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The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
Amelia Rauser
Hardcover: 216 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press (March 17, 2020)
ISBN-13: 9780300241204

Neoclassicism recast as a feminine, progressive movement through the lens of empire-style fashion, as well as related art and literature

The Age of Undress explores the emergence and meaning of neoclassical dress in the 1790s, tracing its evolution from Naples to London and Paris over the course of a single decade. The neoclassical style of clothing—often referred to as robe à la grecque, empire style, or “undress”—is marked by a sheer, white, high-waisted muslin dress worn with minimal undergarments, often accessorized with a cashmere shawl. This style represented a dramatic departure from that of previous decades and was short lived: by the 1820s, corsets, silks, and hoop skirts were back in fashion.

Amelia Rauser investigates this sudden transformation and argues that women styled themselves as living statues, artworks come to life, an aesthetic and philosophical choice intertwined with the experiments and innovations of artists working in other media during the same period. Although neoclassicism is often considered a cold, rational, and masculine movement, Rauser’s analysis shows that it was actually deeply passionate, with women at its core—as ideals and allegories, as artistic agents, and as important patrons.

Author

Amelia Rauser is professor of art history at Franklin and Marshall College.

It's a fascinating subject.

'Neo-Classicism' is hardly a precise term. Defined simply in aesthetic terms it had a number of observable phases and took various forms.

In the early 1800s, contrasting with the high-waisted girls in diaphanous 'Empire line' robes, was the heavy Caesarism of the Empire itself with legionary eagles and Grecian-style helmets, not to mention uncomfortable, gold-leafed chairs; an aesthetic that managed to be both 'hot 'and 'cold' in its militaristic channeling of the Romantic and revolutionary spirit., encapsualted perhaps by J-L. David's image of the Emperor Napoleon crowned with a gold laurel wreath. We should then remind ourselves that it was Marshal de Saxe who first provided crested 'Classical' helmets for the dragoons of his legion in the 1740s and this fashion in military headgear became increasingly popular from the1760s onwards, adoped by both cavalry and infantry.

Looking farther back into the preceding century, elements of the so-called Baroque embraced Classical forms, for example in elements of its architecture. Spanning the 'long' C17th, the Baroque was an aesthetic that also managed to be 'hot 'and 'cold,' both emotive and rational, splendid and austere, and represents both the final flowering of the Renaissance (a term coined to describe the rediscovery of the 'classic' culture of Greece and Rome that ended the supposedly dark night of the 'Middle Ages') and the last stand of Catholic obscurantism, Rome's Counter-Reformation in the face of the Protestant Reformation of the north (another movement both hot and cold, fierce and cerebral).

The Neo-classical is sometimes represented as a phase of taste and design that emerged in the C18th as a response to the excesses of the Baroque and Rococo (another term to conjure with), yet this overlooks, for example, the Palladian style of the mid-C17th that explored the proportions details of Roman architecture.

If we talk simply of bourgeois women in the early 1800s shedding their stays and preposterous hair-do's, which might be interpreted as an expression of the Revolution. Rousseau had been extolling the virtues of 'man' in his natural state thirty years before, and in the 1750s and 1760s a certain Rousseau-ian zeitgeist is evident in the contemporary development of the 'English style' as expressed in the portraiture of Gainsborough, where the informal elegance of the gentry residing in their country estates contrasts with the formality of the Court and metrpolitan life. Ironically, the English style was becoming popular with the upper classes and bourgeois in France as revoultion was brewing and remained an influence subsequently. (It does seem that the French and English were thoroughly co-dependent throughout the 18th and 19th centuries).

We might speculate to what extent this relaxed style was influenced by British officers returning from America with experience of bushfighting on the frontier and in the backwoods and farmland of the colonies, where the classical precision of Prussian tactical manoeuvre was of limited effectiveness, and officers shed their laced coats, shiny gorgets and spontoons, and fought in 'undress' - the loose, comfortable clothes of the shooting party. The late eighteenth century is replete with records of Major Generals and Colonels rebuking their junior officers for failing to adhere to regulations and dress standards appropriate to officers holding the King's commission, effectively saying "You are not in America now.'

(*Frederican tactics inherited from Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus might be seen as another expression of the neo-classical Baroque, indeed dating back further to the early Renaissance, evolving from the pike and shot tactics of Gonzalo de Cordoba, which we then have to consider might simply have been an evolution of high medieval pike armed infantry- at which point all convenient, simplistic definitions begin to break down entirely.)

Again If we look at the epic canvasses of Benjamin West and J.S. Copley from the 1770s, ironically both sons of the fledgling republic, we can see the grand 'Romantic' formalism of J-L David- the set designer of L'Empire - prefigured by a good twenty years.

At the other end of the scale, grand public buildings were still being built with Classical pediments and Corinthian pillars in the mid C19th century; Roman and Greek temples standing cheek by jowl with monsters of the Neo-Gothic.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.