Stories of Artistic Dress
My interest in the relationship of gender and Artistic Dress was the result of two contemporary short stories. In each, Artistic Dress strips the wearer of their ability to function in traditional gender roles. These fictional stories endow Artistic Dress with gender radicalisms that do no appear to be the intention of its designers. Yet, they do give us a better picture of how the general public saw Artistic Dress and why it was a relatively short-lived phenomenon.
"Eigenkleid"
“Eigenkleid” was published in a 1909 number of Jugend, a wildly popular satirical magazine. The short story’s subtitle proclaimed that it was a “true story by Suzanne Buschvogel” but the melodramatic tale and the author’s atypical name, which translates as “hedge bird,” suggest that neither claim was serious. The tale focuses on Dore, one of “three modern women” from the village of Thumbskirchen. We are asked not to be shocked by the fact that they work; they are unmarried and thus can not alter their situation. Dore celebrates her birthday by buying herself an Eigenkleid with earnings from the sale of a painting. The three women are awed by the “golden dream of a dress” and overjoyed at the prospect that she will no longer wear “a cheap blouse from the department store” or an “overly tight dress,” i.e. one that requires a corset, by the local dressmaker. After two brief public appearances in the dress, Dore becomes the object of ridicule. Her small hometown ostracizes her, she loses many of her small jobs, and her friendships become strained. Most devastating, a male suitor, Hans Lang, publicly avoids her, and then returns the books she had lent him. Dore’s friends blame her misfortunes on the dress. At the end of the story, Dore has let the Eigenkleid sit in the wardrobe for over a year and resigned herself to wearing only English and princess-line dresses. The story concludes with a lesson: “to this day no unmarried woman in Thumbskirchen wears an Eigenkleid.”
The story’s author clearly understood the audience for and marketing of Artistic Dress. The characters who admire the Eigenkleid are three modern women who paint and embroider. Their professions and their reading material reveal that they also admire contemporary art, particularly the applied arts, and might be graduates of a school of design. Graduates of these schools constituted a large percentage of the women who made and wore Artistic Dress. Several founded Artistic Dress ateliers and ran advertisements in art journals such as Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration and Dekorative Kunst. It was presumably from one of the many Munich ateliers that Dore ordered her dress. Furthermore, the author was also aware of specific designs and at least of some of the intentions expressed in the Artistic Dress designers’ essays and books. For instance, the antagonism between fashion and Artistic Dress that so many designers wrote about is captured in the story; when approached by Dore, the local dressmaker veers wildly off her path to avoid her and refuses even to glance at the Eigenkleid.
The author’s knowledge of Artistic Dress is not surprising, given Jugend’s previous attention to the subject. Jugend had published many images that incorporated Artistic Dress; one, a portrait of Anna Muthesius by Fra Newbery, was featured as a cover in 1904. The author, though, seems to purposely distort and conflate different types of Artistic Dress for literary effect. Dore’s dress is consistently called an Eigenkleid, a term that was coined to refer specifically to a garment that was designed by its wearer to suit her own figure, coloring, and tastes. Clearly, however, Dore did not design her own dress; it was the work of a distant artist (probably from Munich) and there is no indication in the story that it was a unique garment rather than one that was sold to other women who, like Dore, shopped by mail. The underlying moral of the story relies upon a conflation of two types of Artistic Dress. Dore’s small-town life is nearly destroyed by wearing the dress because the townsfolk read the garment as a sign of cosmopolitan pretension and as a rejection of traditional feminine mores. To cast Artistic Dress in such a light, the author had to conflate two distinct camps of Artistic Dress. The “dream of a dress” that Dore wears is clearly based on the ones made by Art-Nouveau-inspired designers. The best-known garments designed by these artists were luxurious and associated with wealthy cosmopolitan patrons of avant-garde arts. This style of Artistic Dress, much more so than the others, embraced traditional ideals of femininity, as it linked women to interiors (See Gesamtkunstwerk page) and configured them as beautiful objects (See Gender and the Gaze page) . Dore’s “deep blue dress that shimmered with silver embroidery” was based on this visually adventurous but ultimately socially conservative style of Artistic Dress. The description of how the dress fit Dore—“Nowhere was there tightness or shapelessness, there was nothing but loose, soft lines”—echoes descriptions of the most publicized example of Artistic Dress, van de Velde’s reception dress of 1902.
Rather than being associated with luxury or traditional femininity, true Eigenkleider—of the type of Artistic Dress promoted by Muthesius and developed by women associated with Art and Design schools for their own use—were often read as declarations of female independence, and indeed, “Eigenkleid” begins by describing Dore as an independent, artistic, self-supporting woman. Her lifestyle was apparently acceptable in her small town as long as she wore cheap department store blouses or overly tight (i.e., fashionable corset-based) dresses purchased from the village dressmaker. It is likely that even if she had actually worn a real Eigenkleid, that is, an economical simple garment that she had designed and made herself she would have roused little or no ire. What sets the town against Dore is a garment that never really existed—a dress that combines the luxury, beauty, and finery of Art Nouveau-based Artistic Dress with the declaration of female independence associated with the true Eigenkleid. Significantly, although Dore departed from traditional feminine norms by selling her art for a living, she had not resigned herself to fulfilling the stereotype of the independent female artist, who was pictured in the popular press as either unattractive or amateurish or both. Dore, in her luxurious Eigenkleid, purchased from the big city with her own funds, was not a cowering, unattractive painter. Instead, she inadvertently attempted a new path, that of a woman who embraced both beauty and independence. However, the townsfolk could not accept this combination of attributes, so she abandoned her quest for beauty. At the end of the story, Dore wears English and princess-line dresses, two styles often associated with Reform Dress. This adoption of Reform Dress was often read as a signal of a woman’s renunciation of any attempt to be attractive.
Thus in the Jugend story, two types of Artistic Dress are conflated to cast Dore as a young woman who is unable to successfully navigate gender norms, and the adoption of Reform Dress is used to signal her sense of defeat. The fictional story of Dore provides some insight into why most women rejected Artistic Dress. As Ann Tracy Allen has noted, there is ample evidence to suggest that satirical journals like Jugend played an “active role in the formation and spread of new attitudes, images, and stereotypes.” The story of Dore and the many Witzblätter cartoons about Artistic Dress can be viewed as warnings to the women who read them not to adopt Artistic Dress of any sort, whether luxurious or simple, lest they be thought ridiculous or unfeminine.
"Poor Little Rich Man"
The second story that inspired my interest in gender concerns in the realm of Artistic Dress was “The Poor Little Rich Man,” a short story written by Adolf Loos and published in an April, 1900 edition of Neues Wiener Tagblatt. The story relates the tale of a happy rich man who commissions a well known architect to redesign his home. The result is an interior in which everything has a place. The specificity of the design requires that the architect not only spend several weeks training the family in the use of their new home, but also that he make check-up visits. In otherwords, this is an extreme case of the Gesamntkunstwerk interior. On one such visit, the architect confronts the patron about his slippers. The patron reminds the artist that the embroidered footwear was designed by the architect
himself. The artist responds with thunder, “but for the bedroom. Here they disrupt the whole mood with their two impossible spots of color.” The patron is reduced to removing his footwear on the way into the bedroom, where he is informed that he will be unable to accept any gift or buy anything that would disrupt the design of the home. He thus becomes the titular poor little rich man.
This story, like “Eigenkleid”, clearly exaggerates and distorts Artistic Dress in order to criticize it. There are no known examples of male Artistic Dress in Germany or Austria, or even of Artistic Dress accessories, designed by artists to match a male patron to the Gesamtkunstwerk interior. Aside from Loos’s purely literary slipper incident, Artistic Dress that coordinated with an interior was exclusively feminine. The power an artist exerted over a woman’s wardrobe posed no threat to social ideals, because popular opinion held that women didn’t actually make their own decisions, anyway—they were the slaves of fashion, which exerted its control more effectively than ever via the expanding fashion press. To effectively cast Gesamtkunstwerk artists as maniacal control freaks, they had to be shown treating men as if they were women. Thus, there are no stories or cartoons of a woman resisting Gesamtkunstwerk clothing or being made miserable by wearing it. While there are no fictional stories on the topic, we know that at least one woman resisted being told what to wear by an Artistic Dress designer: Gertrud Osthaus. Her objection was not to wearing a dress that coordinated with the Folkgangmuseum’s architecture, it was to wearing one that matched the dress Maria van de Velde’s would wear at the same event. (See Gesamtkunstwerk page.)
Here is one of my favorite Artistic Dress cartoons (it appeared in a 1904 Neue Fliegende Blaetter), which shares a very similar sentiment to "The Poor Little Rich Man." The captions below the scene read, "Dear Ada, is it porkcubes for dinner again?" and "I can't possibly serve anything else in this room."
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