When (Neo)Classicism Met Modernism: The Ancient Influences that Shaped 1920s Fashion

With the generous support of the Friends of Mills at Staatsburgh, our site has hosted a research intern from Bard College this summer. Celka Rice, a literature major at Bard, has researched various aspects of 1920s fashion, helping Staatsburgh explore the possibility of presenting accurate costumed interpretation during the 100th anniversary of the Roaring ‘20s. Although Celka’s interdisciplinary studies cover a broad background which include history, anthropology, art history, classics, and photography, the internship called upon another of her diverse interests: her expertise in vintage clothing and fashion history. For her summer project, Celka has researched retail sources for reproduction and vintage clothing, and has written three blogs on fascinating 1920s fashion topics.

Blog Author, Celka Rice

In the 1920s, a new set of shapes began to dominate stylish silhouettes for women in Europe and America. Dresses which had once been constructed around the S corset (a garment designed to push a woman’s chest forward, while forcing her stomach and backside in the opposite direction), gave way to lines designed to create a column of the feminine figure. With this shift, draping techniques changed, and fashionable designers began to anchor their garments at the shoulders as opposed to the waist. Those who did so were often called modernists, but in fact what they were doing had ancient origins, tracing its lineage back to the construction techniques of the Ancient Greeks. Modernists generally rejected that which they deemed “traditional,” while at the same time championing the “primitive,” a particular interpretation of Ancient Greek culture. This post attempts to chart chronologically the exploits of three modernist designers who incorporated specific interpretations of primitivism into their work: Lady Duff Gordon, or Lucile, Paul Poiret, and Madeleine Vionnet.

 

The S-Bend Corset

The chiton, a key component of dress in Ancient Greece, is a form of tunic that fastens at the shoulders.  The garment was said to imply luxury and leisure given that the flowing fabric was inappropriate for manual labor.

Lady Duff Gordon

One of the most important couturiers in the shift to the modernist fashions of the 1920s was the British designer Lady Duff Gordon, known as Lucile, whose dresses drew inspiration from both classical and neoclassical fashions and popularized trends endemic to the decade such as straight silhouettes, garments built from the shoulders, thin textiles for both dresses and undergarments. Of her label, a large fashion house by 1909, the Honorable Mrs. C.W. Forester, a renowned British fashion writer, wrote that “To her we owe the first conception of a dressmaker’s shop as a salon, the social meeting place for a genuine aristocratic and artistic clientele. In many ways the advent of Lucile was a landmark in the history of modern beauty.”

 

Sheer silk and cotton Lucile gown, ca. 1919

Fashion illustration by Jules de Ban for Lucile Ltd. featuring a court presentation gown, ca. 1923 

Lucile specialized in creating dresses for theatricals, fancy dress balls, and tableaux vivants at a more affordable price than most of the garments on offer in Paris. She was well known for her propensity to name these dresses-- those featured in a 1905 album sent out to wealthy buyers were dubbed with imaginative titles such as “The tender grace of a day that is dead,” “The shortness of time,” and “Oblivion.” By 1910 Lucile was creating straight sheath dresses influenced by the shape of the classical column and the attire of post-revolutionary France with much less whimsical names: “Directorate,” “Empire,” “Josephine,” and ‘Recamier.” These pieces featured an outer, semitransparent layer, set over an inner, peach or pink layer, in order to imitate the look of exposed pale skin. Like the Ancient Greek chiton, they draped from the shoulders, tying with a sash at the waist. They were supported by light undergarments, somewhere in between the traditional corset and the Ancient Greek bandelette. Lucile did not invent these undergarments (although she certainly claimed to have done so), but she was unusually adept at producing and popularizing the style.

A portrait of Madame Raymond de Verniac (a society lady and one of the leading Merveilleuses) in neoclassical style, signed only with the name David, ca. 1799 

These dresses were inspired, not only by Ancient Grecian design, but also by another period in history during which Ancient Grecian design was popular: the French Directory, which lasted from 1795 to 1799. A fashionable set of aristocrats known as “Les Incroyables” and “Les Merveilleuses” (translating roughly to the Incredible Men and the Marvelous Women), sported tight, semi-sheer clothing. Merveilleuses largely wore white linen, a material which had become essential to Greek garment composition after it was brought from Egypt. Their dresses draped from the shoulders, as the Greek chiton had, and were shaped to transform their wearers into something resembling a classical column. Both the men and the women who belonged to this fashionable set wore unusually immodest clothes, which they defended using ideas about the classical purity of the nude body. It is no wonder that these clothes gained popularity during the so-called “age of revolution,” when, Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers-- and particularly their ideas about reason, republic, democracy, and empire-- enjoyed a renaissance.

A visual satire of "Les Merveilleuses" by the Scottish illustrator Isaac Cruikshank, ca. 1799 

Maison Lucile thrived in the American market during the war years, but by 1921 the house was on its last legs. In 1921 the Chicago store closed, followed quickly by the New York and Paris stores in 1922 and the London base in 1924. Bad business and licensing deals, along with a refusal to fall in line with avant garde postwar styles, were responsible for the collapse of the label. However, without Lucile and her influences, both classical and neoclassical, the modernist fashions of the 1920s-- built from the shoulders, column-like in silhouette, thin, supported by even thinner undergarments-- would never have come to be.

Paul Poiret

Sixteen years younger than Lucile, Paul Poiret, claimed to be the innovator behind new (or at least new for their time) styles such as the uncorseted silhouette. He was not the first to promote the uncorseted silhouette, but he was certainly one of their earliest popularizers, drawing inspiration from both Asiatic and classical dress. He established his own couture house in 1903, after working for master designers such as Doucet and Worth. Like Lucile, he began to produce narrow dresses draped from the shoulders. The patterning of these garments approached the female body as a single unit, as opposed to as two distinct pieces (top and bottom), and Poiret cited both classical and neoclassical inspirations when it came to their construction.

 

Sketches of the costume for Le Minaret, featuring hobble and lampshade skirts within the same garment. 

Poiret’s involvement in the play Le Minaret provides an interesting case study in the ways in which his classicism overlapped with his vision of Asia when it came to producing modernist fashions. After designing the costumes for the Parisian production, an entirely inaccurate reimagining of the dynamics of a harem within a Persian court featuring slaves, musicians, and eunuchs, Poiret reconfigured it as a fashion show featuring popular contraptions such as hobble skirts and lampshade dresses. He took this show to the United States, where he lectured to audiences that: “Women must wear something simple, but personal or individual… It can be personal without extravagance. Simple things prove the most original.” This emphasis on Persian and Russian influences which invoked a fantasy of the Far East and classical simplicity with Ancient Greek and Roman origins was, according to historian Nancy Troy, deployed in order to align his fashions with the interests of the wealthy French elite, a group for whom modernist primitivism was all the rage. Both Asiatic and classical styles evoked primitivism, highlighting the muscles and energies of the tensed body. This preoccupation with the body was juxtaposed with an era when sports were transitioning from a folk practice to a system of spectators and participants designed to productively fill the newly designated leisure time of the middle and lower classes.

A photograph of a costume for Le Minaret, ca. 1913

 Poiret ultimately fell to the same pressures as Lucile, unable despite his creative genius to successfully navigate a new world of business in which patents and brand licensing were as important to a label’s success as the techniques being patented. However, for a few short years the man who had dubbed himself the “King of Fashion” did indeed reign, and even after his fall, his popularization of both the classicism and visions of the Far East which were part and parcel of an interest in primitivism continued to influence later designers.

Madeleine Vionnet

Like Poiret, Madeleine Vionnet trained at the couture house of Doucet, led by Jacques Doucet who was one of the leading couturiers of luxury ladies fashions in Paris. Like the self-proclaimed “King of Fashion” she created designs of such a radical nature that they were not appreciated within more traditional circles. In fact, many of the vendeuses at Doucet refused to show her clothes due to their revealing nature, and so she started her own house in 1912. Vionnet was known for creating dresses made on a bias cut, which clung to and shifted with the body in its entirety. Fashion historian Rebecca Arnold writes of a silk dress included in Vionnet’s 1918-19 collection that: “The diagonal jabot points at the hemline of the dress echo those at the hem of the Greek chlamys or cloak… The swathed cowl neckline falls like the chiton in deep folds that curve around the neckline.”

A bias cut dress (cut on diagonal lines) by Vionnet, ca. 1932

Indeed many of Vionnet’s designs were influenced by the silhouettes of the chiton and chlamys, as well as the forms and colors of antiquity more generally-- the logo of her house was a classical column upon which stood a figure holding fabric. When the journalist Bruce Chatwin interviewed Vionnet in 1973, he reported that there was a photograph of the Parthenon above her fireplace, “…a talismanic photo, for Madame Vionnet has always turned to classical Greece for inspiration.” Genevieve Dufy, an employee of Vionnet’s, reported that they regularly made trips to the Louvre in order to inspect antique vases-- both for their lines, and for the lines of the clothes of the women featured on them (the interested reader should follow this link in order to read more about the ancient Greek vases at Staatsburgh). “Vionnet” writes Arnold “…sought for ‘true beauty’ in her designs – an eternal or at least classical ideal that relied upon Platonic notions of proportion and wholeness.”

Model wearing a dress by Vionnet, ca. 1927

Vionnet draping on a doll, ca. 1923

Of course, as much as Vionnet was a classicist, she was also a modernist. She was not dissimilar in this to Isadora Duncan, a pioneer of modern dance who used ancient Greek art and dress in her performances. Both women were hugely popular during the 1920s and found that Greek culture truly complemented their modern works. As Lady Duff Gordon and Poiret had before her, Vionnet claimed to have liberated the female body. She did not use the corset, but in its stead suggested that her clients make use of diet and exercise in order to remain svelte. Organized sport-- out of which the attire for many of the more adventurous trends of the 1920s sprung-- here also provided the figure necessary to wear those trends.

Conclusion:

So why was it that what we often call modernist fashion was so strongly reminiscent of antiquity? One possible cause can be seen in action in the aforementioned case of “Les Incroyables” and “Les Merveilleuses,” fashion darlings of the French Directorate and muses of Lucile. Their popularity, and their genesis, was due in large part to the roots of period ideas about democratic nationhood in the Athenian democracy and the Roman republic. In an era of political turmoil, these systems of government came to the forefront politically, and so too did ancient Greek and Roman dress dominate fashion. In the years directly following WWI, proponents of democracy and republicanism took to the world stage to cast their ideas of what a nation should be (and even what a governing body composed of nations should be) into the roiling mess left in the wake of battle. Thus, it seems inevitable that these years would also be filled with classical dress.

There has been a long history of linkages between the classical and the modern which predated the 1920s. The very notion of the classical was re-popularized during the Enlightenment, when thought and philosophy from the ancient Greek tradition gained traction during an era obsessed with reason. Of course, it was not only reason that Enlightenment era thinkers were obsessed with: reason was linked to notions of progress, futurity, and expansion, which were in turn connected to the notion of empire, a notion justified through the empires which the ancient Greeks and Romans had controlled. Through this intellectual lineage the future and the ancients were linked in a connection that resurfaced again and again in dress as well as broader aesthetics.

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Bibliography:


Sources from Staatsburgh Library:

Fashion, A Timeline in Photographs: 1850 to Today, Caroline Rennolds Milbank, Rizzoli New York

McKim, Mead & White Architects, Leland M. Roth, 1985, Harper & Row, New York

20,000 Years of Fashion: The History of Costume and Personal Adornment, Francois Boucher, Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York

Lucile Ltd: London, Paris, New York and Chicago 1890s-1930s, Valarie D. Mendes and Amy de la Haye, V&A Publishing, 2009


Sources from Bard Library:

Fashion in Costume: 1200-2000 by Joseph Nunn, New Amsterdam Books, Chicago, 2000

Leisure and Entertainment in America, Donna R. Braden, Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, Dearborn, Michigan

The Mode in Costume, R. Turner Wilcox, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944

Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources, Volume 4: The Twentieth Century to Today, Edited by Peter McNeil, 2009, Oxford, Berg (Chapter 21: Vionnet & Classicism, by Rebecca Arnold and Chapter 22: Paul Poiret’s Minaret Style: Originality, Reproduction, and Art in Fashion)

20th Century Fashion by Valarie Mendes and Amy de la Haye, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1999 (Chapter 2: La Garconne and the New Simplicity)


Sources from MET Digital Archive

Evening dress, Madeleine Vionnet (French, Chilleurs-aux-Bois 1876-1975 Paris), ca. 1932, French, gift of Florence G. McAteer (Mrs. Howard W.) in 1982 (Accession Number: 1982.422.8

Dress, Lucile, ca. 1919, British, promised gift of Sandy Schreier (Accession Number: L.2019.43.77)


Sources from Victoria and Albert Digital Archive

Design for court presentation gown, Jules de Ban for Lucile Ltd., ca. 1923, British, given by the artist (Accession Number: E.299-1962)