Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising Tiger’s Leap: Fashion Past, Present, Future Part II

Walter Benjamin introduced the notion of the “tiger’s leap” in reference to neoclassicism, or the revival of styles associated with classical Greco-Roman antiquity. Specifically, he called attention to the neoclassicism that emerged during the period of the French Revolution (1789-99). He noted how the culture of the French Revolution “evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past.”[i] Following the overthrow of the monarchy and adoption of proto-democratic values, the political climate of the Revolution and subsequent First French Republic (1792-1804) and Empire (1804-15) was reflected in a revival of Greco-Roman styles in art, decorative art, and fashion.

In the early 1800s, high-waisted gowns made from sheer white cotton skimmed the body in a manner reminiscent of classical marble sculpture. The drapery of classical sculpture seems to exist outside of the perceived whims and vanities of fashion.[ii] While classicism is steady and unchanging, fashion is restless. Yet, preoccupations with the classical can be linked to changing contextual factors. Benjamin’s “tiger’s leap” dates from 1940, when the early horrors of the Second World War were unfolding while the traumatic scars of the First World War were still omnipresent. Revivals of classicism during the interwar period have been linked to a desire for bodily wholeness, unification, and stability.[iii] Draping responds perfectly to this desire by approaching the whole body in the round, unlike tailoring and pattern making which divide the body into parts. Women’s fashions in the 1930s saw a revival of drapery, with designers such as Madame Grès being compared to sculptors. The garments in this section add color back to the marble sculptures whose polychrome paints have faded over time to create historically inaccurate associations between classicism and the color white.

[i] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), 261.

[ii] Judith Clark and Adam Phillips, The Vulgar: Fashion Re-Defined (London: Koenig, 2016), 32.

[iii] Alison Bancroft, Fashion and Psychoanalysis: Styling the Self (London: IB Tauris, 2012); Lucy Moyse Ferreira, Danger in the Path of Chic: Violence in Fashion Between the Wars *(London: Bloomsbury, 2021); Paula Alaszkiewicz “The Fragmented Fashion Body: Mannequins and the Paris Exposition Internationale, 1937.” Fashion Studies 5, no. 1 (2024): https://doi.org/10.38055/FS050111.

The corset is one of fashion’s most controversial garments. It is charged with eroticism and is linked to historical practices of controlling and regulating women’s bodies. Various forms of structural undergarments have been worn in Western European women’s fashion since the sixteenth century. At this time, undergarments began to be reinforced with rigid vertical strips or “busks” made from wood, ivory, or whalebone that were intended to support proper posture beneath layers of heavy and cumbersome garments.

Corsetry changed significantly in the nineteenth century. Prevailing gender discourse perpetuated women’s bodies as weak, and therefore in need of the supportive structure of corsetry.[i] In the 1820s, the introduction of metal eyelets allowed for tighter lacing of corsets, leading to reported reductions of three to ten inches from natural waist measurements. However, scholars caution that extreme tight lacing was not a common practice amongst corset wearers.[ii] At the same time, nineteenth-century medical professionals were concerned about the long-term bodily harms caused by corsetry, including pressure on the lungs and deformed ribs. Although awareness of these dangers was growing, there was no socially acceptable alternative to corsetry for women at the time.

The extent to which corsets harmed the body remains the subject of debate. Recently, scholars have advocated for greater consideration of corseted women’s agency in their own sexuality.[iii] However, it is undeniable that corsetry was a tool used to control women’s bodies. This makes the numerous revivals of corsetry since the late twentieth century a fascinating topic. Following Vivienne Westwood’s famous remaking of the corset as outerwear in 1987 and the pink satin Jean Paul Gaultier corset worn by Madonna in 1989, the corset has regularly cycled through fashion and is currently a popular trend. According to British Vogue, the “rib-crunching corset” was reawakened at the 2024 Met Gala—the event considered by most to be the Superbowl of fashion.[iv] While some interpret recent revivals of the corset as an empowered subversion of outdated gender norms, others have questioned if the corset can ever be considered as “feminist.”[v] Can contemporary corsets and corset-inspired fashions be separated from histories of gender oppression?

[i] Valerie Steele and Coleen Gau, “Corset,” in The Berg Companion to Fashion, ed. Valerie Steele (Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2010), 166.

[ii] Valerie Steele, “The Corset: Fashion and Eroticism,” Fashion Theory 3, no. 4 (1999), 449 and David Kunzle, “Dress Reform as Antifeminism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2, no. 4 (Spring 1977): 574.

[iii] Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 5.

[iv] Daniel Rodgers, “The Rib-Crunching Corset Was The True ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Reawoken at the 2024 Met Gala,” British Vogue, May 7, 2024: https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/kim-kardashian-extreme-corset-trend-met-gala-2024.

[v] Alexander Fury, “Can a Corset Be Feminist?,” T: New York Times Style Magazine, November 15, 2016: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/t-magazine/fashion/corset-history-feminism.html

This section juxtaposes two ensembles: a walking suit from the early 1880s and a skirt suit from the 1960s. Despite the decades separating these looks, they share remarkable similarities in the long lines of buttons cascading the length of their bodices and gathered bustles on the back of their skirts. Positioned together, the two mannequins reference the established convention of fashion plates, or the hand-painted engraved prints that were published in early fashion magazines. The framed images on the wall are reproductions of fashion plates from 1822-1883.

By the mid-nineteenth century, most fashion plates were composed of a pair of idealized white women, typically dressed in variations of a similar garment. In addition to showcasing the latest fashionable styles, the prints depicted intimate bonds of friendship and sisterhood. These picturesque scenes were located within private domestic spaces, as well as newly-accessible public spaces, such as parks and cafés. Some fashion plates feature activities like skating and hiking, or holidays at the seaside. Historians credit fashion plates with representing women’s increasing mobility, autonomy, and independence in nineteenth-century cities.[i] Sharon Marcus, a feminist literary scholar, suggests that fashion plates involved a gendered structure of looking in which women consume images of women.[ii] Additionally, fashion plates were primarily made by women. Therefore, they are important examples of imagery of women made by women for women.

[i] Justine de Young, “Representing the Modern Woman: The Fashion Plate Reconsidered (1865-75), in Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914, ed. Temma Balducci and Heather Belnap Jensen (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 97-114.

[ii] Sharon Marcus, “Reflections on Victorian Fashion Plates,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2003):12.

From desert boots to cargo pants and camouflage prints, military uniforms have influenced fashion for centuries. In the nineteenth century, near-constant wars between colonizers and Indigenous peoples, the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15), American Civil War (1861-65), Austro-Prussian War (1866) and Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) had notable impacts on women’s fashion. Tailored bodices with military-inspired bouillon fringe and soutache braid embellishments were a way to signal patriotism and solidarity at a time when military service was largely reserved for men. In this sense, military influence in nineteenth-century fashion also saw stylistic cues crossing binary gender lines between menswear and womenswear. The title “avant garde” is therefore doubly appropriate here. In everyday speech, “avant garde” means ground-breaking and innovative, but the term originally referred to the reconnaissance unit, or the “advanced guard,” of the French army that scouted terrain ahead of the main army corps.

The impact of the Second World War (1939-1945) on fashion was significant. Rationing limited the amount of fabric, width of lapels, and numbers of buttons permitted on civilian garments. Moreover, the symmetrical tailoring and “practicality” of military uniforms was readily apparent in the streamlined silhouettes of women’s fashions. Adhering to rationing and adopting wartime silhouettes was a way of demonstrating support on the home front.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, social etiquette mandated rigid rules and rituals for conduct during mourning, including appropriate dress. Mourning attire consisted of matte wool and silk crape fabrics dyed black, which absorb, rather than reflect, light. Beads made from the gemstone jet provided suitable decoration during the full and half mourning phases. It was suggested that widows wear mourning dress for at least two and half years.

The visibility of “proper” mourning attire increased in 1861 when Queen Victoria of England (1819-1901), then aged 45, was widowed. She remained in mourning attire for the remainder of her life. During this time, mourning dress received attention from fashionable magazines and retailers. Certain historians suggest that the gradual “fashionization” of mourning attire paved the way for the introduction of the “little black dress.”[1] Accordingly, this section juxtaposes nineteenth-century mourning attire with fashionable black dresses from the various decades of the twentieth century. While these “leaps” demonstrate clear stylistic similarities, including voided velvets, lace embellishments, and ruffled flutter sleeves, the symbolic meaning of the color black in Euro-American fashion changed significantly between the represented periods.

[1] Valerie Mendres, Black in Fashion (Victoria and Albert Museum, 1999), 9.

This theme explores the association of lace and gender expression. When lace first developed in the early modern world, it was worn by men and women alike. Yet, for the past two hundred years, lace has been strongly linked with “femininity” in a binary view of gender. Within this period, the meaning of lace has been “twisted” many times.

Lace figures in the “underwear as outerwear” trend that routinely cycles through fashion. So-called “lingerie” dresses were extremely fashionable in the Edwardian period (1901-1910). The name of this style is informed by its materials—white gauzy cotton or linen with lace detailing—which were commonly used in undergarments. Despite the name, the lingerie dress was outerwear. It was worn on summer afternoons for leisure activities, becoming a sign of “respectable” and “appropriate” femininity. Initially, lingerie dresses “represented the unhurried, tidy lifestyle of upper-class women” because the handmade lace was expensive and required careful laundering.[i] Eventually, as the style grew more popular, versions with machine-made lace were available at a variety of prices.

The white lingerie dress as a symbol of “respectable” femininity was used strategically by British suffragettes and American suffragists advocating for women’s right to vote in the early twentieth century. Dressing in white for marches created visual unity amongst disparate bodies. In contrast to the darker colors of masculine dress of the period, white was “a purified and visible marker of difference, conforming to gender binaries of the period, and was thus reassuringly feminine.”[ii] The lingerie dress countered perceptions of the suffrage movement as threatening and radical; associations between white, purity, and femininity were deployed to align the movement with familiarity and safety.

This section leaps from the early years of the 1900s to the 1980s, when the California-based designer Nancy Johnson produced garments with career women in mind. Designers were responding to the increasing number of women in the workforce by offering versions of the “power suit,” which is a men’s garment adapted for women. The power suit followed advice for working women to “dress like men, without being too threatening.”[iii] Nancy Johnson disagreed with this approach, stating that women “do not feel the need to dress according to a standard that businessmen have set.”[iv] Instead, Johnson re-routed romantic and picturesque styles, many adorned with handmade lace, from the tearoom to the boardroom. Once again, the meaning and gendered associations of lace were subject to remaking.

[i] Megan Stevenson, “‘A Charming Consideration’: Edwardian Lingerie Dresses,” Documenting Fashion: A Dress History Blog , June 20, 2017: https://sites.courtauld.ac.uk/documentingfashion/2017/06/20/edwardian-lingerie-dresses/

[ii] Kimberly Wahl, “Purity and Parity: The White Dress of the Suffrage Movement in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,” in Colors in Fashion, ed. Jonathan Faiers and Mary Westerman Bulgarella, (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 22.

[iii] Ashawnta Jackson, “The History of the Power Suit for Women,” JSTOR Daily, October 29, 2021: https://daily.jstor.org/the-history-of-the-power-suit-for-women/.

[iv] Paddy Calistro, “New World Entrepreneur Focuses on Nostalgia,” LA Times, June 2, 1989: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-06-02-vw-1278-story.html.

In 1998, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City organized an exhibition titled The Ceaseless Century: 300 Years of Eighteenth-Century Costume. The exhibition, curated by Richard Martin, explored the seemingly infinite quotations of the eighteenth-century in subsequent fashion design. As Martin explained, “in fashion, in particular, the eighteenth century is a model for dress of artifice and exuberance, ostentation and ornamentation, even as those elements atrophy in much modern clothing. The century might end at calendar’s duration, but its dreamlike aura of opulence and of strong individualism within a structured society is ceaseless.”[1]

This section of Tiger’s Leap: Fashion Past, Present, Future distills Richard Martin’s curatorial thesis into a single object, a robe de style from the 1920s. The extended hips reference the distinct shape of eighteenth-century court dress, as pictured in the accompanying illustration of fashionable dress from 1778. In the eighteenth century, “pannier” undergarments supported skirts that widened at the hips yet remained flat in the front and back (see image below). While the maker of this dress is unknown, the robe de style is most associated with the French designer Jeanne Lanvin (1867–1946). In addition to this nod to the eighteenth century, Lanvin is celebrated for incorporating Medieval and Renaissance references in her designs.

[1] Richard Martin, The Ceaseless Century: 300 Years of Eighteenth-Century Costume (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 8.

The curved teardrop or pinecone-shaped motif featured in this section is known as boteh, meaning “shrub,” in Persian and buta in the Indian subcontinent. Trade routes connecting the Islamic empires of Safavid Iran and Mughal India fostered cross-cultural exchange and influence. Beginning in the sixteenth century, weavers in the presently disputed Kashmir region of the northern Indian subcontinent utilized an Iranian technique to produce pashmina wool shawls with fine boteh/buta patterns. The twill tapestry weave required numerous highly skilled artisans working on a single piece. With the labor of three weavers, simple designs took three months to produce while shawls with complex designs, which were woven as mirror-image pairs that were joined together, could take more than one year to complete.[1]

Shawls with boteh motifs produced in Kashmir appeared in Europe in the 1770s. By the early years of the 1800s, these shawls were extremely desirable. They provided warmth and decoration to fashionable neoclassical dresses made from thin white cotton muslin, as pictured in countless fashion plates (Object 39). Despite regular and dramatic changes in silhouettes, Boteh shawls remained fashionable until the 1870s. As the European market for these shawls expanded, textile producers in Scotland and Northeast England sought to replicate the Kashmiri shawls. In the absence of equivalent raw materials and specialized weaving skills refined over generations, producers turned to a new industrial innovation: the Jacquard loom. This loom, patented in 1804, mechanized the process of weaving patterns into fabric making it more time efficient while requiring less labor. Furthermore, the Jacquard loom allows for very dense patterns that were nearly impossible to create in the twill tapestry technique. The town of Paisley, Scotland, a prominent weaving center in the nineteenth century, is the namesake of the English word for boteh/buta motifs.

Paisley has since become a ubiquitous pattern in Euro-American fashion. As it leaps between time periods, its meaning evolves. However, its original “leap” from Kashmir to Europe had profound consequences. The historian Janet Rizvi summarizes: “The story of Europe’s romance with the Kashmir shawl is a chronicle, not only of the theft of intellectual property (the buta/paisley), but also of the blatant and conscious exercise of economic power that took a product of beauty and worth, imitated it, commodified it, used the cheap imitations to undercut the position of the original in its traditional markets, and finally threw the original into fashion’s dustbin.”[2] Once discarded amongst fashion’s trash, it awaited eventual revival as a tiger’s leap.

[1] Shahzeen Nasim, “Kashmir to Paisley,” Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, July 29, 2016, https://www.cooperhewitt.org/2016/07/29/kashmir-to-paisley/

[2] Janet Rizvi, “The Kashmir Shawl and its Use in the Indo-Islamic World and Europe,” in Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: South Asia and Southeast Asia, ed. Jasleen Dhamija (Bloomsbury, 2010).

Optical illusions are prevalent in the patterns and textiles in this section. Two of the dresses (Objects 41 and 43) represent op art, an abstract art style based on optical illusions often formed of black and white geometric shapes and patterns. The term “op art’ was coined in Time magazine in 1964. The two dresses with op art patterns also date from the 1960s. One (Object 43) features an additional layer of illusion; it is a paper dress. In 1966, Scott Paper, an American company that manufactured toilet roll and other household products, launched disposable paper dresses. The dresses cost $1.25 each and were available by mail order. The so-called “paper dresses” were made from a non-woven cellulose-based fabric called Dura-Weave. The dresses were incredibly popular; over 500 000 orders were placed in less than a year.[i] Other companies quickly followed suit. These inexpensive garments responded to a growing consumer appetite for constant newness. Since paper dresses ripped easily and did not withstand washing, they were only intended be worn once or twice.

Looking back at fashion history, paper dresses signal a key moment in the development of the fast fashion system. Ultimately, the trend for paper dresses was short-lived. However, their legacy lives on in other non-woven goods, including surgical masks and Tyvek coveralls. Tyvek is used by museums to protect objects from dust, light, and other elements. It is also the material used in the dress in this section from the 1990s (Object 42). While the design echoes the silhouette and monochromatic palette of the 1960s dresses, it replaces the bold op art patterns with embroidered floral sprigs. Like the perpetual rebirth of fashion, these spring buds are ready to burst and blossom into something new.

[i] “Paper Dresses,” Victoria and Albert Museum, accessed September 10, 2024:  https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/paper-dresses?srsltid=AfmBOoox9d1bWpWKc6_urvJyMjmLFgq8Z4rp_OvuHpAqjgJ_ImepuRRj.