The Ohio Sports Almanac - Orange Frazer Press - Paperback Book

1 – Fashion, Art, and the Marketing of Modernism

p.19 – What set Charles Frederick Worth apart from previous dressmakers to the international aristocracy and wealthy bourgeoisie was not simply that he was male rather than female (although this did constitute a potentially scandalous departure from the prevailing norm, it also effectively raised the stature of the heretofore predominantly female dressmaking profession), but rather that, for the first time, fashionable women’s wear was the creation of a single designer who not only selected the fabrics and ornaments that made up any given outfit but who developed the design and produced the final product. Worth’s success in consolidating these previously distinct operations enabled him to exercise extraordinary influence over the direction of France’s luxury textiles industry and to gain control of all aspects of the dressmaking process. He was, therefore, in a position to dictate the character of each dress he designed down to its smallest details and, more importantly, to position haute couture as a powerful force for regularization in the increasingly rapid pace of fashionable innovation through the semi-annual rhythm of its presentations of new models.

p.21 – Having taken command of the design, production, and distribution processes for the gowns he created, Worth was able to set the tone for high fashion during the last third of the nineteenth century, and to charge his clients accordingly. Costume historian Diana de Marly notes that “it did not suffice to be merely wealthy to go to Worth, a client had to be in the millionaire or rich aristocratic class.” Worth gowns, particularly those intended to be worn at formal court appearances and masquerade balls, typically incorporated extremely expensive materials such as silk, brocade, or handmade lace. The labor-intensive nature of hand embroidery and the other specialized sewing techniques required in their production also contributed to the high price of his dresses.

2 – Theater and the Spectacle of Fashion

p.101 – The most famous of Paul Poiret’s extravagant parties, to which he gave the title “The Thousand and Second Night,” was a fantasy based on the tales of The Arabian Nights that came to life on the evening of 24 June 1911. For that occasion, Poiret and his wife required their 300 guests (mostly artists and patrons of the arts) to dress up in “Oriental” costumes.

p.102 – Those who failed to do so were refused entry, unless they were willing to outfit themselves on the spot in Persian-style clothes that Poiret had designed “according to authentic documents.” Thus, Poiret used the occasion of an extraordinarily sumptuous party to demand that everyone in his circle accept the controversial features of his latest couture creations, including the jupe-culotte and harem trousers, which dominated his spring 1911 collection of women’s clothes introduced early that year, probably in response to the impact of Léon Bakst’s designs for the Ballets Russes production of Schéhérazade, which Poiret, who regularly attended the theater and other prominent cultural venues in Paris, had seen when it premiered there on 4 June 1910.

p.103 – Although Poiret always resisted any suggestion that the was indebted to the Ballets Russes for his introduction to “Oriental” styles of dress, and there is evidence to support the contention that he arrived independently at an interest in the tales of The Arabian Nights, particularly Schéhérazade, Bakst’s costumes and stage designs had indeed been hugely influential. Bakst himself noted in a letter to his wife written after the public dress rehearsal of Schéhérazade that “the whole of Paris now dresses in ‘Oriental’ clothes.”

p.104 – As Alexander Schouvaloff has pointed out, “At the time, everything east of Suez was called ‘Oriental,’ but Schéhérazade was not the real Orient. It was a Russian idea of an Orient as seen by the French, and they were taken in by it because they had not seen anything like it on stage before. There was, after all, nothing new about the Orient as such – it had been more or less in fashion since the time of Delacroix – but everything was new about Schéhérazade.

p.118 – After 1880, French women gained access to state-sponsored secondary education and subsequently began to enter the job market in areas that had traditionally been restricted to men. Their potential mobility and independence, whether they wore culottes or not, were increasingly perceived as a threat to the traditional social structure based upon the sexual division of labor and a controversial role for women within the confines of the family rather than out in the public domain.

p.119 – Around the turn of the century, the image of a culotte- or trouser-clad woman on a bicycle circulated widely on posters and in cartoons where this femme nouvelle was often represented as a muscular, cigarette-smoking androgyne. Comparable suggestions of sexual inversion were at work in the Oriental costumes that Bakst designed for the Ballets Russes, and not only because women wore trousers; men’s clothing could also challenge conversional gender categories. For example, in Schéhérazade, Nijinsky wore billowing trousers and a brassiere-like top supported at the shoulders and decorated at the midriff by strands of pearls.