Decadence & Aestheticism
Truth, Beauty, Exoticism, and the Sublime in 19th century Fashion

Thursday 7 October, Thursday 14 October, Thursday 21 October & Thursday 28 October 2021

18.00 - 19.30 GMT

(Hosted on Zoom)

In collaboration with the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, organised by Dr Robyne Calvert and Dr Veronica Isaac.

‘All art is quite useless’ - Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Truth

Emily Taylor, Stefanie John, and Hilary Davidson

Thursday 7 October 2021 (18.00 - 19.30 GMT)

Please scroll down for abstracts.

Material constructions: making, outré and taste in late 19th century dress
Emily Taylor

Late nineteenth-century Europe and North America experienced some of the most accelerated wealth gains the modern industrial age has known. Overtly and purposefully expressed through access to and making of material culture, this paper will consider how this wealth and the luxurious transience of fashionable dress expressed the leisure, social access and knowledge of the wearer through two deceptively simple inputs: cost and style. For the leisured classes taste of style formed (and still does form) a point of near obsession as the shifting epitome of what an individual or organisation wished to express or cover up about themselves.

This paper will explore the materiality and taste of decadence through a reflective examination of the construction, fabrics and embellishment of six garments and accessories in National Museums Scotland’s collection, c.1850-1900. Two Parisian garments inspired by ‘other’ ‘exotic’ cultures in their heavily beaded trimmings and Persian and Chinese style textiles will be contrasted with the ostensible reversion to simplicity of two Liberty dresses; comparing their internal construction to external appearance will pose questions of authenticity, mimicry and how boundaries of taste were enacted in different social environments. Aniline textiles used in a top hat box and pair of long-johns, and a pair of heavily beaded slippers will address questions of colour technology and visual vibrancy; asking how central was outré dressing to expressions of decadence and how may this have acted as a foil for defining Aestheticism.

Discussion will centre on subjective responses to aesthetics and design versus highly developed making, considering how wealth pushed manual and industrial skill levels to extreme achievements, while prompting reflection on what value systems this and a fixation with materiality really promoted.

Dr Emily Taylor is Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts at National Museums Scotland. Her research focus is on material cultures of Euro-centric dress and textiles in dialogue with identity construction, c.1700-1900. Exhibition projects have included assisting with the Fashion and Style Gallery at National Museums Scotland (opened in 2016) and with Body Beautiful: Diversity on the Catwalk touring UK venues until 2023. Her most recent publication is ‘Gendered making and material knowledge: Tailors and mantua-makers, c.1760-1820’ in Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain A Nation of Makers edited by Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith (2020). Emily acts as secretary for The Association of Dress Historians.

Unveiling Truth and Beauty: Textiles in Sarah Grand’s Short Fiction
Stefanie John

In this paper I will discuss the functions of textiles and their relationship to aestheticism and decadence in Sarah Grand’s short fiction of the 1890s. References to clothes and decorative textile objects, such as curtains, handkerchiefs, and veils, pervade Grand’s short story collection Emotional Moments, which was first published in 1908 but was inspired, as the author states in the preface, by the time she spent living in London in the 1890s. While most studies that discuss fashion and fabric in Grand’s work have focused on novels such as The Beth Book (1897), this paper foregrounds how Grand weaves textiles into the settings, plots, and imagery of her short works. I’m interested in the way in which Grand’s prose evokes textile materiality and thus – both critically and affirmatively – reacts to the (literary and fashion) styles, interiors and urban spaces associated with the aesthetic and decadent movements. The connection is most prominent in Grand’s most frequently anthologised short story “The Undefinable: A Fantasia” (1894/1908), which will serve as my main example. The story ironically reverses the roles of male artist and female muse, offering a feminist critique of aesthetic culture, but it also takes up stylistic tropes and material culture associated with aestheticism. It alludes to Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891) by centring on a painting which is, at crucial moments in the plots of both works, covered by a curtain or throw and later unveiled to affect changes in character constellation and action. In the stories collected in Emotional Moments, textiles frequently connote disguise, mystery, and ambiguity. These fictional textures reflect the dynamics of beauty and performance, surface and depth, truth and illusion that were central to aestheticism and decadence.

Dr Stefanie John is Lecturer in English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Braunschweig, Germany. Her research interests include poetry and poetics from the Romantic period to the present, the fin de siècle and Victorian material culture, nature writing and ecocriticism. Her first monograph, Post-Romantic Aesthetics in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry was published with Routledge in 2021. Her articles have appeared in English, Romanticism, Romantic Circles Pedagogies and the Journal of Victorian Culture Blog. Her current research project examines the functions of textiles – as decorative surfaces, metaphors, and material objects – in late Victorian literature.

Looking Back Through Fashion: Regency Romanticisms
Hilary Davidson

In the popular imagination, Regency fashion (c. 1795-1825) is synonymous with the heritage space of ‘Austenland’, where heroines with bosoms heaving from white muslin dresses are pursued by dashing heroes with strong thighs and manly cloaks. These hectic figures are reinforced by legions of neo-Regency texts from Georgette Heyer onwards. However, such romanticised, atemporal visions of the dressed past parallel fashion trends in the Regency period itself. Just as distance in time now gives Regency fashion glamour, so the growth of historicism throughout the later eighteenth century flowered in the dress of the Regency period. Sartorial romantic fantasies bridged distances in time and space to embody concepts of the Gothicised Baroque, Renaissance and Middle Ages; of the classical ancient world; of Orientalism; and the exotic or picturesque foreign brought closer by the ongoing Napoleonic Wars. The past and the Other were part of a selection of garments to put on, indiscriminately levelled in an eternal, nostalgic present, yet fleeting as the fashion moment. Although historic-style dress often searches for ‘authenticity’, any aesthetic expression of the past is inescapably tempered through the present. We judge the success of an Austen adaptation, a neo-Regency costume, or fashion’s current ‘Regencycore’ by its knowing performativeness of historicity, an inherently Romantic activity, but always conforming to current tastes. In using dress to satisfy an individual, romantic yearning for a relationship with a perception of the past, modern viewers and readers replicate similar impulses to those expressed through fashion during the Regency.

Hilary Davidson is a dress and textile historian, curator and archaeologist based between Sydney and London. After training as a shoemaker, she completed an MA in the history of textiles and dress at Winchester School of Art before becoming curator of fashion and decorative arts at the Museum of London. Hilary is an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney. After a wide range of publications across dress and textile history, her first book was Dress in the Age of Jane Austen (Yale, 2019).

Beauty

Ailsa Boyd, Max Donnelly, and Kimberly Wahl

Thursday 14 October 2021 (18.00 - 19.30 GMT)

Please scroll down for abstracts.

Some Americans in the ‘House Beautiful’: Edith Wharton and Wildean Aesthetics
Ailsa Boyd

The novelist Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was one of the Americans who would not stay at home. They travelled Europe and beyond, socialising with communities of other expats, consuming the culture of the Old World. This transatlantic position enabled artists like J. McN. Whistler and J. S. Sargent to create new ways of looking at the world, and writers like Henry James and Vernon Lee to describe the negotiations of living between two continents and cultures. Wharton’s travels early instilled in her a need to educate herself in art history and architecture and her first guides through the arts of Europe were John Ruskin and Walter Pater. She was thus well-versed in the moral weight of truth and beauty in art, whether in the decorative choices in her homes, or the life decisions of her fictional characters. In 1882 she could have attended Oscar Wilde’s lecture ‘The House Beautiful’, when he brought radical British aesthetics to the US, with an undoubted influence on the 20 year old aspiring novelist. But the first book she published was an interior design manual, which became immensely influential. In many ways her decorative style was very little like Wilde’s, and her book was intended as a check on the decorative excesses of the Gilded Age which took Aestheticism to its glittering, marble apogee. Her taste and control seem diametrically opposed to Wilde’s espoused decadence, and I will examine the morally weighted corridor which leads from one to the other in the House Beautiful, past some very yellow wallpaper.

Dr Ailsa Boyd is an independent writer and lecturer in 19th century art, design and literature, with a particular interest in the decoration of the homes we live in and imagined spaces. Her academic publications include: Beatrix Whistler, manuals of household taste, Henry James’s home in Rye, and Edith Wharton’s interior design. She is currently completing a monograph, Identity and Domestic Space in Victorian Literature: Houses and Fictions in George Eliot, Henry James and Edith Wharton. Web: https://ailsaboyd.wordpress.com. Twitter: @AilsaBoyd. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8318-3233.

Daniel Cottier and the House Beautiful
Max Donnelly

Born in Glasgow, Daniel Cottier was the son of a merchant seaman and, according to one contemporary, ‘was far more like an ideal coasting skipper than an artist’. He trained as a stained-glass artist, partly in London, where he attended Ruskin’s lectures and was taught drawing by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown. In 1864 Cottier established his own firm in Edinburgh, making stained glass and providing painted interior decoration, but it was in Glasgow where he sealed his reputation as a consummate colourist and daring innovator by collaborating with innovative architects to create remarkable decorative schemes for three churches.

An ambitious entrepreneur and businessman, Cottier relocated with his family to London around 1870. Keen to tap into the growing middle-class market for ‘Art’ decoration and furnishing for homes, Cottier added furniture, painted ceramics and art dealing to his portfolio; the company motto, a quotation from Quintillian, places Cottier & Co. firmly in Aesthetic cannon by stressing the sensory over the cerebral: Docti rationem artis intelligunt, indocti voluptatem (‘the learned understand the principles of art, the unlearned feel its pleasure’). Cottier became an international figure in Aestheticism when he expanded his business empire by opening a branch in New York in 1873, the same year in which a partnership in Sydney was established. 

Cottier is the subject of a newly published monograph Daniel Cottier: Designer, Decorator Dealer (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 2021). Co-editor Max Donnelly will select examples of the firm’s oeuvre from three continents, examining stained glass, furniture and textiles, as well the interiors of homes, places of worship and public buildings. He will discuss the way in which Cottier, and the designers and artists he employed, drew on aesthetic theories, historical and global visual references, nature and literature to forge a highly original concept of beauty within their ‘house style’, as well as the ways in which Cottier’s clients inspired, encouraged – or sometimes thwarted – his personal pursuit of beauty.

Max Donnelly is Curator of Furniture and Woodwork 1800-1900 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he specialises in nineteenth-century design and has curated several displays. He practiced and studied fine art in Edinburgh and London before specialising in decorative arts, working for dealers in New York and New Bond Street and appearing on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. V&A publications include a chapter on furniture in C.F.A. Voysey: Arts and Crafts Designer (2016), contributions to The Story of Scottish Design (2018), and the book Christopher Dresser: Design Pioneer (2021). He and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu are co-editors of the monograph Daniel Cottier: Designer, Decorator, Dealer, written with Andrew Montana and Suzanne Veldink and published by the Paul Mellon Centre (2021). Max also writes for journals including The Burlington Magazine and has lectured in the UK, Europe, North America and China. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a Trustee of the Decorative Arts Society and the Emery Walker Trust.

Decadent Beauty: Haptic Modes in Aesthetic Dress and Design
Kimberly Wahl

In this short paper, I will explore tensions between elite constructions of Aestheticism and popular expressions of Aesthetic Dress as a denigrated form of haptic pleasure.  Touch, visual longing, emotive attachments to works of art, and other embodied forms of Aestheticism, have historically been judged according to the status and artistic credentials of the viewer/collector.  Whereas the contemplation of ‘high-art’ was posited as intellectual inquiry into the nature of beauty, the excessive materiality and bric-a-brac of popular Aesthetic decoration and design were often dismissed by serious critics as commercial and therefore adulterated forms of Aestheticism.  As a consequence, ‘amateur’ Aesthetic dressers and homemakers (usually women) interested in the decorative arts, were often ridiculed or parodied as pathological followers of a deviant and debased ‘cult of beauty’. Can we turn the tables on this historical context and instead, view this modality of dress and design as a subversive beauty practice where the divisions between high and low art, self and other, object and subject, collapse under a sensorial (and generative) frenzy of decadent Aestheticism?

Dr Kimberly Wahl is an Associate Professor in the School of Fashion, Ryerson University.  Her doctoral work, and first book, Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an age of Reform (2013), interrogated the gendered hierarchies in both popular and elite artistic dress circles in the Aesthetic movement.  In 2012 she was awarded a SSHRC Insight Development grant to investigate the complex relations between fashion and feminism in the Suffrage movement in Britain.  A recent article “Bifurcated Garments and Divided Skirts: Redrawing the Borders of the Sartorial Feminine in Late Victorian Culture” is included in the volume Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend, edited by Ben Barry and Andrew Reilly (Intellect 2020). In this, and earlier work, her research has approached Victorian dress reform and artistic/alternative clothing as embodied forms of cultural critique. Current research interrogates the historical framing of feminism and fashion in relation to contemporary beauty discourses, and the politics of visual culture.

Exoticism

Samuel Love, Louise Wenman-James, and Veronica Isaac

Thursday 21 October 2021 (18.00 - 19.30 GMT)

Please scroll down for abstracts.

Send in the Clowns: The Pierrot Costume as Decadent Cipher
Samuel Love

In 1893, Aubrey Beardsley described his art to a school friend. His work, he said, concerned subjects that were ‘quite mad and a little indecent’. The denizens of the imaginary world Beardsley was creating were ‘strange hermaphroditic creatures wandering about in Pierrot costumes or modern dress’. Beardsley was not alone in clothing his strange, decadent creatures in the costume of Pierrot, originally a stock character from the Italian commedia dell arte; throughout the late nineteenth century, in Paris and in London, Pierrot was seen wandering through the posters, drawings, poems, and plays of avant-garde luminaries. This paper will examine why the artists of the decadence were fascinated by the figure of Pierrot, how he was reinvented and his history rewritten in fin-de-siecle artistic circles, and what donning Pierrot’s costume has meant since his 1890s heyday.

While Pierrot’s appearances in early modernist literary texts have been appraised, a cohesive study of his meaning as an echo of decadent aesthetics in the twentieth century and beyond is yet to be written. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide this, I will begin to demonstrate how depictions of Pierrot in the work of Beardsley and his contemporaries transformed the meanings of Pierrot’s costume. I will argue that the artists and writers who returned obsessively to Pierrot erased all trace of the clown’s buffoonish past, refashioning Pierrot’s costume as a cipher for their interests and philosophies that been reprised by figures from Cecil Beaton to David Bowie to recast the wearer as a decadent archetype. 

Samuel Love is a second-year PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of York, focusing on the relationship between interwar High Society, glamour, and visual art. He attained a Masters by Research from Edinburgh College of Art in 2019, writing his thesis on Englishness and images of the countryside between the wars. He was the recipient of the Aubrey Beardsley Society’s inaugural Emerging Scholar Prize and has previously spoken at conferences such as This Woman’s Work: A Kate Bush Symposium (Edinburgh College of Art, 2019), Queer Modernisms (Oxford University, 2018), and Art and the Sea (Liverpool University, 2018).

Oh, I didn’t know you were a Selfridgette!’: Power Play, Self Construction, and Fashion in Ada Leverson’s Bird of Paradise
Louise Wenman-James

Perhaps best remembered as Oscar Wilde’s friend and confidante, Ada Leverson is often overlooked in literary studies of Aestheticism and Decadence. Leverson’s contributions to periodicals such as Punch and The Yellow Book demonstrate her comical perspective on 1890s culture, and the novels she published in the early twentieth century demonstrate an ongoing engagement with Decadence and Aestheticism.

My paper will explore Leverson’s Bird of Paradise (1914). Throughout the novel, Leverson reflects on the fashions of the 1880s and 1890s while exploring the function of clothing and self-construction in the 1910s. In Leverson’s penultimate novel, concepts of beauty and fashion become sites of both generational conflict and gender-based power play, and the web of interpersonal connections between the characters demonstrate an ongoing discussion of beauty, illusion, and disillusion among the upper echelons of society. Lady Kellynch, seemingly in limbo between the fashions of 1887 and 1914, passes judgement on the ‘artistic-looking’ Moona Chivvey who ‘has untidy hair and green beads round her neck’ (p. 32). 23 year old Madeleine is described as a ‘Selfridgette’ (p. 53) by Rupert, a young male artistic type who aims to ‘cultivate’ (p. 173) Moona. The protagonist Bertha is continuously in dialogue with male characters around her who attempt, in varying degrees of success, to control her clothing. Bertha’s husband Percy repeatedly describes her as a canary due to her love for brightly coloured dresses. However, by the end of the novel, his perspective shifts, and Bertha becomes the titular Bird of Paradise.

Leverson’s female characters are ultimately well-dressed and beautiful. However, the social interactions that develop from their fashion choices invite further consideration. My paper will explore these interactions to argue that many anxieties of the fin-de-siecle carry through to the early twentieth century; Leverson utilises themes of Aestheticism and Decadence to present a society that continues to demand power over women’s clothing, appearances and identities.  

Louise Wenman-James is a PhD student at the University of Surrey. Her doctoral research is on the women of The Yellow Book, looking specifically at the work of Olive Custance, Ella D’Arcy, Vernon Lee and Ada Leverson. Her project is funded by the University of Surrey Doctoral College Studentship Award. https://twitter.com/L_WenmanJames.

Shopping in Byzantium: Costumes fit for a ‘Temple of Art’
Veronica Isaac

Centring on three ‘Aesthetically inspired’ productions presented at the Lyceum Theatre between 1881-1888, this talk examines the part that scenery, special effects and specifically, costume, played in bringing the exotic and the orient to the London stage. By the 1880s the Lyceum was recognised as a ‘Temple of Art’, within which audiences were transported to the classical, oriental, and exotic worlds they saw depicted in works by leading artists of the period (amongst them Albert Moore, Edward Burne-Jones and Lawrence Alma Tadema). This paper highlight the contribution actress Dame Ellen Terry made to the Lyceum’s status within Aestheticism, through a close examination of the costumes created for her performances in The Cup (1881); Twelfth Night (1884) and Macbeth (1888). More broadly and ambitiously, this research seeks to highlight the important insights costume for performance can offer into the socio-cultural attitudes of the audiences for which it is created, and particularly their ideas – and prejudices – surrounding race, gender and the body.

Dr Veronica Isaac is a material culture historian who specialises in the history of nineteenth century dress and theatre costume. She is a curatorial consultant and university lecturer and is currently working at the University of Brighton and New York University London. This paper has emerged from her doctoral research into the dress of the actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928), and her ongoing investigations into nineteenth century theatre costume.

Dark Decadence: The Gothic in Aestheticism and Neo-Aestheticism
Robyne Calvert

This explores the influences and celebrations of the gothic in 19th century Aestheticism, beginning with Oscar Wilde’s infamous Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. The decadent side of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ will be explored alongside fin de siècle artists like Aubrey Beardsley, and Margaret and Frances Macdonald, who produced radically new work that for many appeared strange and frightening – even garnering the moniker the ‘Spook School’ for the Macdonald sisters. The talk will then look to how the darker side of this era yet haunts contemporary ‘aesthetic’ subcultures like Dark Academia.

Dr Robyne Calvert is a Cultural Historian with research interests focused on the history of art, architecture and design in Britain. She is a research affiliate and visiting lecturer at the University of Glasgow, and was a researcher and lecturer in heritage, architecture and design history and theory at Glasgow School of Art for over a decade. She received the Pasold Fund PhD bursary for her thesis ‘Fashioning the Artist: Artistic Dress in Victorian Britain, 1848-1900’ (University of Glasgow, 2012). Her media appearances include The Janice Forsyth Show (BBC Radio Scotland), The People’s History Show (STV), and Antiques Road Trip (BBC One). She is currently completing a new history of the Mackintosh Building at GSA, to be published by Yale University Press in 2022.

Rags to Sequins: Dressing the Witch
Rachael Grew

Moving across 100 years from the late 19th century to the early 1970s, this talk examines the different ways witches are dressed. From the coral necklace in Sandys’ Medea, to the ‘madragore green’ sequins of the Young Witch in Leonor Fini's Le Sabbat, via the ragged appearance of Baba Yaga in children's illustrations, I examine the significance of dress in communicating the identity and corporeality of the witch.

Dr Rachael Grew is a visual culture historian specialising in concepts of gender and identity within French and British art and design c.1850-1950, with a focus on women Surrealists, especially Leonor Fini. Her work employs feminist and posthumanist theory to explore depictions of hybrid, ambiguous bodies in flux; bodies which blur boundaries not only of gender but between human / animal / plant / mineral. Rachael has published a series of articles and essays around gender and hybrid bodies in Surrealism, the most recent of which examine surrealist costume and theatrical design. She is currently working on a monograph that attempts to develop a feminist art historiography of Fini, mirroring the unstable bodies in Fini’s work by destabilising art historical taxonomies and methods of writing.

Unwrapping the Mummy’s Bandages: Whiteness, Fabric and Horror in Imperial Gothic Fictions
Catherine Spooner

In H. Rider Haggard’s imperial Gothic novel She (1886), and Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), women are disrobed in ways that explicitly recall both striptease and the Victorian fad for mummy unwrapping demonstrations. In these novels, the mummy’s white wrappings substitute for skin in ways that are simultaneously eroticised and deathly. This paper draws on and extends Richard Dyer’s argument in White that images of the ‘white woman as the idealised creature of light’ underpin the cultural dominance of racial whiteness and reinforce a heterosexual matrix (1997: 140). While racialised whiteness is a standard preoccupation of imperial Gothic scholarship, the properties of textiles in mediating and constructing this whiteness has been given less attention. The paper identifies in the act of unwrapping a slippage between luxury fabric, skin, veil and grave clothes that simultaneously supports and contests the cultural dominance that Dyer identifies. It argues, therefore, that the white dress is both a fundamental prop to ideologies of whiteness and ineluctably reveals the horrors at their heart. 

Catherine Spooner is Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University. Her seven books include Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Contemporary Gothic and Post-millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic, which was awarded the 2019 Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize. Her most recent book, The Cambridge History of the Gothic Volume 3: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries, co-edited with Dale Townshend, was published in September 2021. She makes regular media appearances and has featured on shows including BBC Breakfast and The Steve Lamacq Show on BBC Radio 6 Music. She is currently writing a book on the Gothic cultural history of the white dress.