Artistic Dress as Reform Dress
One of the greatest problems facing a student of Artistic Dress is its relation to a contemporary anti-fashion, Reform Dress. Since the 1850s, Reform Dress advocates opposed fashion in the name of health and hygiene. They typically advocated change in both male and female costume, often basing their changes on pseudo-scientific and esoteric ideas. Gustav Jaeger promoted wool clothing, which he claimed was both healthier and spiritually superior to other fabrics. Heinrich Lahmann advocated porous fabrics as part of his general reform of life. The number of Reform Dress proponents who targeted the corset is too long to list.
Since the heyday of Artistic Dress corresponds roughly to that of Reform Dress, and both called for the abandonment of the corset, the two movements are often conflated or Artistic Dress is viewed as merely a more visually appealing style of Reform Dress. Reading Artistic Dress as a subcategory of Reform Dress is certainly a legitimate approach to the topic. The shared objection to fashion and the similarity of the rhetoric defaming the corset link the two movements. Additionally, some Artistic Dress designers defined their work as a beautification of Reform Dress, which they described as “homely” and charged that the dresses “neglected entirely the consideration of beauty.” In my study, I have chosen, for the most part to separate Artistic Dress from Reform Dress because I find that much is lost if we see it as a subcategory. (See for instance the information under “Applied Arts” and “Eigenkleid” in this topic of the website). Yet, there were artists who saw Artistic Dress as the logical progression of Reform Dress: “To render Reform Dress truly tasteful, that now is the goal of the artist.” These artists stressed considerations of healthy and hygiene rather than design principles. Perhaps the best known of these was later Nazi art theorist Paul Schultze-Naumburg. In 1902, he organized an Exhibition of New Women’s Dress in Berlin. The participants were required to conform to a list of rules written by the organizing committee of the exhibition and espoused in Schultze-Naumburg’s 1903 book, Die Kultur des weiblichen Körpers als Grundlage der Frauenkleidung (The Culture of the Feminine Body as the Foundation of Women’s Dress). All of the rules dictated how the dress interacts with the body: there was no mention of aesthetic concerns. This stress on the body is illustrated by the visuals included in Schutze-Naumburg’s book. Of the one hundred and thirty-three illustrations, only eight show examples of Artistic or Reform Dress; thirteen show contemporary fashion (often followed by an illustration of how it distorts the body); there are twenty-four images of contemporary, Ancient, and medieval artwork; the remaining eighty-eight are photos of nudes or anatomical drawings. There is much more stress on the body than what the clothes look like.
The distinction between Artistic Dress and Reform Dress is least visible when viewing the subject from a Reform Dress angle. Reform Dress advocates quickly adopted Artistic Dress as part of their movement: Reform Dress unions illustrated Artistic Dress in their journals ; Artistic Dress exhibitions were included in Reform Dress histories and reported in Reform Dress press; and Artistic Dress ateliers often advertised in Reform Dress media, presumably because they had a great amount of patronage to gain from those channels. The embracing of Artistic Dress by Reform Dress advocates indicates that the category of beauty was never one that Reform Dress designers excluded; they merely did not see it as fundamental. Thus artists’ attempts to posit Artistic Dress as something other than Reform Dress was accepted only within the Artistic Dress community. This lack of distinction has continued in dress history, where Artistic Dress is often covered only as a subcategory of Reform Dress.
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