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THE CLOTHED BODY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
17-19 January 2002Mary Harlow & Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Birmingham and the Open UniversityUnwrapping presents: the Reception of Ancient Dress 1500-2000
This paper seeks to outline the variety of ways in which Classical dress has remained at the forefront of western aesthetic taste - in both 'high' and 'low' culture - over several centuries. The appeal of Classical clothing can be seen to stretch back to Italian Renaissance dress of the fifteenth century, a period in which soft linen shifts and high-waisted gowns in the 'antique' style became the fashionable must-have of the great ladies of Florence, Milan, Venice and Rome. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Classical clothing was the source of inspiration behind the fancy-dress costumes of the European courts; the masques held at the Tudor and Stuart courts in England were peopled with courtiers costumed in fanciful version of Classical dress, whilst the elegant and sexy ladies of Charles II's court were painted by Lely and his contemporaries in a series of flesh-exposing 'Greek' gowns. Classical dress - that is to say, loose drapery - quickly became a byword for eroticism. In the Eighteenth Century Classical drapery was used by Reynolds and Coates for their portraits of British women, while in France the grandes dames of the Ancient Regime were often depicted as nymphs or goddesses. But it was in the early years of the nineteenth century that Classicism entered mainstream fashion; indeed, the dress historian C.W. Cunnington described the period 1800-1821 as the 'vertical epoch', with the years 1800-1807 as the era of 'pure Classicism'. The classic Jane Austen-style 'Empire line' was based on ancient Greek and Roman modes inspired in large part by the influential costume studies of Thomas Hope.
By the mid Victorian period, the fashionable female shape had been squeezed and contorted into tightly laced corsets and ankle-boots and had been swollen out with petticoats, crinolines and bustles. It was only the dress reform movement, which advocated the abandonment of the hourglass corset, who encouraged an emancipated female lifestyle by extolling the virtues of the Antique waist of Venus and the Graces. The fuller figure, dressed in loose drapes, became an inspirational model for that certain type of woman who campaigned for social and political reform.
The simple styles of antiquity were also admired by the academy artists such as Alma-Tadema, Poynter and Long, who went to great lengths to recreate as accurately as possible the draping an fastening styles of the past. The early decades of the Twentieth Century witnessed another revival of ancient fashions, the most interesting interpretations of the Classical sources coming from the Spanish designer Mariano Fortuny. By the 1920s Hollywood was making its own unique foray into the ancient world and visualized the dress antique past as a remarkable blend of nineteenth-century academic painting and contemporary catwalk chic. The costumes created for Rita Hayworth's Salome or Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra speak as much (or more) about the fashions of 1953 and 1963 as they do about ancient dress. Fashion photographers have long loved things Graeco-Roman: think of Steichen's Isadora Duncan dancing, or Man Ray's women in siren shifts, or Hollywood's portraits of Lana Turner and Jean Harlow. More recently, in 1973, Norman Parkinson photographed the model Apollonia sky-high on a Greek column; in 1979 Avedon photographed Lauren Hutton in a white sheath dress for a Revlon Ultima advertisement which imitated his own 1954 picture of a goddess at the gaming tables. The latest revival in Classical dress styles probably began - as so many fashion fads do - with the British designer Vivienne Westwood. In the 1980s, whilst her fellow designers concentrated on images of power dressing by 'constructing' women in tailored jackets and padded shoulders, Westwood opted for a softer approach and went pagan with two classically inspired collections, Pagan I in 1988 and Pagan V 1990 (Rifat Ozbek also looked to the Graeco-Roman past in 1990 with his White Collection). The paper is supported by a wide array of visual images taken from fashion plates and magazines, films and advertisements.