Fashioning the female artistic self: Aesthetic Dress in nineteenth-century British visual culture

This dissertation investigates the cultural meaning of Aesthetic Dress in the activities and art production of individuals associated with the Aesthetic movement in Britain during the last four decades of the nineteenth century. During the 1870s and 1880s Aesthetic Dress was widely discussed in the fashion literature. At the same time, it was closely allied with the concurrent Aesthetic movement in the fine arts. This connection is evident through a survey of the fashion journals then circulating the term in connection with the visual arts and in the everyday usage of artistically-minded women, who wore Aesthetic Dress, attended and/or exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, and followed the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and J. M. Whistler. This project traces the convergence between artistic practice, acts of self-fashioning, and gender-based manifestations of power, pleasure, and social change within a broader Victorian milieu. Aesthetic Dress played a crucial role in the self-definition of artistic elites. Reshaping the dominant stylistic traits of clothing in favour of looser more romantic forms of dress, Aesthetic Dress was not only designed and worn by members of the Aesthetic movement, but also utilized as a form of artistic inscription in the art produced at that time. It was expressive through a language of bodily gestures, historical referents and effects of drapery, form, and colour. Aesthetic Dress was also inflected by competing discourses of health and morality which characterize the dress reform movement during the second half of the nineteenth century. I also address the absorption of alternative modes of artistic dressing into mainstream fashion in the context of popular culture. My research, by focussing on the social significance of alternative forms of dress in relation to both art and culture, redefines and historically situates Aesthetic Dress as a meaningful category in the history of visual culture, rather than examining it solely as a function of artistic elitism, or as a by-product of material culture.