War and Wellingtons: Military Footwear in the Age of Empire

What do your shoes say about you? Shoes are now much more than just things to walk in. From kids on the block to models on the catwalk, we use them to signal how fashionable we are. But, beyond style, this most intimate object communicates much more . . . our sexual desires, aesthetic sense, social status and personality. And, before they became supreme objects of desire, shoes had a history. From ancient times to the present, shoes have had a cultural as well as a practical purpose. Within these pages is pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about shoes - the tiny crushing shoes of China, the infamous chopine with its 23-inch heel, how dandies made men's shoes beautiful in the eighteenth century, and how the powers of conservatism made them dull again, war and the wellington boot, sex and the high heel, the codes of the "gay shoe," shoes in fairytales and in art, the irresistible rise of the sneaker, and the cult of shoe designers.</p

Pigments empoisonnés. Les verts arsenicaux

[from para. 1]: "Le 20 novembre 1861, Matilda Scheurer, une fabricante de fleurs artificielles âgée de 19 ans, décède d’empoisonnement « accidentel ». La jeune femme autrefois « belle » et en bonne santé, travaillait pour M. Bergeron, au centre de Londres, avec une centaine d’autres employés. pour M. Bergeron, au centre de Londres, avec une centaine d’autres employés. Elle époussetait des feuilles artificielles couvertes d’une poudre verte attrayante qu’elle inhalait à chaque inspiration et dont elle absorbait les traces souillant ses mains à chaque repas. La teinte brillante de ce pigment vert, utilisé pour colorer les robes et les ornements de cheveux comme cette couronne française élaborée et conservée au Boston Museum of Fine Art, a été obtenue en mélangeant du cuivre et du trioxyde de diarsenic hautement toxique, généralement connu sous le nom « d’arsenic blanc » ." </p

Decorated Men: Fashioning the French Soldier, 1852-1914

Finery is so instinctual for men, and for the Frenchman in particular, that, in spite of their theories, the fiercest egalitarians from the National Convention to the Commune have festooned themselves with scarves, feathers, braid and multicolored cloth.... Well! This inclination is more worthy of praise than condemnation... Men think, and above all, act differently according to which costume they don: dress the most cowardly of men up in a French officer's, uniform and then get back to me...     Gabriel Prévost, Le nu, le vêtement, la parure chez l'homme et la femme (1883)     In an 1864 caricature by the artist Draner, a member of Napoleon Ill's elite bodyguard poses in front of a milliner's shop. With his hat perched jauntily on his head, cape tossed over his shoulder, and long legs swathed in bright red and blue cloth, he usurps the traditional place of the elegant woman on the boulevard. The caricaturist's intention is clear: this officer is a fashion plate himself, a military mannequin. He takes his role seriously: he faces the viewer, seemingly unaware of the admiring glances directed at him by the shop women, whose pale gowns fade in comparison with the flamboyance of his peacock hues. He does not look at the merchandise, he is the merchandise -- a living advertisement for the glamour of the French army. Draner was not alone in his characterization of members of the Hundred Guards. Henri Bouchot, who described the different regiments of the Second Empire wrote: "The Hundred-Guards are more like 'pretty women,' marked by their refined shapeliness" (Bouchot 1898: 294). As unusual as this image may seem to a modern viewer, the juxtaposition between soldier and woman of fashion was not an anomaly in the nineteenth century. Decorated and decorative men were an integral part of the landscape in the latter half of the century, a part of the sartorial environment that historical scholarship has neglected.</p

Techniques toxiques. Chapeaux mercuriels

[para. 1]: "Le musée des Moulages de l’Hôpital Saint-Louis à Paris abrite des murs entiers de vitrines renfermant des moulages en cire reproduisant les maladies de peau dont sont affectés les pauvres de la capitale mondiale de la mode. Ils sont d’un réalisme saisissant."</p

Blazing Ballet Girls and Flannelette Shrouds: Fabric, Fire, and Fear in the Long Nineteenth Century

Fire was one of the most terrifying dangers for women and children in the nineteenth century. Many burned to death in highly inflammable clothing. A new, sylph-like Romantic feminine ideal in dress arose in tandem with the gas lighting that illuminated the light white cottons and almost “immaterial” materials that became fashionable during the Neoclassical period. These textiles included machine-woven gauze, tulle, and tarlatane, and they put working-class ballet dancers pirouetting near gas footlamps at particular risk. French prima ballerina Emma Livry died when her tutu caught on fire, and the charred remains of her costume are still preserved at the Musée-bibliothèque de l’Opéra in Paris. In the late 1870s, another popular, mass-produced fabric, flannelette, was sold as a cheap, washable substitute for woolen flannel. Yet the soft, raised, furry “nap” of the fabric that kept children warm set them ablaze because most working-class homes lacked proper fire guards. In response to the dangers ushered in by these new products, textile manufacturers and chemists attempted to flameproof them, but these fireproofed fabrics were not widely adopted. This article maps emotional responses to clothing accidents, tracing a shift from the romantic individualization of early nineteenth-century fire deaths to the anonymous statistical analysis and detached scientific observation of accidents in the late nineteenth century. It considers the role of the researcher’s and curator’s own emotional reactions to the material remains of disturbing garments that still bear the traces of physical trauma in their very fibers.</p

Fashion's Chameleons: Camouflage, “Conspicuousness,” and Gendered Display During World War I

Other creatures grow their clothing on their individual bodies; scales, or bristles, fur or feathers—they have but one suit, self-replenished. They may clean it perhaps, but cannot change it—save … the chameleon. The human animal shows in its clothing as conspicuously as in many other ways, the peculiar power of extra-physical expression.</p

Tainted Love: Oscar Wilde’s Toxic Green Carnation, Queerness, and Chromophobia

Color speaks a powerful cultural language, conveying political, sexual, and economic messages that, throughout history, have revealed how we relate to ourselves and our world. This ground-breaking compilation is the first to investigate how color in fashionable and ceremonial dress has played a significant social role, indicating acceptance and exclusion, convention and subversion. From white used for pioneering feminism to the penchant for black in post-war France, and from mystical scarlet broadcloth to the horrors of arsenic-laden green fashion, this publication demonstrates that color in dress is never straightforward and is as mutable, nuanced, and varied as color itself. Divided into four thematic parts – solidarity, power, innovation, and desire – each section highlights the often violent, emotional histories of color in dress across geographical, temporal and cultural boundaries. Underlying today’s relaxed attitude to color lies a chromatic complexity that speaks of wars, migrations and economics. While acknowledging the importance that technology has played in the development of new dyes, the chapters explore color as a catalyst for technical innovation that continues to inspire designers, artists, and performers. Bringing together cutting-edge contributions from leading scholars, it is essential reading for academics of fashion, textiles, design, cultural studies and art history.</p

Made to measure? Tailoring and the ‘normal’ body in nineteenth-century France

[para. 1]: "During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientists, administrators, artists and doctors abstracted and depersonalised the human body using a new tool: statistics. As Ian Hacking argues in The Taming of Chance, the nineteenth century established the hegemony of statistical measurement as a mode of scientific and social investigation.1I am interested in the profound effects this growing determinism had on conceptions of the male body. The Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci revived classical canons of bodily pro-portions based on abstract geometry in his drawing of Vitruvian Man. By contrast, early statisticians such as Adolphe Quetelet mathematically quantified the height, weight and chest measurements of flesh-and-blood populations and used his measurements to calculate bodily means or norms. In effect, he defined the concept of the ‘average man’. All individual variations could literally be measured against this normative but abstract body. The quirks of the asymmetrical human being – who had uneven shoulders, a curved spine or a large stomach – became abnormal deviations rather than personal traits. Many contemporary social commentators read these infinite variations as visible markers of the degenerative effects of urban modernity. The depressing ‘realities’ of these pathological symptoms came into increasing conflict with classical, medical and fashionable models of the ideal body. The contrast between the ideal and the average man was debated in the realms of art, medicine and the military, domains that often overlapped in nineteenth-century discourse.3This chapter focuses on the practice of tailoring – a process of production and consumption in which the problem of dressing actual, not ideal, bodies was a constant and compelling concern."</p

Vogue's New World: American Fashionability and the Politics of Style

[para. 1]: "Despite the French connotations of its title, the first Vogue was an inherently American cultural phenomenon. It began in New York in 1892 as social gazette for a Eurocentric elite and became a more professional and self-confidently patriotic publication under the directorship of Condé Nast, who purchased it in 1909. Although Vogue has always maintained its aloofness as an elite women's publication, this article links the magazine with the geographical and social conditions of its production. The magazine carefully negotiated the urban and demographic fabric of Manhattan at a period when concepts of national and gender identity were undergoing a radical transformation. In the face of mass immigration and the rise of new models of womanhood during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, early Vogue adopted a largely conservative stance. However, as the magazine's editorial staff and market audience changed during its first three decades, Vogue began to renounce the snobbery of the social networks of the Gilded Age (the period from 1870 to 1914). While it maintained privileged ties to Europe, it also began to embrace more populist understandings of "authentic" American taste and style in dress. This new nationalism included a greater acceptance of mass-produced and branded goods, an attitude which typifies American fashion design and production in the twentieth century."</p

First Impressions: Footprints as Forensic Evidence in Crime in Fact and Fiction

As skilled ‘detectives’, dress historians are experts in closely reading surviving artefacts and using them to glean evidence of the lives of those who made and wore them. With shoes and footwear, this rich, object-based approach can yield new information that challenges established histories. This article turns traditional object analysis on its head by interrogating instead the impressions and traces that objects leave behind, taking a forensic approach to footwear. It examines the rise of scientific policing and the history of footprints as a key form of evidence in crime fact and fiction. Five key British and Francophone stories and novels written between 1833 and 1931 provide a barometer of how narratives of the capital offence of murder and footwear evidence shifted during this century. These are interwoven with contemporary forensic science texts, police handbooks, newspaper articles and trial transcripts from the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, commonly known as the Old Bailey. This article charts the shift in perceptions that occurred between 1830 and 1890, which I call the ‘Age of Conviction’, a period where there was a widespread belief in the veracity of prints, to an ‘Age of Suspicion’ from 1890 to 1930, as more scientific and critical methods of examination and recording made detectives and the public sceptical and wary of deception. This expanse of earth covered with snow is a white page upon which the people we are in search of have written, not only their movements, their goings, and comings, but also their secret thoughts, their alternate hopes and anxieties. What do these foot-prints say to you, Papa Absinthe? To me they are alive like the persons who made them; they breathe, speak, accuse! (Émile Gaboriau, Monsieur Lecoq (1868), p. 27)</p