A number of scholars have defined fashion as the will to restructure the body through clothing. Anne Hollander’s premise in Seeing Through Clothes is that the silhouette of contemporary fashionable clothing influences the ideal image of the nude body in Western art. The Renaissance nude is upholstered like the stiff brocades and stuffed sleeves of that time; nineteenth-century nudes are corseted without the corset, and so on. She dates fashion’s beginnings at 1300 based on the emergence of observable visual fluctuations. The passage is worth quoting:
The direct reflection of fashion in the image of the nude body can be demonstrated only during those centuries of Western society when true fashion actually existed. If fashion in dress means constant perceptible fluctuations of visual design, created out of the combined forms of tailored dress and body, then many early civilizations and much of the eastern hemisphere have not experienced ‘fashion’ as we know it. They will have undergone changes of surface fashion, such as those in different kinds of trimming, different details of hairdressing, different colors and accessories; but basic shapes will have altered only very slowly by a long evolutionary process, not dependent on any aesthetic lust for perpetual changes of form. The changes in true fashion, ongoing in the West since about 1300, demand reshaping of the body-and-clothes unit.122
Hollander’s dating derives from visual sources, common enough only after about 1300 to observe constant fluctuations in tailoring. Others such as Susan Crane have used both historical and literary texts to argue that fashion appears in the fourteenth century with the arrival of “cutting to fit,” due to the arrival of technological advances in cloth making and body-conscious tailoring, which she interprets as allowing an explosion of social meaning around clothing.123
Similarly defining fashion and its appearance in terms of garment construction, but refuting the fourteenth-century hypothesis, Jennifer Harris traces the earliest beginnings of Western fashion to the twelfth century. She bases her conclusions on the increasing complexity of garment construction during the twelfth century and a concurrent acceleration of change in styles of dress and hairdressing.
Although twelfth-century experiments in garment cutting and construction involved manipulating fabric by temporary lacing or stitching instead of permanent seams or buttons, they nonetheless called for a great deal of ingenuity on the part of the tailor and provided the impetus which led, over the next century or so, to cutting-to-fit and functional buttons. They also reflect a sense of change and progress inherent in society at large.124
While there is less detailed and realistic visual evidence to support the existence of constant change for the twelfth century than for the fourteenth century, volume and length were clearly key features of elite dress in this period. Moreover, Harris touches on the importance of psychology and sociology to the arrival of a particular type of production technology. I would argue that dating fashion’s advent to the appearance of any given type of technology neglects the societal forces that brought about such a development.
The fourteenth-century trend for remodeling the body through cut, corsetry, decolletage, and padding has been studied as a radical transformation by Odile Blanc. While her dating corresponds to Post’s, like Newton she does not claim any sort of birth of fashion for this period, although she does discuss the “invention” of the fashionable body.125 Blanc is careful to limit inquiry to
The range of the information that can be gleaned from the attitudes and relations between figures in the miniatures of aristocratic luxury manuscripts, namely the ways contemporaries conceived their garments and the relationship they had with the body. Grane is similarly more concerned with how clothing is used to represent the self in this period than with the larger mechanisms of fashion.
The use of tailoring to remodel the body is a remarkable phenomenon, and it is undeniable that “fashion” can connote the parade of changes in garment silhouette. Tailoring is more a symptom of the type of artifice typical of a fashion system’s complex theatricality, however, as fashionable consumption encompasses far more than clothing. The desire to attract attention through altering the body’s natural contours should be understood as one desire among many.
World History
