February is Fashion History Month

Costume history is a subject that I find utterly enchanting and the shelves in my office groan with stacks and stacks of books on the topic. Normally I have to travel to distant places to get my fashion history fix, but this month there are a number of local exhibitions celebrating the history of fashion. 

12.12.12 Life in Three Centuries at the Fashion History Museum
Photo courtesy of the Fashion History Museum 2012

'12.12.12: Life in Three Centuries' looks at the intersection of fashion and life in 1812, 1912, and 2012 and is presented by Jonathan Walford, Kenn Norman, and members of the board of the Fashion History Museum at the newly restored Guelph Civic Museum (52 Norfolk Street) in Guelph. The exhibition is currently open 1 - 5 p.m. daily and will close March 4, 2012. For more information, please call the Fashion History Museum at 519 267-2091.

Making Fashion at the Textile Museum in Toronto
Photo by Ingrid Mida 2012

In the Making History exhibition at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto, Ryerson University Fashion students present recreations of historical garments and accessories. Dr.Alison Matthews David, who teaches Costume History at The School of Fashion at Ryerson University, developed this project as a hands-on research assignment for her students to foster respect for and understanding of the skills of the largely anonymous makers of historical dress and textiles. She said that "As a dress historian, I hope that as future fashion and costume designers, Ryerson students will take these traditional techniques, from smocking and hand-beading to painting on silk and shoemaking, and bring them to life again on stage and catwalk." The opening reception for this exhibition is on Wednesday, February 15, 2012 from 7-8 pm at the Textile Museum (55 Centre Avenue). By the way, I helped install this exhibition. In handling these objects, I could tell that these garments and accessories were made with a lot of love! 

Roaring Twenties at the Bata Shoe Museum
Photo courtesy of the Bata Shoe Museum and under copyright

And of course, if you haven't yet seen the exhibition Roaring Twenties: Heels, Hemlines and High Spirits at the Bata Shoe Museum, it continues until June 2012. Wouldn't this pair be perfect for Valentine's Day?

New Directions in Sculpture

The Sound of Paper by Ingrid Mida  Paper Sculpture (10 inch diameter) copyright 2009

The Sound of Paper (Detail Shot) 

Paper Sculpture by Ingrid Mida, copyright 2009

If you've been wondering why my blog posts have been somewhat irregular in the past three months, it was in part because I have been working hard to take my artwork to another level, to layer in deeper meaning and make it more contemporary.

This book work called The Sound of Paper takes inspiration from the shape of a crinoline as well as my research into the history of feminism. While it may appear to be simply the silhouettes of women dressed in 17th century clothing who are emerging from the pages of the book, it also has a deeper layer of meaning in honour of French writer Francois Poullain de la Barre who rejected the principle that a person's sex determined the capacity for learning in a paper entitled "On the Equality of the Two Sexes" in 1673.

I'm participating in a group show that opens tomorrow at the Launch Projects Gallery in Toronto and will be posting more of this new work on both my blog and my website. I look forward to hearing your reactions!

Symbolism of the Crinoline

Fashion historians have ascribed different meanings to the enormous skirts of the mid-19th century, which was a period of significant male domination and gender differentiation. Men were considered "serious, active, strong and aggressive" and wore dark clothes with little ornamentation. Women were "frivolous, inactive, delicate and submissive" and wore clothing that inhibited their movement in light pastel colours, ribbons, lace and bows. In one sense, the crinoline symbolized female fertility like all fashions that expand the apparent size of the hips. In another aspect, the huge bell like skirt concealed women's sexuality in a cage and created a form of female imprisonment.

Other fashion historians have asserted that the crinoline was representative of how the bourgeois women adopted a "useful cloak of armour" to mediate the experience of modern city life. The enormous width of the skirt provided a barrier between the wearer and everyone else. This was important in a time in which increasing urbanization and industrialization led to more frequent contact with strangers. In that sense, the crinoline was a modest form of "protection".

In spite of being much maligned in the press, the mass manufacture of the cage crinoline became an important industry and the largest firm W.S. and E.H. Thomson had factories in England, France, Germany and the United States. Technical advances reduced the manufacturing costs and brought crinolines within the reach of all social levels.

As the popularity of the crinoline grew, it began to lose appeal among the fashionable set as they sought to differentiate themselves from the working class. In the mid-1860s, the crinoline began to shift to the back of the skirt, leaving the front skirt panel more or less straight. By 1868, the reinforcement of the skirt had slipped entirely to the back becoming a half-crinoline. By 1870, the crinoline disappeared altogether and was replaced with the bustle.

An Introduction to The Cage Crinoline

Cage Crinoline (1860) made of wool and cotton with a spring-steel frame
Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum

As the skirts of the mid-nineteenth century ballooned in size, women wore numerous layers of petticoats to achieve the desired bell-like silhouette. The word crinoline was initially used to describe a petticoat cloth made of crin (French for horsehair) interwoven with lin (linen). After the 1850s, the word crinoline evolved to describe a "foundation garment composed of graduated steel or whalebone hoops that distended skirts and preserved their shape".

With innovations in the manufacture of steel, the introduction of the cage crinoline in 1856 allowed women to wear the fashionable wide skirts of the time without enduring the weight or warmth of multiple layers of petticoats. The news of this fashion innovation quickly spread through such publications as Godey's Lady's Book. In spite of the many difficulties and dangers caused by wearing enormous skirts, cage crinolines became hugely popular.

The crinoline was not the first time that fashion has emphasized a woman's hips. In Elizabethan times, the farthingale was worn, and in the 18th century, panniers created an expansive hip line. But in the middle of the 19th century, technology had advanced for the manufacture of low-cost flexible lightweight steel hoops to support the skirt structure. Unlike the previous hip expanding garments, the low cost of the cage crinoline made it accessible to all classes of women. Furthermore, improvements in looms and dyes in the textile industry and the invention of the sewing machine allowed the voluminous skirts supported by cage crinolines to be adopted by women of all social classes. For this reason, the cage crinoline has a significant place in fashion history.

Note: The above is an extract of a research paper that I wrote for a course in Fashion, Culture and Society at Ryerson University. I am fascinated with the crinoline because of its importance in fashion history as one of the first garments worn by all classes of woman and also because of its inherent sculptural qualities.

Book Review: Seeing Through Clothes

This is a book for serious scholars of fashion or art. If that does not describe you, stop reading now! However, if you want to immerse yourself into the meaning of clothing as portrayed through works of art, then read on.

Seeing Through Clothes is concerned with the interconnection between clothes worn in real life and clothes portrayed in works of art. "With clothes as with art, it is the picture itself, not the aspects of culture or personality it reveals, that demands the attention first and appeals directly to the imagination through the eye. Because they share in the perpetually idealizing vision of art, clothes must be seen and studied as paintings are seen and studied -- not primarily as cultural by-products or personal expressions but as connected links in a creative tradition of image-making." (page xvi)


This book, densely packed with original ideas and analysis, is comprised of 5 chapters, each of which could be a book, in and of itself.

Drapery traces the visionary history of fabric through its portrayal in paintings and sculptures. "Fabric is thought to decorate and beautify, not only because of its direct appeal but because it has been shown to do so in an incredible variety of works of art since the remotest antiquity." (page 2)

The chapter on Nudity traces the meaning of the unclothed or partially clothed figure in works of art. The clothing we wear carries significant meaning and the absence of clothing in turn shares this same complexity. "Nakedness is not a customary but rather an assumed state, common to all but natural to none, except on significantly marked occasions. These may be ritual, theatrical, or domestic, but they are always special, no matter how frequent." (page 84)

In Undress, Hollander explores the idea that the suggestion of partially removed clothing creates an intensified erotic force in works of art. "In art the body without its clothes is a pale shadow of its clothed self. But the body shown either partially nude or closely accompanied by cloth and clothing can carry a more complex message about itself and its dress. The dialectic of clothes and body is more sharply focused when both appear." (page 236)

In Costume, the conventions of costume in theatre, ballet, opera and film are examined. "The history of theatrical costume shows that the first purpose of dressing for theatrical events is to catch the eye with something unusual." (page 239)

In Dress, the idea that dress is a form of visual art, with changes in what is considered fashionable dress being accomplished through filters of artistic convention (ie, photography, film or portraiture). "And the difference between the way clothes now look (at any given time) and the way they used to look is made most clear to the eye through changes in the style of their pictorial respresentation -- including styles of photography and cinematography. Dressing is always picture making, with reference to actual pictures that indicate how the clothes are to be perceived." (page 311)

In Mirrors, Hollander considers the interrelationship between mirrors and images. By looking in the mirror, we create a self-portrait by which we measure our looks against images that we have seen (in painting, photography and other media). "People look at their clothes in mirrors to see how they fit into the common visual scheme or indeed to make themselves fit in." (page 417)

Seeing through Clothes is illustrated with extensive black and white images of the works of art that Hollander uses to support her arguments. When I first opened this book, I was disappointed by the quality of printing and put it aside, not aware of the wealth of information inside. Eye candy it is not. This is brain candy! With original thought and weighty analysis, this book requires very careful and thoughtful reading. In fact, I probably should read it again.

Title: Seeing Through Clothes
Author: Anne Hollander
Publisher: University of California Press, Berkeley (Paperback version 1993)
(Originally published by Viking Press in 1973)
Category: Non-fiction - Costume in art; Costume history
Price: US$28.95 Canada $36.50
Number of Pages: 504

P.S. I've also ordered Anne Hollander's other book Feeding the Eye but I expect it will take me a while to get through it.