Artistic Dress

Gender and the Gaze

An overwhelming percentage of Artistic Dress was designed for women.  Among all the exhibitions, publications, and reviews only one garment designed for men is cited, a suit by the painter Hermann Widmer exhibited in the Leipzig Kunstgewerblichen Ausstellung für Bekleidung in 1901.  Widmer sketched at least two other suit designs, but there is no evidence that they were ever made. Under the title of male Artistic Dress one might also include the smocks worn by artists in the studio.  Yet these garments were not called Artistic Dress, and smocks were not included in exhibitions or publications on the subject.  The scarcity of male Artistic Dress forces one to ask the question, why was almost all Artistic Dress made to be worn by women rather than men? 
            At the time, most would have probably noted, as Henry van de Velde did in his book, Die künstlerische Hebung der Frauentracht, that men’s clothing was logical and therefore did not need to be reformed.  Anne Hollander finding that after the French Revolution men’s garments were often read as a signifier of the qualities of the ideal male citizen, indicate that van de Velde was not alone.1 Numerous contemporary sources show that the suits that became popular were often considered rational because they lacked ornament.  In comparison to women’s clothing, men’s clothing barely altered the silhouette of the body, and was thus considered natural.  The muted colors were associated with somberness and sensibility.  The suit that had dominated male middle- and upper-class dress since the end of the eighteenth century had undergone fairly subtle changes in comparison to the changes of the clothing of women of the same classes.  That “timelessness” had also been read as an indication of rationality.
            Yet, this claim of rationality, naturalness, and timelessness had been challenged by many Dress Reformers of the period who developed several garments for men.  Thus, the question, despite van de Velde’s objections, remains; why so little Artistic Dress for men? 
            I believe one answer lies in the contemporary gender constructs linked to looking.  At the time self-display was linked to femininity and the act of looking (the gaze) to masculinity.2   Both fashion with its layers of trimming and body alteration and Artistic Dress, considered objets d’art, rendered the women who wore them objects of the gaze.  Artistic Dress designers themselves recognized this when they noted that Reform Dress was doomed to fail because it did not fulfill a women’s desire to visually please.3  
The standard suit was as important for fin-de-siècle artists as for their male patrons, since any unusual or overt self-adornment during this period was particularly suspect due to the recent scandal involving Oscar Wilde. His notoriety was likely to have dissuaded any large-scale interest in male adornment for artists active around 1900.4   As cartoons of the period reveal, Wilde was well known for velvet, brightly colored fabric and knee-length breeches rather than long trousers.  His choice of fabrics, as well as his overt interest in male appearance, broke from the hundred-year tradition that seemingly stressed logic over beauty in men’s wear.  This was both consistent with his call for beauty in all things and in sharp contrast to contemporary gender constructions which did not allow men to be objects of aesthetic satisfaction.
If a man was to be an object of beauty, who was to look at him?  Women were severely limited in their viewing in the Victorian era.  Female art students were regularly always barred from figure-drawing classes, and nude statues were draped for female audiences at some public exhibitions.  Men were encouraged to dress in a way that united them with others of their class rather than to attract a mate.  Since women were not encouraged to seek visual pleasure in men, Wilde’s unusual dress was seen as an object for men, particularly gay men, to view.  The gendering of Victorian gaze, as well as Wilde’s notorious 1895 trial, which publicly revealed his homosexual activity, rendered the sexuality of any man who concentrated on his own beauty subject to question. 
Some artists successfully navigated the demands of contemporary masculinity and adopted something that could be called Artistic Dress, but those who did so maintained a very clear distinction between public and private dress.  Moreover, their Artistic Dress was directly associated with specific activities or ideas.  Because the clothing was primarily worn for a purpose, the message it conveyed was that the wearer was working or attempting to change his state of mind.  The possibility of this clothing being mistaken as a display meant to catch the eye and visually please the observer was thus sharply reduced.
Gustav Klimt serves as a good example of an artist whose sartorial practices incorporated something that can be called Artistic Dress and met the demands of contemporary masculinity.  As a powerful and sometimes notorious force in Vienna’s art world, Klimt commanded attention and was thus the subject of many photographs.  Examination of these photographs reveals a clear distinction between the public and private dress of the artist.  In standard portrait photographs and records of public events, Klimt sports a typical contemporary suit.  Photographs of Klimt in private settings reveal the use of caftan-like garments with boldly patterned fabrics or decorative embroidery.  Klimt created two personae with his clothing selections.  In the well-tailored suit, he was a respectable middle-class man whose wardrobe expressed the social norms of professionalism, logic, respectability, and heterosexual masculinity.  On vacation, he left the city, adopted a caftan-like garment, and got back to nature. 
Klimt also wore a loose flowing garment in the studio.  A blue garment with gold embroidery on the shoulders, commonly called “Klimt’s smock,” is preserved in the Vienna Stadtmuseum.  The garment is speckled with paint marks, which indicate that it was used for work.  While it was not unusual for artists to wear protective smocks during studio sessions, Klimt’s smock stands out because of the embroidery on its shoulders.  The needlework is a gold tree-of-life pattern; both pattern and color are common in his paintings.  Apparently because the decoration was both relatively small, related to the professional activity of the wearer, and worn only in private, it did not fall outside the realm of acceptable masculinity.  A look at the garments worn by female artists of the same period reveals different expectations and use of decoration.

This website was produced during a sabbatical granted by the San Joaquin Delta College Board of Trustees.