Casual Friday: After the Ball

Loretta reports:

I happened on this little bit of early filmmaking, clearly made to titillate.  There seemed to be a good deal of that happening in the early days of cinema:  lots of scantily clad women.  There are certainly some oddities in this one—like, what is that stuff the maid is pouring on her?  But ye persons of historical nerdiness will appreciate this golden opportunity to see what layers a woman would be wearing in the late 1800s, and what went over and under what.

Après le Bal is a film by George Melies, whose name film buffs and anybody who's seen Hugo will quickly recognize.

Illustration is a possible image for during the ball:  Albert von Keller's Lady Dancing, 1900.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see only a rectangle or square where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

A White Summer Day Dress, Worn Two Ways, c 1875

Isabella reporting,

As promised here, I'm sharing more from the exhibition Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 27, 2013 and then at the Art Institute of Chicago, June 27-September 22, 2013.

The focus of the exhibition is the relationship between women's fashion 1860-1880 and the Impressionist painters working during the same time. James Tissot (1836-1902) enjoyed painting beautiful women, and lavished much care on the details of their clothing. (I've shared another of his paintings here.) White cotton batiste dresses were popular for summer day-wear in the late 1870s, the feminine light fabric showing off the endless ruffles, tucks, and gathers that embellished the bustled gowns. In these two paintings, hung side by side in the exhibition, Tissot painted the same dress to very different effect.

In Portrait, left, the young lady (her identity is now unknown) is wearing the dress as it was designed, over a long, stiff corset, multiple petticoats, and a bustle - the height of fashion in 1874. It's the undergarments that give both the dress and the lady the stylish, vertical shape. Tissot emphasises the crispness of the fabric, with every pleat sharply ironed and briskly delineated. Even the bright yellow silk bows seem animated, like butterflies that have lighted for a fleeting moment on the white cotton.

But when the dress reappears four years later in July: Specimen of a Portrait, right, the mood and the dress are altogether different. Dated from 1878, this picture is a portrait of Tissot's long-time mistress Kathleen Newton, comfortably seated on a couch before the open window of a seaside house. Her languid pose captures the heat of the summer afternoon, with her hair pinned up in a casual, slightly frizzy topknot.

The white dress, too, is at ease. Gone are the restrictive corset and layered petticoats. Now the cotton softly drapes over Kathleen's natural body and crossed legs, and the translucent sleeves seem to cling damply to her arms. Even the yellow ribbons have relaxed, the silk no longer crisp, but faded and limp.

The notes from the Museum's curator suggest that the second painting reflects a change in fashion during the intervening years, a shift from a fuller silhouette to a narrower one. To me, it looks like a more personal transition, a crisp, new dress first worn formally, that over time becomes relegated to the status of a comfortable old favorite.

There is, of course, no "right" answer here, since neither Kathleen Newton nor James Tissot are here to ask. What do you think?

Above: Portrait, by James Tissot, c. 1874. Tate.
Below: July: Specimen of a Portrait, by James Tissot, c. 1878. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Fashions for April 1813

Loretta reports:

April fashions for 200 years ago.  Does it seem that far away to you?

 

 

—Ackermann's Repository, 1813

 Please click on the illustrations to enlarge.

Fake Beards & Face-Paint: the Dreadnought Hoax, 1910

Isabella reporting,

With April Fools still prowling about, it seems like appropriate to mention one of the most outlandish pranks of the Edwardian era. (Remember this earlier hoax from 1809?) In our time of hyper-security and identity checks, it's impossible to imagine a group of artists and writers in cheesy costumes bluffing their way onto a royal  navy ship – but that's exactly what happened in what became known as the "Dreadnought Hoax."

On February 7, 1910, six members of the Bloomsbury group planned an elaborate lark.  Dressed in improvised costumes and with fake beards pasted on their faces, they presented themselves as a party of Abyssinian princes with their Foreign Office guides to the crew of the HMS Dreadnought, flagship of the home fleet. The costumes were not particularly good - see the photograph above - and one fake beard even disguised a woman, the writer Virginia Woolf (far left in the photo).

Yet they succeeded in fooling not only the captain and crew of the Dreadnought, but an admiral as well. They were welcomed on board the ship with full honors, marines at attention, the band playing, and African flags flying. The ship's officers invited the visitors to dine with them, which the visitors politely declined, claiming the food and drink would be inappropriately prepared for their diets. In reality, they feared the glue holding their beards in place would not survive a meal.

The mastermind of the plot, infamous practical joker Horace de Vere Cole, described the hoax in a letter to a friend:

"It was glorious! Shriekingly funny – I nearly howled when introducing the four princes to the admiral and then to the captain, for I made their names up in the train, but I forgot which was which, and introduced them under various names, but it did not matter....

"I was so amused at being just myself in a tall hat [Cole played the part of one of the English guides] – I had no disguise whatever and talked in an ordinary friendly way to everyone – the others talked nonsense. We had all learned some Swahili: I said they were "jolly savages" but that I didn't understand much of what they said...It began to rain slightly on the ship and we only just got the princes under cover in time, another moment and their complexions would have been running – Are you amused? I am...Yesterday was a day worth living."

But while Cole was amused, many others were not. Within days the details of the hoax became widely known, with the newspapers devoting much page-space to the story as well as printing cartoons like the one, right, that are appalling to us now. The Edwardians may have been elegant, but they could also be audaciously arrogant and insensitive - imagine the international incident that this "hoax" would cause today!

Even in 1910, parliament demanded answers about the lack of security, while the navy was forced to endure the humiliation of being the butt of the entire affair. Even Cole was almost (almost) sorry about that, noting that the officers "were tremendously polite and nice – couldn't have been nicer: one almost regretted the outrage on their hospitality."

Above: Photograph of the participants in the Dreadnought Hoax, 1910. From collection of Horace de Vere Cole.
Below: "Once Bitten, Twice Shy", cartoon from the Daily Mirror, February, 1910.

Easter Monday & Greenwich Fair according to Dickens

Loretta reports:

Dickens's lively account of Greenwich Fair. 

~~~

GREENWICH FAIR
If the Parks be "the lungs of London," we wonder what Greenwich Fair is—a periodical breaking out, we suppose, a sort of spring-rash: a three days' fever, which cools the blood for six months afterwards, and at the expiration of which London is restored to its old habits of plodding industry, as suddenly and completely as if nothing had ever happened to disturb them.
...
The chief place of resort in the daytime, after the public-houses, is the park, in which the principal amusement is to drag young ladies up the steep hill which leads to the Observatory, and then drag them down again, at the very top of their speed, greatly to the derangement of their curls and bonnet-caps, and much to the edification of lookers-on from below. "Kiss in the Ring," and "Threading my Grandmother's Needle," too, are sports which receive their full share of patronage. Love-sick swains, under the influence of gin-and-water, and the tender passion, become violently affectionate: and the fair objects of their regard enhance the value of stolen kisses, by a vast deal of struggling, and holding down of heads, and cries of "Oh! Ha' done, then, George—Oh, do tickle him for me, Mary—Well, I never!" and similar Lucretian ejaculations. Little old men and women, with a small basket under one arm, and a wine-glass, without a foot, in the other hand, tender "a drop o' the right sort" to the different groups; and young ladies, who are persuaded to indulge in a drop of the aforesaid right sort, display a pleasing degree of reluctance to taste it, and cough afterwards with great propriety.
—Sketches by Boz Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People, 1836

You can read the entire funny and vivid account here at Google Books or here at Internet Archive.
There's more about it here.  And James Grant wrote his own account in his Sketches in London, 1838 (with illustrations by Phiz, or Hablot Knight Browne, who also illustrated for Dickens.  More about the fair here.

Illustrations from Pierce Egan's The Pilgrims of the Thames, in Search of the National! 1838.