Down With Frou Frou

7/27/2019 Down With Frou Frou

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Down with Frou Frou

Source: Chapter 2-

'Down with Frou-Frou:

Aesthetes, Reformers

and Emanicipated

Women 1890-1920'in E. Wilson & L. Taylor,(1989) Through TheLooking Glass: Ahistory of dress from1860 to the present day.London: BBC Books

The Edwardian period from 1901 to 1910 -in France the Belle Epoque -isusually pictured as one of elegance and graciousness. It is seen as the Indiansummer of British world supremacy, and a time free of the rush and speed ofmodern life. Britain's Empire was at its zenith and stretched across the globe,while the fortunes that had been made during the Industrial Revolution werenow supplying new generations with an income from investments for whichmany had never had to work. Nouveaux riches abounded. The ownership ofland was still the passport to power and privilege, and the aristocracy retainedits hold, but industrialists also bought estates and many gained titles as well.American heiresses crossed the Atlantic to marry dukes, and actresses and

musical comedy stars-some of whom also married into the aristocracy -setthe fashion as much as did society ladies.


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High fashion continued to be extravagant and luxurious as befitted a leisuredsociety. Styles had changed, however, and in 1900 elegant women no longerappeared small and submissive beside bearded Victorian patriarchs. Now

they were tall, voluptuous and statuesque. Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon, one ofthe most important dress designers in Edwardian London, claimed that hermannequins were approaching 6 feet (1.8 metres) in height. The Edwardiansociety lady, with her jutting bosom and S-bend figure, floated across grassylawns in frothy, high-necked gowns and huge hats. Lucile's designs were justas impractical in a different way as the bustles ofthe 1880s, for she designeddresses made of soft, easily damaged silk chiffons and crepes, trimmed withyards of fine, hand-made lace. The Edwardian woman of fashion positivelyfrothedover with pastel femininity and 'frou-frou'. To dress fashionably was,moreover, a full-time occupation, as well as an expensive one. Lucile, in hermemoirs, recalled that:

To have worn the same dress at three functions in a season caused

comment... very few women bother now [1932] to change theirdresses five or six times a day, yet every Edwardian with any claims tobeing well dressed did so as a matter of course.'1

(.......)

Beneath the surface of luxury and lace, however, Edwardian society wasdeeply troubled. The glamorous Edwardian decade was in fact one of intensesocial strife. As well as the campaign for votes for women, which reached aviolent climax, Ireland was in turmoil and there was serious industrial unrest

between 1908 and 1913. However, the wealth that the Empire brought toBritain did benefit at least some membersworking class, and their standard ofliving as a whole was rising. The poorest sections of society, however,continued to live in squalor and misery.

The supreme confidence of the High Victorian age had given place by the1890s to a sense of uncertainty. The economic depression of the last quarterof the nineteenth century by no means affected everyone directly, but gaverise to tears of German and American competition and to a narrow,chauvinistic insistence on British superiority. Yet from the 1880s onwardsthere were growing fears about the fitness of the British to shoulder theimperial burden, and many forms of dissidence in the arts, from the 'decadent'aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater,

3to flourishing dress reform andsocialist movements, and there was also, increasingly, militant feminism.

At the same time the social horizons of many were widening. By the end of


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the nineteenth century many middle-class women had followed the mid-century pioneers and were taking up paid employment in social work,domestic science and midwifery, while lower down the social scale morewomen were being employed as shop assistants, clerks and secretaries, bothin the expanding public sector and in commerce and industry, and as teachers

in elementary schools. Very few married women went out to work, althoughpenury often compelled working class wives to take in washing or do sewing,or undertake other forms of homework-ing such as finishing off smallindustrial goods. Such work, because it was done in the home, did not offendthe norms of respectability which increasingly influenced working-classfamilies, nor did it appear in labour statistics, but it was certainly widespread.

Many young, unmarried women, meanwhile, were gaining greater freedom ofmovement and economic independence. The Fabian Society, for example,

founded in 1884, had a high proportion of women mem-bers. The Fabians

were non-revolutionary socialists who believed in the gradual evolution ofBritish society towards socialism. Its members were drawn largely fromintellectuals and white-collar workers. Its women members, too, were drawn

from an aspiring class, many of whom had to fend for themselves and whohungered for education in order to be able to do so more effectively. That isnot to say that women enjoyed the same independence as men. Theirfreedom was a relative affair. Before she married, Beatrice Webb, then

Beatrice Potter, and later probably the most famous woman Fabian, wasallowedto undertake investigative research for Charles Booth in the East End.She did not, however, receive payment for this, and she was also, as the onlyunmarried daughter, expected to look after her widowed father and run hishousehold.

Fashions were no longer only for the wealthy. As the boundaries of classshifted, more sections of society were expressing their aspirations to socialmobility in their dress, although differences in class position could still beeasily deduced from the clothes worn.

Tailor-made or ready-to-wear clothingIn the 1890s, although women still wore tight corsets, the heavy, drapedbustle was abandoned, and instead skirts were gored. The tailored suit,known as a 'tailor-made' or costume, introduced in the previous decade,

becameextremely popular. It was a fashion thought to have originated inEngland, with the tailoring firms of Redfern and Creed. In the 1890s and thefirst decade of the twentieth century, middle-and upper-class women werewearing these suits or the woollen andserge skirts, with light, soft, shirtwaistblouses, and for the first time were prepared to buy them 'off the peg'. Thesesomewhat simplified garments could be, and were, mass produced, and


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although the cheaper models, worn by shop assistants, typists andso on,may not have been particularly well made, they at least looked smart andattractive. The novelist Arnold Bennett, however, in attendance at a talk at the

Times Book Club given by H. G. Wells around 1910, observed that althoughthe women present:

deemed themselves elegant . . being; far from the rostrum Ihad a good view of the back of their blouses, chemisettes andbodices. What an assortment of pretentious and ill-madetoilettes! What disclosures of clumsy hooks-and-eyes andgeneral crass carelessness! It would not do for me to beholdthe 'library public' in the mass too often!4

But this type of costume was a boon, not only to the women of the middleclasses, who found in it a practical and attractive form of dress for shop-pingand morning visits, but for the legions of young women now going out to work.

So, although this was a period of economic depression, the ready madeclothing trade was able to expand to serve the typists and telephonists, thesaleswomen of the city centres and the clerical workers of the growing statebureaucracy. These women were less well paid than the male clerks theyoften replaced, and the rigid office hierarchies kept them bunched at thebottom of the promotional ladder, or segregated in 'women's work' with fewprospects of promotion. (.........)

The unskilled working class and what was referred to at the time as 'theresiduum' (the very poorest and the unemployed,) remained quite outsidefashion. It was calculated by one researcher that 50 per cent of all adult malewage earners (approximately two and a half million workers) were bringinghome less than 25s [41] a week. A group of Fabian women investigating thedisposable income of working-class families in Lambeth in 1909 declared that:'clothing is, frankly, a mystery. ... In the poorer budgets items for clothesappear at extraordinarily distant intervals, when, it is to be supposed, they canno longer be done without.' Working-class women, bringing up their familieson 'round about a pound a week' (32), spent moremoney on boots than onany other item of clothing, putting aside a shilling a week for the boot club[1.60 today]:

The women seldom get new clothes. The men go to work and must besupplied, the children must be decent at school, but the mother has no

need to appear in the light of day. If very badly equipped, she canshop in the evening in the walk, and no one will notice under herjacket and rather long skirt what she is wearing on her feet. Most ofthem have a hat, a jacket and a 'best' skirt to wear inthe street. In thehouse a blouse and patched skirt under a sacking apron is theuniversal wear..., These women who look to be in the dull middle of

middle age are young, it comes as a shock when the mind grasps it.9


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The husbands of these women were in occupations such as bricklayer'slabourer, plumber's labourer or builder's labourer, and some were unem-ployed. Even if he was better dressed than his wife, the working man'sgarments would consist only of a donkey jacket, trousers of corduroy orshoddy, and a flat cap and scarf.

(.....)

Lady Bell, wife of a leading ironfounder in Middlesbrough, investi-gatedconditions in the town inAt The Works (1907). She found that wages variedconsiderably, and some families were quite comfortably off, especially iftherewere several wage earners in the family. Lady Bell observed that some of theworkmen, who did not need such good clothes, were 'obviously much betteroff than many a clerk with the same amount'10. The poorest, on the otherhand, obtained their clothes mostly from old clothes shops or through thetallyman (who supplied goods on credit), although the working man had to

have a good flannel shirt and a Sunday best suit. As in Lambeth, the womenhad the worst clothes: 'A working girl said on one occasion that she thoughtthe mark of a "real lady" was that she wore a short skirt and neat boots, thislast represent-ing to the working girl almost the unattainable'." Many workingpeople still had to rely on second-or even third-hand clothing, even for specialoccasions. In Esther Waters, published in 1895, George Moore described theapparel seen at a servants' ball:

It had been found impossible to restrict the ball to those whopossessed or could obtain an evening suit, and plentv of checktrousers and red neckties were hopping about... a young girl hadborrowed her grandmother's wedding dress, and a young man wore acanary-coloured waistcoat and a blue.guardsman's coat of old time.These touches of fancy, and personal taste, divided the villagers fromthe household servants . . Cooks trailed black silk dresses adorned

with wide collars and fastened with gold brooches containing portraitsof their late husbands.

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(..........)

In some jobs, particularly in the dress and retailing trades, women had to look

smart and wore reasonably fashionable clothes. Such was the importance ofrespectability that most working women wore sober colours -which were also,of course, more serviceable. Bedraggled finery was the hallmark of thewoman who was no better than she should be. George Moore describessome of these women too -servant girls forced into prostitution:

Two young women came out of an eating-house, hanging on eachother's arms, talking lazily,...poor and dissipated girls, dressed invague clothes fixed with hazardous pins. The skirt on the outside wasa soiled mauve and the bodice that went with it was a soiled

chocolate. A broken yellow plume hung out of a battered hat. The skinon the inside was a dim green, and little was left of the cotton velvetjacket but the cotton.13


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So the Edwardian facade of luxury and glamour was ultimately deceptive.

Don't be a scorcher -reform and reactionCentral to the social struggle was the open conflict over the role of women.Apart from its more direct manifestations, the controversy often took asymbolic form and was expressed in fierce debates about appropriate formsof dress. This had a significance that actually outlasted the campaign forthevote, since it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the dramatic strugglebetween conventional styles of dress for women (and men) and the new 'anti-fashions', or various kinds of reform dress, determined the direction of

twentieth-century mainstreamfashions, particularly for women.

During the 1880s there was renewed interest in dress reform, the objectivesof which were rather different from those of aesthetic dress, although therewas considerable overlap, and, towards the end of the nineteenth century,sometimes a convergence. In the 1880s the German zoologist Dr Jaegeradvanced with considerable success his view that men and women should

wear only animal fibres, i.e. wool (the origin of the slogan 'wear wool next tothe skin'), since vegetable fibres caused 'noxious exhalations'. Ideally thismeant, not only that wool clothing and undergarments (including the verysuccessful combinations) should be worn, but that the interior of the homeshould also be furnished entirely in wool, down to the sheets on the beds.

Jaeger's theory was, quite simply, scientifically wrong; yet it is significant thatit was promoted precisely as scientific. For at this period 'science' wasequated with everything modern and rational -hence 'rational dress' -and aview developed that decoration of ail kinds, but particularly in matters ofdress, was irrational and therefore should be done away with. This wasperhaps an understandable reaction to the fearful elaboration of women'sclothes in the 1870s and 1880s, when a woman looked more like a cross

between an armchair and a lampshade than a human being.

Nevertheless the stress on function and utility led to a neglect of the complexsocial meanings which dress conveys. From the point of view of dress reform,the pleasurethat a beautiful garment can give was disregarded, or seemedsuspect and unworthy, for there undoubtedly was a puritanical side to rationaldress.

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(.......)

Some women, by the last two decades of the nineteenth century, weredetermined to wear less constricting clothes. In 1881, Mrs King, author ofWomen's Dress in Relation to Health, formed, with Viscountess Harberton,

the Rational Dress Society, later called the Rational Dress League. Its aimswere as follows:


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The Rational Dress Society protests against the introduction of anyfashion in dress that either deforms the figure, impedes the movementof the body, or in anyway tends to injure health. It protests against thewearing of tightly-fitting corsets, of high-heeled or narrow-toed bootsand shoes; of heavily weighted skirts, as rendering healthy exercise

almost impossible; and of all tie-down cloaks and other garments

impeding the movement of the arms. It protests against crinolines orcrinolettes of any kind as ugly and deforming. The object of theRational Dress Society is to promote the adoption, according toindividual taste and convenience, of a style of dress based uponconsiderations of health, comfort and beauty, and to deprecateconstant changes of fashion that cannot be recommended on any ofthese grounds.15

(.........)

The issue of appropriate dress for women came to the fore at this time partlybecause a number of battles in the fight for the emancipation of women hadalready been won. As Viscountess Harberton pointed out in 1882:

Now that women are being gradually allowed to take their place inSociety as rational beings, and are no longer looked upon as meretoys and slaves; and now that their livelihood is becoming more andmore to be considered their own affair, the question of dress assumesproportions which it did not use to have.18

By the 1880s a number of academic girls' schools, and colleges for women atOxford and Cambridge, were well established; and the expan-sion ofwomen's education had a direct impact on women's dress. There was still

considerable opposition to the education of girls from many quarters, andwhat the students should normally wear was a matter for anxious concern -how to steer a fine line between looking 'fast' or unladylike on the one handand totally frumpish on the other, the balance being usually tipped in thedirection of frumpishness. Victorian bourgeois culture seemed to have a realphobia about 'mannish women'. Perhaps the underlying cause of this was

male hostility resulting from a double fear test women should becomeeconomic competitors, and also lest they should cease to provide thedomestic comforts to which men were accustomed. Some women also felt

threatened by the 'New Woman' -because she questioned the terms on whichwomen were permitted to participate in society, and demanded new andalarming economic and social freedoms, thus upsetting the leisured lady'sapple cart.

With the expansion of educationfor girls, however, it came to seem unhealthythat they had so little physical exercise, and girls had already begun to playorganised games and do formal gymnastics, eurhythmics and Swedish drill in


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the 1870s, or even earlier. In the last two decades ofthe nineteenth centuryadult women too were slowly beginning to participate in a whole range ofactive sports such as golf, swimming, rowing and cricket, but of widest socialsignificance were lawn tennis and bicycling.

The newly developed game of lawn tennis enabled young men and women tomeet and get to know one another in a relaxed, informal yet not entirelyunsupervised setting. Middle-class tennis parties were the stage for flirtationsand romance, and young women were therefore concerned to look elegantrather than efficient on and off the court. Kate Gielgud described typical tenniswear for women in the 1880s in herAutobiography:

Our tennis dress consisted of ankle length flannel or serge skirtsclosely pleated, and plain long-sleeved blouses with starched linen

collars, and we wore wide leather belts and stiff brimmed boaters.Later the Huxley girls introduced us to stockinette jerseys, woollen andlight, which left our necks free, though we were not allowed to roll upour sleeves.

19

Betty Ryan, a Wimbledon tennis champion just before the First World War,recalled that when she and others wore corsets during their games of tennisthese often became bloodstained, presumably because they cut into theplayers' fleshduring their exertions.20 The 'plimsoll' or flat rub-ber-soledcanvas sports shoe, had been patented in 1876, and this made a more activegame possible for women.

The development of the bicycle as a means of transport, and of bicycling as aleisure activity, had even more far-reaching consequences. The originalvelocipedes and penny-farthing bicycles had been dangerous vehicles, riddenmainly by athletic young men who adopted, for this pursuit, a special garbconsisting of breeches, leggings, a Norfolk style jacket and a cap. Corah's

Leicester hosiery and jersey factory devised a jersey bicycling suit for men in1883, called the 'Fred Wood Champion Suit' after the Leicester cyclist whohad become world champion in June of that year. (This firm also developedfootball sweaters for men.)

In 1884 the Rover safety bicycle, with two equal-sized wheels, and in 1887the first pneumatic tyre were developed, and now bicycling could become apopular leisure activity, taken up enthusiastically by the urban and suburbanmiddle classes, including large numbers of young women, and the craze even

extended to some better-off working people as well, especially during the

peak years of the craze, from 1895-7.


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(.........)

No one could deny that women's ordinary dress was ahazard. As one womanwrote long afterwards:

My long skirt was a nuisance and even a danger. It is an unpleasantexperience to be hurled on to stone setts and find that one's skirt hasbeen so tightly wound round the pedal that one cannot even get upenough to unwind it.

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Controversy arose because women adapted men's jackets, shirts, coats, hatsand eventually even trousers, or at least knickerbockers, as cycling wear. Thescandal over women revealing their ankles and even their lower calves hadpassed by the mid 1860s, when special short-skirted, ankle-revealing croquetdresses had become socially acceptable, and by 1881, according to ArthurLazenby Liberty (owner of the Liberty store in Regent Street), sportswomen

had adopted men's tailored jackets, a white shirt with collar and tie andvarious kinds of masculine headgear. The rational, or reform dress worn bysome of the most advanced women bicyclists, however, was more shocking.

Only a small minority of mostly privileged women actually wore any full-scaleform of 'rational dress' for bicycling in Britain (although it seems to have beenmore popular in France and Germany). Surviving examples (for example, thepair at the Gallery of English Costume at Platt Hall, Manchester) are rarecollectors' items. (..........)

When The Lady Cyclistfulminated against fashionable attire it enunciatedsome of the main arguments in favour of dress reform:

Fainting, hysteria, indigestion, anorexia, lassitude, diminished vitalityand a host of other sufferings, arise from interference with thecirculation of the blood and the prevention of the full play of thebreathing organs. These conditions of a living death will never beremoved until the corsets, banded skirts and petticoats, irrational

footgear and other errors inclothing are abandoned.25The language used here -'irrational', 'errors' -reminds us of the supposedlyscientific and rationalistic basis of dress reform, but health and science were

not the only reasons for hostility to the fashionable dress of the period. Dressreform attracteddiverse groups of women and men who shared a number ofoverlapping yet varied beliefs and values. The extrav-agant frivolity, as manyfelt. of feminine fashion seemed to stand for all the worst aspects of theeconomic and social system, yet was easier toattack than capitalism itself.

There was outrage, for example, at the cruelty to animals and birds whosepelts and feathers adorned the woman of fashion. At first this came mainly


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from naturalists, but was taken up by humanitarians. Traders continued tocircumvent such restrictions as were placed on the import of feathers andbirds, and in 1895 the Duchess of York tactlessly wore an aigrette (feathers asa hat trimming) at an RSPCA prize giving; but by 1906 Queen Alexandra hadannounced that she would nolonger wear wild birds' feathers, and in 1911Queen Mary eliminated all plumed millinery from her wardrobe before theroyal visit to India (source of the egret and other fashionable plumage). Manyattempts to pass legislation that would prohibit the hunting and trading of birdsfor their feathers failed, but the importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act finallybecame law in 1921, passed, The Timesfelt, largely as a result of 'popularagitation, and to that extent the Act is in accord with popular feeling'26. But bythat time fashions had changed, and women no longer wished to wear hatsweighed down with tail feathers, wings and even whole birds.

Aesthetic reformersAesthetic dress continued to attract adherents. Oscar Wilde was an advocate

of dress reform, but his views on dress also incorporated aesthetic views andhe was insistent on the importance of beauty in dress as in everything else.Wilde himself wore breeches in a variety of forms; he was lampooned in aLittle Lord Fauntleroy Van Dyke suit of black velvet with a loose, low collar,and was described in a 'brown suit with innumerable little buttons that gave itthe appearance of a glorified page's costume'27. By 1883, he had given upbreeches in favour of trousers, and had also had his long hair cut shorter, buthe continued to dress in flamboyant and provocative style.

In 1884 he gave a lecture on dress in which he argued that clothes should behung from the shoulder rather than from the waist. He wished, as did all dressreformers, to do away with the bustles, high heels and corsets ofcontemporary women's dress, suggesting instead that they wear Turkishtrousers, and believed that it would be better for both sexes to wear garmentsdesigned along the lines of ancient classical, Mesopotamian or Egyptiandress.

(........)

Aesthetic dress continued into the 1890s. Jessie Rowat, who attended

Glasgow School of Art, and married its principal Francis Newbery in 1889,devised for herself a style as timeless as that of Mrs Comyns Carr. For herwedding she designed and had made up a dress based on that worn by StUrsula in the series of paintings by Carpaccio in the Accademia in Venice,which depict incidents in the life of the saint. Soon after her marriage asecond, similar dress was made, this timeof fine, green corded silk, withwhite chiffon slashed insets in the sleeves and a square neck edged withblack pearls, the whole dress lined with white alpaca. Because this dress was

outside contemporary fashions, she was able to wear it for many years, theGlasgow papers describing it variously as a ' Carpaccio dress', a 'robe de


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styleor a 'picture gown'. She seems to have designed all her own and herchildren's dresses. Some of these were made up by a visiting dressmaker,who used a machine, but Jessie Newbery herself always sewed by hand andoften used saddle stitch to emphasise the construction of the garment. Herclothes (which she continued to design until her death in 1948) had no

tailoring darts, nor did the skirts have waistbands; instead they weresuspended from a silk 'Liberty'-type bodice. Dresses might lie gathered andtied at the waist and she went in for layered clothing -the skirt with its bodicewas worn under a loose tunic, the sides of which were left open and fastenedwith unusual orexotic buttons or embroidered bobbles.

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(.....)

Aesthetic and reform dress, however, were already influencing main-streamfashion. In a sense they were themselves a fashion, and their assimilation toconventional modes was assisted by Arthur Lazenby Lib-erty, whosedepartment store in Regent Street opened in 1875. Liberty specialised in theprovision of oriental, Arts and Crafts and Morris textiles and householdfurnishings. The shop also sold Celtic-based designs. The success of thestore encouraged Liberty to extend his business into women's clothes. In1884 he opened his 'Historic and Artistic Costume Dress Studio' under thedirection of the interior designer E. A. Godwin.

Clearly by that time the vogue for aesthetic dress had spread beyond itsoriginal Arts and Crafts and 'simple life' usage into a wider circle of upper-andupper-middle-class devotees, and was thus commercially viable. While artisticinnovators such as Jessie Newbery and Dorelia John bought materials atLiberty which they made up,or had made Lip, into dresses of their owndesign, less original or daring women bought the garments ready made fromLiberty, who also sold a range of styles, for women and children, fromreproduction classical Greek costumes in Arabian cotton, and embroideredand smocked peasant dress in thin Umrista cashmere, to tea gowns in wool,silk or velvet. Tea gowns -a modified and fashionable version of theunwaisted aesthetic garment -were increasingly worn informally at home bywomen of fashion, and were madeby many fashionable dressmakers.38

Poiret and OrientalismBy 1910, although the Paris couturiers might not have admitted it, a majorinspiration for fashion change was drawn from the philosophies behind theaesthetic and dress reform movements of the European middle classes. The

most innovative, exciting and influential couturier was Paul Poiret.

After a conventional training at the houses of Worth and Doucet, Poiretopened on his own in 1906. By 1908 his designs were beginning to


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revolutionise the whole physical appearance and posture of the fashion-ablewoman. He created 'sheath' dresses, which fell straight in a tube fromshoulder to hem (just as Oscar Wilde would have wished), and neo-classicaladaptations of the aesthetic chiton (the tunic of the ancient Greeks). TheseDirectoirefashions were so called after the Directory period in France,42whichpreceded the Regency period in Britain, and they looked back to the slender,high-waisted fashions of those times. The new designs, launched at hisfashion house in the rue Pasquier in 1906, first appeared publicly in the albumLes Choses de Paul Poiret, illustrated by Paul Iribe and published in 1908.Poiret and Iribe subsequently quarrelled, and in 1911 Poiret invited anotherartist, Georges Lepape, to produce a new series of drawings. Later, Lepape'sson was to claim that 'at least four' of the designs had actually been createdby Madame Lepape, specifically the daring prototype trousered outfits.43

Poiret himself, however, is likely to have been well aware of the campaigns fortrousered dress for women. In addition, he was familiar with Persian, Indian,

Japanese, North African and European peasant textiles and dress. He wouldalso have seen the fabrics and dresses in the Paris branch of Liberty's,opened in the 1880s. His oriental beturbanned Odalisque models, in theirturquoise, yellow, red and pink silks, appeared just as Diaghilev, director ofthe Ballets Russes, arrived in Paris in 1909.

The newness of the Ballets Russes-their music, designs, choreography andsets -inaugurated an aesthetic revolution. It was not just the brilliant, clashingcolours of which Leon Bakst and other Diaghilev artists made use, but thepervasive mood of orientalism and the exotic which thrilled audiences andinfluenced not only fashion but also the fashionable interior. Purple, orange,jade green and black now became popular colours for decoration, whilerooms were furnished with ottomans and soft silk tasselled cushions.

Orientalism also justified divided skirts or harem trousers, and these were firstintroduced by Poiret in 1913, together with his lampshade tunic. This was avery short 'crinoline' worn over a long straight skirt or even loose trousers.Such an outfit bore a startling resemblance to the one worn byAmeliaBloomer so shockingly seventy years previously. Thus, ironically, Paris had atlast sanctioned as the latest fashion what had once seemed outlandish and

horrifying.

Other designers were beginning to share Poiret's feeling for a less con-stricted, freer, looser, lighter style of dressing. But it was Poiret above all whofor the first time catapulted many of the ideals of the dress reform andaesthetic dress movements into the world of high fashion. The Poiret womanwore soft Liberty-type silks, trimmed with bold oriental embroi-dery, or printedwith dynamic wood block prints designed by Raoul Dufy, the Fauve painter,from 1911. Instead of the old rigid corsets Poiret made fashionable lighter and


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more flexible if longer undergarments -although he did also introduce thehobble skirt.

(............)

The Venetian designer Mariano Fortuny went even further than Poiret indesigning a revolutionary aesthetic garment. His 'Delphos' robe was patentedin 1909, and was inspired by the statue of the charioteer at Del-phi. It was apleated silk tube with openings for head and arms and the sleeves, short orlong. The silk was elaborately and minutely pleated in a process which is stillnot fully understood today, and dyed in wonderful colours. It was a completelytimeless garment, and Fortuny continued to produce it for forty years. For thegreat French novelist Marcel Proust (the chronicler above all others of thisperiod of aesthetic creativity)

theseFortuny gowns, faithfully antique but markedly original, broughtbefore the eye... that Venice saturated with oriental splendour...evocative as they were of the sunlight and the ... fragmented,mysterious and complementary colour.44

.

Sweating: womenworkers in the fashiontradeYet although Poiret's designs paved the way for freer styles for all women, hisexotic adaptations of aesthetic dress did not move fashion far enough awayfrom luxury and frivolity to satisfy committed feminists. In 1908, the very yearthat Poiret launched his successful Oriental style, the first weekly newspaperaimed at working-class women in Britain published an article on 'Dress for thewoman worker'. It announced the manufacture of a 'Workers' Dress -bothcheap and artistic. It was to be made in two or three different styles out ofplain, good material (of the homespun type) in various colours . . . with a little

embroidery on the bodice,' The article concludes:

Fashion will not always rule despotically. As the great upwardmovement of womanhood broadens and the dawn of woman's

consciousness of mighty power grows clear, it will be pleasing towatch its influence on the ladies' papers, and see how long theirsnobbish twaddle and rag-trade announcements endure.46

The manufacture of fashionable clothing remained grounded in poverty and

exploitation, particularly the exploitation of women workers. Women's work inthe tailoring trade had originally grown out of a family system (when the whole


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family, including children, had worked under the direction of the male head ofthe family) and this was one reason why women workers were so badly paid.It was assumed -often wrongly -that women did not need a subsistencewage, because their wage was only an addition to their husband's 'familywage'. Many male workers, however, in tailoring and other trades, were

earning well below subsist-ence wages towards the end of the nineteenthcentury; and in any case, many women had no working husband:

(.........)

During the last years of the nineteenth century the incidence of sweatedlabour was increasing. This was at one time thought to have been due todepressed conditions in the trade, but it seems rather that both sweating -which meant primarily very low wages and poor condi-tions of work, andoutwork

-and the contracting out of work, whether to small workshops or toworkers in the home, were 'a feature of the rapid growth of the tailoring tradeand [of] its partial mechanisation'.48

This coincided with the arrival of large numbers ofJewish refugees in flightfrom pogroms in Russia and Poland. By 1901 there were more than 1300Jewish workshops in the London garment trade. Increasing numbers ofwomen also were entering paid work.(.......)

In the early years of the twentieth century reformers and radicals, perhapsparticularly women, were much preoccupied with the question of sweating.Women such as Clementina Black campaigned and undertook surveys ofwomen workers, and in 1906 the Daily News, which was owned by thephilanthropic Cadbury family, organised an Anti-Sweating Exhibition, whichwas attended by 30 000 visitors. As a result the National Anti-SweatingLeague was formed, a Select Committee set up, and in 1909 the TradesBoard Act, the first of its kind, was passed. It probably had little impact onsweating. Indeed it is possible that it even further institutionalised low pay bysetting different minimum rates for men and for women.52

The tailored wear was mostly cut and sewn by male workers. Women madebuttonholes and trimmings, and the often elaborately trimmed blouses wornwith the tailor-made. The majority were extremely badly paid, but ClementinaBlack's survey of married women workers revealed that there were someskilled workers who could earn what was for the period quite a respectableamount: There exist also very great differences of rate between one employerand another; for practically the same work women may be receiving 2s 3d or3s 3d [5.45] a dozen, and sometimes more work is demanded by the worse

paying employer.'53


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(......)

Quite apart from the sweated workshops, there was extensive employ-mentof seamstresses in the workrooms of the department stores, where thevaltered and made up models. One such worker, Ann Cheriton, was employedfor several years at the turn of the century by Swan and Edgar (a departmentstore at Piccadilly Circus, closed down in the 1970s). Along with six or sevenother young women she worked as a bodice hand for 12s 6d [23] a week,later 15s [27.60] and then 17s 6d [32]. There was no holiday pay and theyhad to live at home, for this was not a sub-sistence wage in London.54LikeClara Frances Lloyd, who worked at Liberty during the First World War, AnnCheriton took an early train to work in order to take advantage of the 4d [38p]

'workmen's' return. The hours were long-9.00 a.m. to 7.00 p.m. at Swan and

Edgar, and 8.30 to 6.30 at Liberty's -and both did elaborate hand sewing inworkrooms which were divided into numerous sections -skirt rooms, sleeverooms, tailor-ing rooms and embroidery rooms. At Liberty's good luncheswere pro-vided at the reasonable price of Is 6d [1.71] per week, and therewas a week's paid holiday. These improved conditions of work by comparisonwith Swan and Edgar fifteen years earlier probably reflect the improve-mentsin pay and conditions that occurred as a result of the war."

The First World War and afterFashion continued to develop during the First World War, even if some of themajor French designers closed their premises for the duration. Women's rolehad changed so much that there was now nothing too untowards in theirparticipation in the war effort as nurses or ambulance drivers behind the linesin France -a number of ex-suffragettes came into their own here; while someworking-class women wereable to earn more in the munitions factories or inheavy industry than they had ever earned before. There they replaced themen who had gone to the front to fight. Their employment was referred to as'dilution', because they were paid less than the men had been, and were to beemployed 'for the duration' only.

Not all women fared better during the war, and Sylvia Pankhurst helped thosein the East End who were left penniless or surviving on a tiny army allowancewhile their young men or husbands were away. The majority of women,however, although they did not gain equal pay, were able to enjoy a higherstandard of living, and younger women were able to spend some money on

smarter clothes and accessories. Significantly for the future of fashion, thewomen in factories and working on the land sometimes wore practical boiler


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suits or jodhpurs, which began to break down the taboo against trousers forwomen. By the end of the war, women's clothes were looser-waisted, withshorter skirts, and simple round necklines had replaced the old stiff, highcollars.

Yet it would be a mistake to see the war as the main cause of the greatchanges that appeared to come about in the 1920s, symbolised by shortskirts, short hair, make-up, smoking and free and easy manners and morals.The belief that the 1920s was the great age of emancipation for women is oneof the best-known cliches of fashion and social history. It has been the aim ofthis chapter to demonstrate that it was in the years leading up to the FirstWorld War that the basis was being laid, in fashion as well as, more directly, inpolitical and economic ways for the changes that appeared much moregenerally in the 1920s. These prewar years were years of significant social

innovation and change notwithstanding the tremendous opposition towomen's emancipation. It is true that before the war all sexes and ages, butparticularly women and girls, were still normally wearing too many stuffy,restrictive clothes. Vera Brittain described her school wear in 1911 as

consisting of:

woollen combinations, black cashmere stockings, 'liberty bodice, darkstockinette knickers, flannel peilicoat and often, in addition, a long-sleeved, high-necked, knitted woollen 'spencer'.At school, on the topof this conglomeration of drapery, we wore green flannel blouses inthe winter and white flannel blouses in the summer, with long navy-blue skirts, linked to the blouses by elastic belts which continuallyslipped up or down, leaving exposed an unsightly hiatus of blouse-tape or safety-pinned shirt-band For cricket and tennis matches,even in the baking summer of 1911, we still wore the flowing skirts andhigh-necked blouses, with our heavy hair tied into pigtails

At the time, both the supporters and the opponents of dress reform saw themovement as the expression of total opposition to high fashion. In retrospect,ironically, we can see that in the end many of the ideas of the wearers ofrational dress, socialist gowns, aesthetic modes and 'vegeta-rian drawers'were incorporated into the mainstream, their ideas con

-tributing towards the

radicalisation of women's dress. In the 1920s it was men who were perceivedas imprisoned in unhygienic, restrictive and outmoded clothing.

IMAGES AND CAPTIONS FROM THE ORIGINAL TEXT


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Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon, the British couturier, achieved internationalsuccess. Her trade mark. was daring chiffon gowns (and lingerie} in the neo-classical style, shown here in the couturiers' magazine Les Modesof 1914.

(Below) The frail vision of Edwardian femininity had rigid underpinnings,including extra long, flat-fronted corsets. These examples, advertised in TheQueen newspaper in 1905, were made in Paris and sold in London at pricesbetween 12s 11d and 3 guineas.


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(Above) Tailor-made suits could be purchased at reasonable cost by mailorder and were advertised in newspapers. In 1905 John Noble of Manchestetstressed in the

Daily Newsthat 'the garments are Guaranteed MadeAbsolutely Without any Sweating of the Workers'.


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(Above) Salford second-band clothing market in the 1890s. Some women arewearing traditional Lancashire shawls, but some are in the moderntailar-madesuits.


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This poor family from Kirriemuir, in remote, rural Scotland, are wearing theirbest clothes -both bought and home-made -with ill-fitting boots. Photographc. 1900. So the Edwardian facade of luxury and glamour was ultimatelydeceptive.


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(Below) The 'New Woman' at the turn of the century typically wore a tailor-made suit. These students of St Hilda's College. Oxford, in tbe 1890s proudly

displaysymbols of their largely scientificstudies.


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(Below) Most women who cycled in the 1890s wore the conventional full-length skirt. It was a struggle to maintain decorum when mounting anddismounting.


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(Below)Jessie Newbery, wife of the head of the Glasgow School of Art, wasdeeply involved with th ework of architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Shedressed in a completely personal style inspired hy peasant and Renaissanceart. Here she is wearing a wool cape with her own embroidered decorationover a 'Carpaccio dress',c. 1905.


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(Below) At this aesthetic wedding, c. 1890, the two little bridesmaids arewearing the Liberty-style smocks, favoured by the Healthy and Artistic DressUnion, while the seven older bridesmaids wear loose, draped aesthetic-styledresses.


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(Below) By the 1880s the two strands of the dress reformmovement, aesthetic and rational, had merged to form the Healthy and


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Artistic Dress Union. The cover of their journal Aglaia for spring 1894 has anArts and Crafts-inspired drawing by Henry Holland.

A weekend fete in the gardensof Blenheim Palace in May 1911. The ladieswear watered-down versions of Paul Poiret's Directoire line of 1908.


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(Below) Messrs. Lotery's factory, with its rows of young machinists working incramped conditions, was featured in the Tailor and Cutterfor 11 April 1907 asa model works.


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(Below) A mannequin, probably a shop assistant, models an afternoon dressfora customer in the gown department of Morgan Squires, the Leicesterdepartment store, c. 1905.


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ADDITIONAL IMAGES


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Three women on bicycles, Early 1900s,The Stapleton Collection, TheBridgeman Art Library.

Edwardian Postcard


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Vicountess Harberton in her rational cycling outfit.


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Maud Allan, a London dancer, wearing a "classical" dance costume,1908

"Hobble" skirt modelled at a 1910 Lucile show

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