woman. Dir. Marcel l’Herbier. France, 1924. L’ironie du destin. Dirs. Dimitri Kirsanoff and Nadia Sibirskaia. France, 1923. La Souriante Mme Beudet / The Smiling Mme. Beudet. Dir. Germaine Dulac. France, 1922. Les Enfants du paradis. Dirs. Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert. France, 1945. Ménilmontant. Dir. Dmitri Kirsanoff. France, 1926. Modern Times. Dir. Charlie Chaplin. USA, 1936. Potemkin. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Russia, 1925. Riten / The Rite. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Sweden, 1969. Sigrid & Isaac. Dir. Anders Wahlgren. Sweden, 2005. Sommarnattens leende / Smiles of a Summer Night. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Sweden, 1955. Two for the Road. Dir. Stanley Donan. USA, 1967. Vargtimmen / Hour of the Wolf. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Sweden, 1968.

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INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures. Abbassoil tango e Parsifal! (Down with the Tango and Parsifal!) 171 Abel, Richard 86 Absolute Vodka project 47 Adorno, Theodor 84 advertisement 46–8, 142–6 afrofuturism 48 After the Great Divide (1987) 5 Against Fashion: Clothing as Art 1850– 1930 (1992) 2 Agamben, Giorgio 164, 165 À la recherche du féminin perdue 65–75 Albers, Anni 117 Albers, Joseph 116, 117 Albrecht, Donald 147 Amor Pedestre (Pedestrian Love) 167 Anderson, J. W. 121 Andersson, Harriet 208 Anglo-Saxon dominance 11 Antonelli, Lucilla 169 architecture dress 19–23 Greek 21 Armfeldt, Desirée 210 Arnheim, Rudolph 85 Arnold, Rebecca 150 artistic expression, fashion as 7–13 Art Nouveau 40 Arvatov, Boris 116 Aschberg, Olof 187 Ateljéinteriör 197 Attimonelli, Claudia 48 Aufheben 65 avant-garde and ideology 41–2 avant-garde artists, Russia 107

avant-gardes, Italian futurism and international 45–6 Badet, Régina 171 Bakst, Léon 8 Balla, Giacomo 8, 40, 43 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules Amadée 77 Barbier, George 9 Barthes, Roland 4, 43, 91, 143 Battista, Giovanni 50 Baudelaire, Charles 4, 23–6, 30, 90, 91, 163 Bauhaus, German 47 Beale, Marjorie 144, 145 Beaulieu, Yolande 89 Benjamin, Walter 4, 25, 26, 42, 84, 90, 91, 101, 121 Bergman, Ingmar 13, 203–4, 205, 206–15 Bergman–Mago collaboration 205–6 Beyer, Nils 212 Bjelfvenstam, Björn 209 Björnstrand, Gunnar 206 Bloch, Ernst 84, 85 Boccioni, Umberto 40, 43 Boex, Eva 141 bohemian 9 Borlin, Jean 88 Bötticher, Karl 21, 22 Boucher, François 166 Bow, Clara 83 Breward, Christopher 7, 10 Brost, Gudrun 205 Cairo, Humberto 159 Calefato, Patrizia 11, 39

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Carlqvist, Margit 210 Carrà, Carlo 40 Carter, Michael 164 Castiglione, Baldassare 43 Cavalcanti, Alberto 88 Centanni, Monica 47 Chadwick, Whitney 2 Chalayan, Hussein 9 Chanel, Coco 45, 49, 104, 128 Chaplin, Charlie 46 Chiari, Gian Paolo 157 Chicard, Monsieur 71 Clair, René 87 Classical Antiquity 20 classicism 54 Cocteau, Jean 9, 45 Cogswell, Molly 135, 139 Cogswell, Van Rensselaer 128 Colomina, Beatriz 23 colonial war, Ethiopia 42 constructivism and production 107–13 Prozodezhda in theory of 102–5 Russia 8, 12 Soviet 107 constructivist body 105–6 Contro il lusso femminile (Manifesto against Women’s Luxury) 44 Corbusier, Le 8, 23 Cornell, Peter 182 corte (cut) 170 Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (2003) 2 Crary, Jonathan 162 Dagostino, Maria Rosaria 47 Dahlbeck, Eva 210, 211 Dalí, Salvador 9 dandyism 43 Das Passagen-Werk 4, 91 Daumier, Honoré 66 Davies, Vanderbilt Emily 129 Davis, Whitney 157 Dean, Earl R. 47 de Balzac, Honoré 55 de Bourges, Michel 64 de Girardin, Delphine 58 de Girardin, Émile 58 De Grazia, Victoria 144

Index

de la Pera, Eduardo Martínez 159 de Latouche, Henri 58, 62 de Launay, Charles 58 Delaunay, Robert 9, 119, 137 Delaunay, Sonia 1, 2, 8, 45, 116, 117, 119 Delluc, Louis 87 de Marzo, Cindi 147 Depero, Fortunato 40, 46, 47 Deslys, Gaby 169 Devimeur, Léone 162 diciannovismo (1919) 41 Die Tektonik der Hellenen (The Tectonics of the Greeks) 21 dogma, visible legs as modernist 161–4 Doherty, Thomas 84 d’Orsay, Musée 10 Doucet, Jacques 8, 145 dress architecture 19–23 story of 128–36 Drew, Sidney 166 Drucker, Johanna 25 Duchamp, Marcel 45 Dudevant, Baron 60 Duff-Gordon, Lucy Wallace Sutherland 160 Dufy, Raoul 120 Duhamel, Georges 147 Dulac, Germaine 87, 88 Dupin, Aurore 61 Edström, Mauritz 212 Egerman, Anne 210 Egerman, Fredrik 210 Egerman, Henrik 209 Eiffel Tower 128, 136–41, 140 Ekster, Aleksandra 46, 117 Engebretsen, Rune 19, 83, 177, 203 Engström, Leander 181 ephemeral quality, fashion 28 Ethiopian colonial war 42 Europe modernism 56 Evans, Caroline 127, 165 expressionism, fashion 192–9 Exter, Alexandra 101, 102, 104, 106, 112 fabric-pattern (tissu-patron) 119–20 Factura 117 FaniCiotti, Vincenzo (Volt) 43, 44

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Index

fascism 41 fashion 3–7 as artistic expression 7–13 duplicitous aspect of 93 ephemeral quality 28 expressionism 192–9 futurist 42–4 and modernity 23–6 seasonal changes of 101 Simmel and 29–33 and Utopia 101–2 Fashion and Art 10 Femina 169 feminism 56 feminism vs. modernism 53–7 À la recherche du féminin perdue 65–75 Sand and Gavarni 57–65, 59 Film als Kunst (Film as Art) 85 Fini, Leonor 9 Fiorucci, Elio 50 First World War 40 Flaubert, Gustave 78 A Florida Enchantment (1914) 166 Flügel, John Carl 163 Fordism 148 formalism 54 Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space) 43 Fortuny, Mariano 49 Fourier, Charles 54 Fredrik Egerman, Attorney 206 French film in 1920s 87–8 French Impressionism 87, 92 French Revolution 56, 63 Friedberg, Anne 94 Fuchs, Eduard 75, 77 futurism and italian fashion 48–50 Russia 41 futurism, Italy to fashion, contribution 45 and international avant-gardes 45–6 primary characteristics of 39–41 futurist fashion 42–4 Gaines, Jane M. 85, 165 Gan, Aleksei 102, 105 Gardner, Ava 50

235

Gaultier, Jean-Paul 121 Gautier, Théophile 55 Gavarni, Paul 11, 55, 58, 59, 62, 67, 67, 68, 69–71, 72, 73, 73, 74, 75, 75, 76, 76, 77 misogyny 77 modernism vs. feminism 57–65, 59 Geczy, Adam 10 Gemeinschaft (community) 26 Genoni, Rosa 49 Georges-Michel, Michel 171 George, Waldemar 171 Gesamtkunstwerk 6, 8, 40, 117 Gesellschaft (society) 26 Glasscock, Jessica 163 Goldstein, Max 13 Göller, Adolf 21, 22 Goncharova, Natalia 8 Gramsci, Antonio 41, 42 Greek architecture 21 Greenberg, Clement 103 Green, Nancy 148, 149 Gronberg, Tag 140 Grumbach, Didier 141 Grünewald, Isaac 9, 12, 13, 177, 178, 178, 179, 180, 184, 193, 197, 198 fashion journey 180–3, 181 Gunche, Ernesto 159 Harper’s Bazar, fashion drawing from 137, 138 Hawes, Elizabeth 149 Hayes, Will H. 84 Hegel, G. W. F. 55, 65 Hénard, Robert 159, 171 Hepburn, Audrey 121 Higher Artistic Technical School (Vkhutemas) 111 Histoires de ma vie (1856) 60 Hjertén-Grünewald, Sigrid 177 Hjertén, Hans-Eric 212 Hjertén, Sigrid 9, 13, 178, 178, 179, 180, 185, 187, 188–92, 189, 194, 196, 196, 197, 198 Hodin, J.-P. 180 Hollander, Anne 6, 10, 165 Horkheimer, Max 84 Hour of the Wolf 213–15 Hübsch, Heinrich 19–21

236

236

Hugo, Victor 62 Huyssen, Andreas 5 ideology, avant-garde and 41–2 imitation, Tarde and 26–9 industrialization, western 40 In Men’s Clothing 67 Institute of Artistic Culture (INKHUK) 102, 103 Ioganson, Karl 102 Iribe, Paul 9 Isadora (1845) 78 Italian fashion, futurism and 48–50 Italian futurism to fashion, contribution 45 and international avant-gardes 45–6 primary characteristics of 39–41 Jacobsson, Ulla 209 JosèpheLebas, Germain Marie 86 Kamenskiy, Vassiliy 116 Kandinsky, Vassily 102 Kane, Christopher 121 Karaminas, Vicki 10 Kelly, Grace 50 Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier 130 Khlebnikov, Velemir 116, 117 Kiaer, Christina 116 Kirsanoff, Dimitri 12, 85, 86, 88–90, 90, 92, 94, 95, 97 Klimt, Gustav 8 knee-length skirts 162 Kollnitz, Andrea 1, 12, 13, 177 Kracauer, Siegfried 128 Kristeva, Julia 91 Kruchenikh, Alexey 116, 117 Kuhn, Annette 91 Kuisel, David 148 Kusama, Yayoi 9 La fontana malata (The Ill Fountain) 47 Lagercrantz, Olof 212 Lalique, René 88 Lamanova, Nadezhda 113 La Nazione 45 Larsson, Karin 8 L’arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises) 48 La Souriante Mme Beudet (1922) 88

Index

Leach, William 3 Le Charivari 66, 69, 73 Leger, Benjamin 72 Leger, Ferdinand 88 legs and feet, framing 165–70, 167 Lehmann, Ulrich 11, 53 Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne (1863) 4, 90 L’époque tango 170 Les Débardeurs 69, 71 Les Fleurs de Mal (1856) 4, 90 Les honneurs du pied. Fantasio 8, no. 157 (1913) 168 Les lois de limitation (1890) 27 Le système de la mode (1967) 4–5 Levenson, Michael 127 Le ventilateur tourne dans le coeur 45 Le Vêtement masculin futuriste manifeste 8 l’Herbier, Marcel 87, 88 Libyan War 40 L’Inhumaine (1924) 88 Lipovetzky, Gilles 6–7 L’ironie du destin (The Irony of Destiny) 86 Lissitzky, El 102 Loos, Adolf 23 Lundgren, P.A. 211 Lupano, Mario 127 Magison, Phyllis 150 The Magnificent Cuckold 118 Malcolm, Charlotte 210 Malevich, Kazimir 102, 112, 117 Mallet-Stevens, Robert 88 Malnig, Julie 163 Manifesto 40, 42 Manifesto della moda femminile futurista (Futurist Manifesto of the Women’s Fashion) 43 Manifesto del Partito politico futurista (Manifesto of the Futurist Political Party) 40 Manifesto for Futurist Art in Advertisement (1931) 41 Manifesto futurista del vestito da uomo (Futurist Manifesto of Male Clothing) 43 Margiela, Martin 9 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 40–2, 44, 171 “Marinetti rivoluzionario?” 41 Marx, Karl 55

237

Index

masculine order 66 materialism 29, 55 Matisse, Henri 8 Mayakovskiy, Vladimir 116 McQueen, Alexander 9 Méliès, Georges 159 Ménilmontant (1926) 11–12, 86, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 97 The Merry Widow 211 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 10, 128, 130 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 118 Michahelles, Ernesto (1893–1959) 45 micro-sociology 27 minimalism 105 misogyny 77 modernism 3–7 dialectic in 57 Europe 56 formal and structural efforts 54 modernism vs. feminism 53–7 À la recherche du féminin perdue 65–75 Sand and Gavarni 57–65, 59 modernist thinkers 54 modernity 3–7 fashion and 23–6 Modern Museum, in Stockholm 10 Modern Times (1936) 46 Monadologie et sociologie 27 Mondrian, Piet 120 Moore, Colleen 83 Moscow, New Economic Policy (NEP) 101–2 Mouvet, Maurice 170, 171 Mukhina, Vera 102 Museum Moderner Kunst, in Vienna 10 music 46–8 Naether, Carl 139 National Agency for Fashion (1935) 49 National Fascist Party 41 Nenni, Pietro 41 neomania 4–5 neotardianism 27 Neuberger, Susanne 6 Neumeyer, Fritz 22 Niboyet, Eugénie 78 nudism 163

237

Nya Nisse 186, 187 Ordine Nuovo 41 Palazzeschi, Aldo 40, 47 Papini, Giovanni 40 Paquin, Jeanne 161 Paris Expo (1925) 45 Parisian culture 58 Parisian fashion houses 3 Parisian models 44 Parismidi 87 Patou, Jean 12, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136 advertising 129, 134, 142–6 press album 146 Paul, Elliot 147 Philippe, Louis 64 Philosophie der Mode (1905) 4 Philosophie des Geldes (The Philosophy of Money) (1900) 29 Photogénie (1920) 87 Picasso, Pablo 8, 45 Pilcer, Harry 169 Pocket Tango Guide 170 Pointon, Marcia 10 Poiret, Paul 8, 88 Popova, Liubov 102, 108, 111, 117 coat and a costume, 1924 105 dress design (1924) 109 textile design (1923–1924) 108 textile design (1924) 115 theater costume design for The Magnificent Cuckold 118 Potemkin (1925) film 89 Prada, Miuccia 10 Prampolini, Enrico 40 The Principle of Hope 84 Prozodezhda for theater 117–19 in theory of constructivism 102–5 prozodezhda 107 Pucci, Emilio 46 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 160 Ray, Man 9, 45 Renaissance artists 1 Renoir, Jean 213 Ribeiro, Aileen 10

238

238

Richepin, Jean 159 Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (Manifesto of Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe) 40 “robes-poèmes” 117 Rocamora, Agnès 137, 139 Rodchenko, Alexander 46, 102, 104, 107, 110, 111, 117 Romanticism 62 Rosanova, Olga 102, 112 suprematist ornament, textile design (1917–1918) 105 textile design with Suprematist ornament (1917) 115 Ross, Chad 163 Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio 41 Rossi, Vicente 160 Roth, Joseph 141 The Rules of the Game (1939) 213 Russes, Ballets 8 Russia avant-garde artists 107 futurism 41 Russian constructivism 8, 12 simultaneous with 119–20 Russolo, Luigi 40, 48 Ryan, Betty 104 Sachs, Josef 187 Sand, George 11, 55, 75, 78, 79 modernism vs. feminism 57–65, 59 Scaramuzzi, Sveva 39 Schiaparelli, Elsa 1, 9, 10, 45, 49 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 20, 21 Semper, Gottfried 22, 113 Sibirskaïa, Nadia 89, 92, 94 Siegfried, André 147, 148 Siemsen, Hans 1, 3, 13 Sigrid and Ivàn 192 Simmel, Georg 4, 19, 44, 107 and fashion 29–33 Sköld, Otto 177 slit skirt 172 in early 1910s 157–8 as visual apparatus 164–5 Smiles of a Summer Night 206–13, 208 socialism 101 Söderbergh Widding, Astrid 203 Sokolov, Ippolit 119

Index

Sombart, Werner 44 Sorel, Cécile 169 Soupault, Philippe 117 Soviet constructivism 107 Soviet Revolution 41 sportodezhda 104 Starace, Achille 49 Stepanova, Varvara 12, 101–5, 107, 108, 110–12, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120 Sternberg, Georgiy Stern, Radu 2, 6–7 Strimpl, Ludvík 160 styles 46–8 “style sleeve” (Stilhülse) 21 Suédois, Ballet 88 Svensk Filmindustri 207 systemic dualism 56 Tairov, Alexander 117 tango 158–61 tango dancing 170, 171 Tarde, Gabriel 19, 26–8 and imitation 26–9 Tatlin, Vladimir 102, 104, 112 Taylor, F. W. 106 Taylorism 106, 128, 145 Teller, Bonwitt 131 text/texture/textile 113–17 Thayer, Sigourney 129 Thayer, Van Rensselaer 128 theater, Prozodezhda for 117–19 “The City and Spiritual Life” (1903) 30 Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) 4 “The Philosophy of Fashion” (1905) 30 Thurman, Judith 9 Trébutien, Guillaume-Stanislas 77 Tretiakov, Sergey 112 Troy, Nancy 2 tselesoobraznos 113 Tsilibaris, Christel 167 Two for the Road (1967) 121 Tzara, Tristan 45, 117 utopia, fashion and 101–2 Vaccari, Alessandra 12, 127, 157 Vainshtein, Olga 12, 101 van de Velde, Henry 8 Vanity Fair 47

239

Index

Vasarely, Victor 116 Veblen, Thorstein 4, 5 Vergesellschaftigung 31 Vertov, Dziga 106 Vesnin, Aleksandr 102 Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst in 10 Vincent, Susan 161 Virginie Déjazet, Pauline 69 visible legs, as modernist dogma 161–4 Vladimir 102 Vogue 47 Volt (FaniCiotti, Vincenzo) 43, 44 von Stuck, Franz 5 Vuitton, Louis 10 Wagner, Richard 171 Wahlgren, Anders 179 Wallenberg, Louise 1, 11, 12, 83 Wallenstein, Sven-Olov 11, 19 Waugh, Norah 165

239

Weber, Max 29 Weininger, Otto 5 Werkstätte, Wiener 8 western industrialization 40 White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995) 2 Wiener Sezession 40 Wifstrand, Naima 209 Wigley, Mark 2, 22, 23 Williamson, Judith 165 Wilson, Elizabeth 9, 161 Winckelmann, Johann 21 Wollen, Peter 128 woman, dualistic and misogynistic view of 93 women’s fashion 3 Zamyatin, Evgeniy 107 Zeit-Echo 1

240

241

242

243

244