How to use this Page

Do not let your collections gather dust at home, with our new line of clothing you can show of your superior consumer skills and still stay in style..

Tweet

By Ulinka Rublack

I will never forget the day when a friend’s husband returned home to Paris from one of his business trips. She and I were having coffee in the huge sun-light living-room overlooking the Seine. We heard his key turn the big iron door. Next a pair of beautiful, shiny black shoes flew through the long corridor with its beautiful parquet floor. Finally the man himself appeared. “My feet are killing me!”, he exclaimed with a veritable sense of pain. The shoes were by Gucci.

We might think that these are the modern follies of fashion, which only now beset men as much as women. My friend too valued herself partly in terms of the wardrobe she had assembled and her accessories of bags, sunglasses, stilettos and shoes. She had modest breast implants and a slim, sportive body. They were moving to Dubai. In odd hours when she was not looking after children, going shopping, walking the dog, or jogging, she would write poems and cry.

Yet, surprisingly, neither my friend nor her husband would seem very much out of place at around 1450. Men wore long pointed Gothic shoes then, which hardly look comfortable and made walking down stairs a special skill. In a German village, a wandering preacher once got men to cut off their shoulder-long hair and slashed the tips of the pointed shoes. Men and women aspired to an elongated, delicate and slim silhouette. Very small people seemed deformed and were given the role of grotesque fools. Italians already wrote medical books on cosmetic surgery.

We therefore need to unlock an important historical problem: How and why have looks become more deeply embedded in how people feel about themselves or others? I see the Renaissance as a turning point. Tailoring was transformed by new materials, cutting, and sewing techniques. Clever merchants created wide markets for such new materials, innovations, and chic accessories, such as hats, bags, gloves, or hairpieces, ranging from beards to long braids. At the same time, Renaissance art depicted humans on an unprecedented scale. This means that many more people were involved in the very act of self-imaging. New media – medals, portraits, woodcuts, genre scenes – as well as the diffusion of mirrors enticed more people into trying to imagine what they looked like to others. New consumer and visual worlds conditioned new emotional cultures. A young accountant of a big business firm, called Matthäus Schwarz, for instance, could commission an image of himself as fashionably slim and precisely note his waist measures. Schwarz worried about gaining weight, which to him would be a sign of ageing and diminished attractiveness. While he was engaged in courtship, he wore heart-shaped leather bags as accessory. They were green, the colour of hope. Hence the meaning of dress could already become intensely emotionalized. The material expression of such new emotional worlds – heart-shaped bags for men, artificial braids for women, or red silk stockings for young boys – may strike us as odd. Yet their messages are all familiar still, to do with self-esteem, erotic appeal, or social advancement, as are their effects, which ranged from delight in wonderful crafting to worries that you had not achieved a look, or that someone just deceived you with their look. In these parts of our lives the Renaissance becomes a mirror which leads us back in time to disturb the notion that the world we live in was made in a modern age.

Ever since the Renaissance, we have had to deal with clever marketing as well as the vexing questions of what images want, and what we want from images, as well as whether clothes wear us or we wear them.

Ulinka Rublack is Senior Lecturer in early modern European history at Cambridge University and a Fellow of St John’s College. Her latest

0 Comments on Dressing Up, Then and Now as of 1/1/1900

Add a Comment

If you're going to ALA next weekend, how many hours have you spent trying to decide what to wear? I have spent too many to count, if I include time on ebay trying to find something. Not counting that, though, it's around 8 -- trying on the dress once it arrived, photographing it, getting undergarments for it, and discussing it with various interested parties -- including the BRGs of course and even the mothers of most of the kids I babysit for.

I picked out a black silk Marimekko dress on ebay, partly in consultation with Fiona from last week, her mother, and little brother ("Let's get the man's opinion, too," the mother said). By the time I consulted them, I'd narrowed the ebay choices down to 2:

* a black silk Marimekko cocktail dress


OR
*a long emerald green dress (also Marimekko)


I liked the bright green one, for the color, but knew the style (babydoll) would be HIGHLY unflattering. Fiona liked the green one, too -- but her mother and brother both liked the black one, and I remembered Alvina saying that most of the editors would be wearing black. So, I went with that.

Fiona was disappointed, but brightened up when she thought of this idea:
"You can spray paint it green!"

The dress came and looked horrible -- the swirly skirt that Fiona's mother,who has a fashion-model figure, described as "skimming the hips" encased mine.

The result: I'm going to
a) wear something I had already OR (if he'll do it) get Fiona's father (an artist/furniture maker whom she claims is really good at making clothes) to cut out a pattern for me and make a new dress myself
b) stop buying clothes on ebay
c) try to remember that it never pays to try to be something you're not, in clothes or writing -- black is NOT my color, cool as it is and smashing as it looks on many people
d) stop beating myself up for the time wasted

Every artist and writer I know is at least a little obsessive-some more than others, it's true. The trick is to obsess about writing (or painting, as the case may be). But how do you turn the channel in your brain once another obsession -- or procrastination technique -- has set in???????????

If anyone has the answer to that one, I'd really like to know it....but I'm also curious about how much time other people have spent on the what-to-wear question.

See you next weekend--and really, what I wear doesn't matter. The point is to celebrate Grace and Alvina and WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON and maybe meet some of you, too!

I'm in Gothenburg to run Göteborgsvarvet This year I will try to get the event a baroque flavor, with the right choice of shoeswaterbottle Stopwatch and attire, as it happens I would hardly be seen in this suit, there's always runners in far more flamboyant dress.

the say that spring is on it's way, hard to tell here.

The essence of style is self confidence, without it everything you put on will look bad, with everything looks marvelous. This is how I dress when I want to relax, comfortable but yet ready for clubbing should I get a late invitation for any jet-set occasions.

I rarely post any of my design work here, but since I am adding these to my surface design portfolio on my website, I thought I might give you a taste. You can check out more of them as I post them on my website.

Yep, I do a little of everything.

Spring is in the air, well in spirit anyway and it's igh time to start planning your wardrobe for the season (one of the most important of the year)
For the Gala opening

For a rainy day

For stick walking

For the Dog

For Clubhopping

For use on public transportation

NOTE TO SELF: EDUCATORS SHOULD STICK TO...EDUCATION


Here we go again. There used to be a time when schools and educators relegated themselves to expanding student's knowledge. It appears that they're also getting involved in fashion choices.

School officials at Lincoln Middle School in Meridien, Conn. have banned hooded sweatshirts, citing that they violate the dress code policy. While the district's Board of Education dress code policy does not specifically ban this piece of clothing, it does now allow head gear, which presumably includes sweat shirt hoods.

"The hooded sweaters, and some of the hooded shirts that are out, all those are excluded. If you're in the stores shopping, that's all there is -- everything is hooded," said parent Cheryl Tomassetti.

School officials said they decided to ban the shirts after some students were spotted wearing hoods over their heads in school hallways and classrooms. Officials said that hoods are sometimes used by students hiding headphones.

Makes a person wonder how far the arm of educators should extend, especially when it comes to the choice of clothing. If it was for safety purposes officials would be justified but headphones?

The ban will go into effect after winter break.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
Author: Neal Gabler
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN; 10: 0-679-43822-X
ISBN; 13: 978-0-679-43822-9

This massive biography – over 600 pages, plus over 200 more of notes, appendices, bibliographies, and index – is advertised as “the definitive portrait of one of the most important in twentieth-century American entertainment and cultural history. […] meticulously researched – Gabler is the first writer to be given complete access to the Disney archives […]”

It probably is definitive. It is notable that where virtually every other Disney biography since his death in 1966 has been heavily criticized by animation experts for gross factual errors and deliberate misrepresentation of his attitudes or motives (such as claiming that Disney was a spy for the FBI, encouraged anti-Semitism, or was really an illegitimate son of a Spanish dancer), the worst that Gabler’s critics have been able to accuse him of are minor errors on the level of whether serious production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs began in September 1936 or several months earlier. These errors may be significant to cinematic historians, but the average reader will find them trivial.

Gabler’s book, with more than 65 photographs from throughout Disney’s life plus other graphics such as a teenage life sketch and his first business card, ought to replace every popularized Disney biography previously written.

There are no big surprises here, and there is much detailed information about events glossed over in previous biographies. For example, every book has told how Disney created Mickey Mouse to replace his earlier cartoon star Oswald the Lucky Rabbit when the latter was stolen from him, but few have told exactly how this happened. Gabler devotes five pages to the event, giving names and dates. Want to know about the notorious but previously vaguely-described Disney studio strike of 1941? Gabler gives it pages 356 to 371, again going into detail. Any questions that a reader may have about Disney’s personal life or his career should be answered in this book.

To a large extent, Disney’s story is the story of the whole American animation industry. Many of the men who became famous at other studios in later years, such as Warner Bros.’ animation director Friz Freleng and music arranger Carl Stalling, got their start among Disney’s first employees.

Gabler notes how many other studios hired away some of Disney’s best men to create cartoons for them during the 1930s, or during the ‘40s made parodies of Disney’s features such as WB’s Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs and A Corny Concerto. It would be an exaggeration to say that Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination can serve as a one-volume history of the animation industry, but it is without doubt an essential read for every animation fan and an essential purchase for every public and academic library.