Artistic Dress Movement
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and other artistic reformers objected to the elaborately trimmed confections of Victorian fashion with their unnatural silhouette based on a rigid corset and hoops as both ugly and dishonest. Their wives and models adopted a revival style based on romanticised medieval influences such as puffed juliette sleeves and trailing skirts. These were made in the soft colors of vegetable dyes, and were ornamented with hand embroidery in the art needlework style.
The style spread as an "anti-fashion" called Artistic dress in the 1860s in literary and artistic circles, died back in the 1870s, and reemerged as Aesthetic dress in the 1880s, where the emphasis was not so much on honesty and purity as sensuality and languor.
Read more about this topic: Victorian Dress Reform
Famous quotes containing the words artistic, dress and/or movement:
“Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“At the milliners, the ladies we met were so much dressed, that I should rather have imagined they were making visits than purchases. But what diverted me most was, that we were more frequently served by men than by women; and such men! so finical, so affected! they seemed to understand every part of a woman’s dress better than we do ourselves; and they recommended caps and ribbons with an air of so much importance, that I wished to ask them how long they had left off wearing them.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women’s life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn’t live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was “the problem that had no name.” Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.”
—Betty Friedan (20th century)