Waskul and Vannini, perhaps following Judith Butler’s theories of performativity, suggest the existence of what they call a “dramaturgical body,” which is
“embedded in social practices […] people do not merely ‘have’ a body—people actively do a body. The body is fashioned, crafted, negotiated, manipulated and largely in ritualized social and cultural conventions” (2006: 6). This explains the desire of social history curators to “keep foremost the need to present history to your visitors as the experience of living people” (Briggs 1972: 1). The Fashion Museum in Bath (formerly the Museum of Costume) was lauded for being able to do just this: “The clothes are mounted on naturalistic figures to give as much impression of life as possible and many are placed in period room settings or against backdrop views of Bath to give a feeling of period atmosphere” (Byrde 1985: 14). There, mannequins and backdrops were used to create an impression of the contexts within which the clothes were experienced.
For example, representations of shopping within the museum environment were influenced by the preoccupations of contemporary curators and projected onto the past but may have also influenced visitors by showing socially normative shopping behavior; the eighteenth-century female shopper in Period Rooms Re-Occupied in Style or the Regency hat buyers in Vignettes of Fashion (Figure 6.3) were at once a subject for the female viewer’s gaze in 1963 and a stand-in for her, whereby the viewer knew that she was also always the viewed. Another example of reflexive embodiment on display comes from the 1964 Vignettes of Fashion exhibition at the Costume Institute. The exhibition sought to reconnect fashions with the social rituals for which they were originally worn: “The exhibition consists of 12 vignettes in which the mannequins are ‘dressed for the occasion.’
Furnishings and paintings from the museum’s collections provide the clothes with authentic settings that illustrate the relationship between dress, interiors, and social manners” (“History of Styles” 1964: 30). In one vignette, “Guests for Tea” (Figure 6.4), mannequins in Edwardian tea gowns at a table set with a china tea service almost identically replicated the 1909 William MacGregor Paxton painting Tea Leaves, on display above them, demonstrating the performativity of social behaviors. The New York Times reviewer noted that “viewing the vignettes, one cannot help but compare them to contemporary developments” (“History of Styles” 1964: 30), as social norms for social occasions and the etiquette for those that remained had changed. The exhibition served as a visual reminder of this process.
Some exhibitions trace reflexive embodiment through highlighting iconic bodies. In the Costume Institute 2010 exhibition American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, curators Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda focused on the changes in the “physical and fashionable appearance” of the “mass-media representations of American women from the 1890s to the 1940s,” whereby the American female body became “a spirited symbol of progress, modernity, and ultimately, Americanness” (Bolton and Koda 2010: n.p.). The curators argued that the fantasy bodies created in these depictions both created and reflected the aspirational reality for historical and contemporary women; the show ended by asserting that the series of archetypal ideals featured within it were styles still embodied by the current American woman.
Even the normative boundaries of the body are essentially arbitrary and changeable. A Brooklyn Museum exhibition from 1957 to 1958, called The Changing Silhouette of Fashion, made this very point: in the exhibition, “ten costumes and the forms they are displayed on show the wide variety of figure mutations the American female put herself through from 1810 to 1928” (“Exhibit Depicts” 1957: 57). The article’s author felt that the display demonstrated that “our women seem to have grown taller, wider and droopier since the old days” when compared with the early 1800s, when “erect posture was the mark of a lady” or the 1920s when women were “flat and rectangular as a playing card” (“Exhibit Depicts” 1957: 57). An article
Figure 6.3 Postcard, c. 1964, showing installation view of Vignettes of Fashion,
“Shopping” vignette. Author’s collection.
describing the acquisition of a large family collection of historical fashion by the Met in 1911 described the same expansion with some hyperbole:
The costumes present an interesting subject for those interested in the development of the American woman. The average American girl of today could not begin to get into the gowns of the girl of the early part of the nineteenth century or into those of her mother fifty years before. The armholes of the earliest costumes would about fit the wrist of the girl of today. The
dresses show that the women of that time were short as well as small, and the Museum authorities had infinite trouble in finding manikins [sic] over which the gowns could be fitted to show them properly. Figures are not made of that size now, as there are only the exceptional women so small. (“Ancient Costumes” 1911: 11)
It does not seem to have occurred to the author of the piece that the Ludlow women could themselves have been exceptional.
Whether or not bodies have fundamentally changed is a topic of some debate.
In her writing on fashion, Doris Langley Moore always vehemently disputed the Figure 6.4 Postcard, c. 1964, showing installation view of Vignettes of Fashion,
“Afternoon Tea” vignette. Author’s collection.
popular assumption that people’s physiques have radically changed over the centuries (Nunn and Langley Moore 1967: 19). Every edition of the guidebook to the Museum of Costume included statements to this effect, and in 1969, she wrote,
To answer a question that is perpetually raised, neither the male nor the female models in the Museum are smaller on average than our visitors themselves.
The height of our masculine figures is generally somewhere near 6 ft., our shortest at present on view is 5 ft. 8 in. […] As for women, we have several dummies of 5 ft. 2 in. (a very ordinary height in the present day); but there are many of 5 ft. 8 in. to 5 ft. 10 in. and a few of 6 ft. The idea that our ancestors were undersized is based on fallacies I have tried to explain elsewhere. The diaphragm of the modern girl is certainly larger than the average in past times, doubtless indicating healthier lungs, and the waist is now free from drastic compression: but when I was a private collector I was able to find living models who could be photographed in out tightest dresses. Our visitors are so often convinced our dummies are “smaller than life” that there may be some element of optical illusion. (Langley Moore 1969: 1–2).
Royal Ontario Museum curator Alexandra Palmer, sidestepping the argument of whether the body underneath has changed, nevertheless acknowledged that the appearance of the body’s proportions could be and was modified through clothing in her 1989 exhibition Measure for Measure (see Palmer 1990), which surveyed “mankind’s imagination in creating coverings for the body over the centuries” (quoted in “New Show at ROM” 1989: 7). Thus, the measurements of the physical body are, in a manner of speaking, irrelevant: it is the ideal proportions of the body and its normative relationship with its immediate environment, including clothing, that are important. These dimensions are subject to change and social censure. Museums provide a space for encounter with these varied body norms. A recent review of the Museum at FIT exhibition The Body: Fashion and Physique (2017–2018) not only lauded the museum’s commitment to showing the variety of silhouettes and proportions deemed fashionable over 300 years but also queried whether museums might indeed have a responsibility to document the full range of ideal and real bodies across time (Neilsen 2017: web).
The vagaries of survival bias and available samples pose problems for collecting, and the article also notes the difficulties of sourcing appropriate mannequins.
Yet the contrast can be valuable as a challenge to what seem like the rigid expectations of modern culture, as demonstrated by the healing journey from an eating disorder undertaken by graduate student Virginia Knight, after being confronted with the reality of her body dysmorphia while glimpsing her reflection alongside a Victorian evening dress in the 2016 Kelvingrove Museum exhibition A Century of Style: Costume and Color, 1800–1899 (2018: web).
While the above is an extreme example, a review of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Of Corsets (1980–1982) provides an example of the cognitive dissonance created by being confronted with such different conceptions of the body; New York Times journalist Bernadine Morris wrote,
Tucked away in a [sic] obscure corner of the fourth floor of the Brooklyn Museum devoted to decorative art is a compact exhibit of antique objects displayed on wire forms suspended from the ceiling. When viewed as abstract shapes bearing some relationship to the human torso, the exhibit has a certain charm, enhanced by exquisite workmanship: rows of tiny, even stitches made by hand; rims of frothy lace; the most delicate embroideries. But when viewed in terms of use these objects were actually put to, it can be seen as a chamber of self-inflicted horrors as women tortured themselves in subjugation to the whims of fashion. For this is an exhibit of corsets, the earliest dating back to around 1780, the latest around 1950, and it is mute testimony to the distortion of the human body through the ages. (Morris 1980: C18)
Photographs of modern people looking at costumed museum mannequins2 (even when posed) demonstrate similar ambivalence: onlookers seem fascinated, horrified, and perhaps even mildly amused at the evident difference between themselves and their predecessors (Figure 6.5). A press photo publicizing the exhibition of French costumes of the eighteenth century at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris (this collection would later be housed at the Palais Galliera) features a young girl admiring a vignette of elegantly dressed mannequins. The caption reads, “She might have worn these fancy silks and velvets if she’d been born 200 years earlier. Special mannikins were made to display the costumes because 1750 Frenchmen were considerably smaller than those of today” (Tavoularis 1954). The implication is clear: the child is confused that although the dresses on display are her size, they do not conform to her present ideals of fashionability.
Viewing archival photographs such as this adds another ambivalent reaction to both the body of the mannequin on display and the pictured visitor. Vision and convention are deeply implicated in the embodied experience of self-presentation, so that Nick Crossley’s assertion that “body techniques are culturally embedded and, as such, often have symbolic and normative significance” (2006: 104) deserves further analysis to unpack how specific “body techniques” gain cultural significance.
The museum can both document and create these body techniques. For example, the Costume Institute’s 1988–1989 exhibition, From Queen to Empress: Victorian Dress 1837–1877, examined sartorial norms for the first forty years of Queen Victoria’s dress. The dresses on show were accompanied by excerpts from contemporary proscriptive literature, such as magazines and etiquette books as the 1879 Ladies Book of Etiquette. The introductory label text
to the exhibition noted that although the spending power of the English varied widely, fashion
[…] had some influence on the dress of all but the very poorest. The aspiring middle classes closely copied all aspects of aristocratic behaviour. An increasing number of magazines became available, offering extensive advice on correct etiquette, including the niceties of proper dress for each and every occasion. (Goldthorpe 1988)
The curator’s intellectual premise, therefore, was that the increased literacy of the nineteenth-century population in matters of social behavior and fashion affected the spread of the predominant silhouette throughout different classes. (This was also the premise of the ROM’s Corsets to Calling Cards 1995–1997 exhibition.) The fashions highlighted in the displays, moreover, focused on the difference in body norms that had evolved over time, as the curator admitted. Speaking of the cage crinoline, she noted, “It looks like a rather monstrous contraction to us, but it was a wonderful advance for Victorian women who were freed from their bulky petticoats” (quoted in Gerston 1988). Furthermore, as a review in the New York Times noted, it was anticipated that the exhibition would also affect fashion:
the outfits of attendees to the opening reception were enthusiastically reported Figure 6.5 An unidentified guest holds a drink as she looks a display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Fashion Ball, November 1960 (Photo by Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images).
(the appearance of the innovative evening pantsuit was particularly highlighted:
“In a crowd of traditionally dressed women, the most advanced looks were tailored, often with trousers, inspired by Saint Laurent’s ‘le smoking.’”) and the inspired enthusiasm of designer Geoffrey Beene for the sundry styles of sleeves on show was the final note with which the article ended (Morris 1988). Despite the historical distance of the fashions on display, then, fashion’s changeable nature lends a fluidity to body boundaries that allows them to shift in response to visual suggestion.