Aesthetic Dress
Aesthetic dress of the 1880s and 1890s carries on many of the external characteristics of Artistic dress (rejection of tightlacing, simplicity of line, and emphasis on beautiful fabrics), even though, at its core, Aestheticism rejected the moral and social goals of the Victorian Dress Reform movement that was its precursor. The Aesthetes' belief that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure was a direct rejection of the reverence for simplicity and handwork propounded by William Morris.
Aesthetic dress encompasses a range of modes, from the Japonaise gowns and Kate Greenaway-inspired children's smocks of Liberty & Co. to the velvet jackets and knee breeches of Oscar Wilde's "aesthetic lecturing costume" for his speaking tour of America in 1882.
Read more about this topic: Artistic Dress Movement
Famous quotes containing the words aesthetic and/or dress:
“... it was religion that saved me. Our ugly church and parochial school provided me with my only aesthetic outlet, in the words of the Mass and the litanies and the old Latin hymns, in the Easter lilies around the altar, rosaries, ornamented prayer books, votive lamps, holy cards stamped in gold and decorated with flower wreaths and a saint’s picture.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Just because you live in LA it doesn’t mean you have to dress that way.”
—Advertising billboard campaign in Los Angeles, mounted by New York fashion house Charivari.