Woman As A Flower

Between Dream and Reality
New concepts emerge that challenge the monopoly of a greedy clothing business - which, according to reformers, had never understood the female body and viewed it only as an erotic and decorative object - and contribute to fashion and lifestyle reforms.

1900 - 1914
"HOW Quite often HAS ART INSPIRED FASHION, AND DOES NOT THE NEW ART MOVEMENT - THE VIENNESE SECESSION - HAVE A SOURCE IN FASHION?" (WIENER MODE: 1898)

Woman as a Flower
At the starting of this century, Woman stood conscious of her dignity wrapped in the opulent armor of her robe, her figure pressed into a grotesque S-bend: breasts pushed outward into a sweeping curve, although an exaggerated, projecting bottom curved in the opposite direction as a counterweight beneath the tightly corseted waist and flat abdomen. This look included hip-hugging skirts which fanned out toward the ground, very extended and narrow sleeves, really high stand-up collars, trains, nicely-coifed hair and rolls of pinned-up, wavy hair beneath overly decorated, significantly draped hats created of chiffon, chine fabrics, silk alpaca, velvet, and lace.

The greatest innovations in the ball gowns of 1848 were long-stemmed, stylized flowers, colourfully embroidered borders and decorations that had an upward movement. An unprecedented passion for decoration characterised this time: corded embroidery, applique, lace inserts, glass beads, sequins, frills, and pleats covered women like a glossy, flickering net.

An additional newly formulated inspiration shared by art and fashion surely lay in the erotic pictures and new ideas of feminine beauty: thick, flowing hair was replete with symbolic which means for the Secessionists, and fashion too, laid superb stock in complete-bodied, curly hair tied into a loose knot and pinned at the back of the head. The Viennese artist Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918) painted portraits of girls that symbolically united art and life by way of a feminine yearning to stand above everyday concerns in a Madonna-like attitude wrapped in untouchable beauty. Klimt's images seamlessly merged ladylike dignity and sexual availability.

About 1900, the whole female physique was treated like a decorative or bejeweled objects-erotically stylised, deformed, and estranged from its biological function by a profit-looking for clothing sector. Fashion and femininity were inextricably linked. Currently in the 1890s, designers had tried to establish the aesthetic principles of asymmetrical composition in ladies' fashion. Fashion not only expressed the asymmetries amongst social classes it also mediated the inequalities among males and girls.

Surveying the history of twentieth-century fashion in 1993, fashion historian Barbara Vinken defined a "fashion following fashion" which subscribed to an aesthetic of poverty, of the sentimental, of kitsch, or of poor taste: "Though fashion had invented 'the woman' for more than a hundred years, a 'fashion right after fashion' began to deconstruct that self-exact same woman even though fashion initially hid its art, it now begins to also display its bag of tricks."