The body exists within various boundaries, both literal and metaphorical. One such boundary, which arguably affects and mediates any and all interactions with the external world, is clothing. While clothes may mimic, draw attention to, define and outline the body, allowing and enhancing its ability to participate in the world in an embodied way, they can also be seen as another aspect of the environment within which a constructed body circulates. According to Calefato, the clothed body is object and subject: “the garment as a vessel of otherness, a place where the identity of one’s body is confused, an indistinct zone between covering and image” (2004: 60). While this is true of the clothed body in lived experience, within the museum, the quote takes on even more meaning. For example, the redesign of the V&A’s Costume Court in 1983 was meant to be body conscious. The museum’s director, Sir Roy Strong, was adamant that nothing interfered with the interplay between clothing and the body: “Dress is the sculpture of fabric on the human body. It has an aesthetic form. We are not trying to present it as part of an illustrated book or as the social history of Jane Austen’s world. […] This display is anti-camp, anti-dramatic, anti-theatre”
(quoted in Menkes 1983: 8). According to the director, “the real innovation of this exhibition [was the] human element. Each of the 200 figures has been exactly proportioned to fit the garment on display, instead of pinning and folding the clothes to the dummies”; head textile conservator Sheila Landi was described
“re-moulding the bosoms of a dummy with polyfilla to get the correct 1920s silhouette” (Menkes 1983: 8). In describing her preview of the new exhibition galleries, fashion journalist Suzy Menkes spoke of “the ghostly effect of no make-up and the wigs, all authentic in style but a uniform shade of pallid grey” (Figure 6.6); deathly mannequins notwithstanding, Menkes conceded that “the idea of emphasizing the natural body shapes of the wearer is illuminating when it comes to twentieth century fashion, for you can then see how great design can restructure our proportions” (Menkes 1983: 8). Erasing the facial personality of a mannequin could instead redirect focus onto the changing body norms that fashion reflects or dictates.
More radically, the once-popular practice of using silhouette heads or bodies for the display of historical fashion erases the specificity of the body inside (even its dimensionality is minimized), thus muting the importance of the body within and refocusing attention on the covering. The support for the item is not completely invisible, though, and becomes an image of a body rather than a body itself.
Examples of this technique date to the 1950s and 1960s: the Costume Institute used figures with painted silhouette heads to display male dress in Adam in the Figure 6.6 Undated postcard showing Derek Ryman “Alexandra” mannequin wearing an eighteenth-century dress from the V&A. Author’s collection.
Looking Glass (1950). The 1962 reopening of the V&A’s Costume Court saw the introduction of similar “bas-relief” figures with silhouette heads (Figure 6.7) and sometimes arms, while the costume was padded out underneath (Laver 1962);
this was praised for the
[…] tact evident in the absence of heads on the dummies which display clothes in the round, which would have introduced an element of personality of dubious value. The lack is made up for by a small silhouette on white card beneath each dummy, showing the figure complete with hairdress, headgear, hands, and feet. Life-size silhouettes give a sufficiency of animation to a number of costumes shown, so to speak, in “high relief.” (“Gallery of Fashion” 1962: 15) From 1963, Doris Langley Moore mounted clothing on enlarged photographs, fashion plates, and drawings, as well as on a mural painted by Max and Daphne Brooker (Figure 6.8) at the Costume Museum at the Assembly Rooms in Bath;
she had experimented with this method as early as 1955, at the museum’s previous home in Eridge Castle, Kent:
In the long gallery a wholly original method of display is used. From 1800 to 1825 the costumes are incorporated in mural paintings; white masks in deep relief, with a lightly suggested background, are used for mounting some of the later dresses needing more volume. In the upper gallery, fashion plates and prints, enlarged to life-size and dressed in clothes of the appropriate dates, recapture enchantingly contemporary faces and attitudes. (Adburgham 1955: 3)
The ROM used a similar convention for displaying twentieth-century dresses in the 1967 Modesty to Mod exhibition (Figure 6.9). This display, curated by Betty (Katharine) Brett, featured very animated uninhabited clothing, articulated not according to the construction of the clothing (by following seams and fabric shapes, for example) but according to human anatomy (knees and elbows).
The liveliness of these garments stapled to the walls rather than mounted on figures (Carter 1967: 13) recalls the dance of Madam Camden’s haunted clothing (Figure 6.10) in the charming nineteenth-century children’s story
“Wardrobe Witches” (Farley 1854: 201–209). Because clothing is so critical to the experience of the body, even clothing without a body is not always lifeless.
Curators at the institutions examined in this research seem to have been very aware of the ambiguous relationship between the body and fashion, and exhibitions featuring undergarments or revealing clothing demonstrate this particularly well. The Brooklyn Museum 1980 exhibition Of Corsets has already been discussed above, but it was preceded in 1939 by an exhibition entitled Style Foundations: Corsets and Fashions of Yesterday and Today, which also
displayed the material means by which women’s bodies were changed for similar ends in different ways:
You breathe freely in modern corsets for modern corsets are not the old fashioned torture chamber affairs that caused ladies to faint and long treatises to be written about health. The rigid, unyielding corsets of our grandmothers Figure 6.7 Slide showing silhouette heads used in the V&A Costume Court, c. 1980.
Courtesy Gail Niinimaa.
Figure 6.8 “The Painting Lesson,” part of a display at the Fashion Museum Bath featuring two day dresses, early nineteenth century (cotton), English. Courtesy Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset Council, UK/Bridgeman Images.
and great-grandmothers have been replaced by soft garments with skillfully placed gores of elastic that give with every breath and motion of the body.
[…] The cycle of fashion is back to wasp waists, hips and high rounded bosoms; but the superb health of the modern woman will not be touched at all. Women’s waists will be two inches smaller and look as if they could be spanned with two hands; but they’ll breathe as freely as ever. (“Tighten Your Stays” 1939)
Here, historical fashion was placed in contrast to modern technology. Although the conception of the ideal body had not changed between Victorian times and the 1930s, the text tells us, the acceptable means by which this was achieved had.
At the Costume Institute of the Met, Richard Martin and Harold Koda collaborated on two exhibitions in 1994 and 1996, both of which traced the variations in the relationship between the body and clothing over time. Waist Not (1994) described
the physical and representational ideals of the human body through history.
[…] But fashion’s inconstant waist is not a sign for body subjugation. Rather, its changes and options suggest that fashion assumes a task of rendering more similar, at least in ideal form, the range of human bodies. (Martin and Koda 1994: n.p.)
Here, as at Brooklyn, the differences and similarities between the shaping of the body (and its ideal silhouette) were highlighted. Two years later, in the 1996 Figure 6.9 Installation view of Modesty to Mod: Dress and Underdress in Canada, 1780–1967, May 16, 1967–September 4, 1967, with permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM.
Figure 6.10 Artist unknown, “The Haunted Wardrobe,” from page 199 of Happy Hours at Hazel Nook: Or, Cottage Stories (Farley 1854).
exhibition Bare Witness, Martin and Koda reiterated their position that fashion ultimately describes the body, even as it seeks to stifle it: “In fact, Bare Witness is not about burlesque stripping. Rather, it is about demarcating the body and making discriminating choices about the body. It is about the power of the body, concealed under the civilized apparatus of clothing, to materialize” (Martin and Koda 1996: n.p.). Their argument is actively anti-Foucauldian, asserting the subversive power of corporeality in social discourse.
Similarly, the 2008 McCord exhibition Reveal or Conceal?/Dévoiler ou dissimuler?, curated by Cynthia Cooper, asked its audience “to consider what this constant modification of the female body looks and feels like materially”
(Matthews David 2010: 250). Unlike the Costume Institute exhibitions, however, which had a range of fully articulated or abstracted mannequins as well as dressmaker dummies and torso forms, the curator and conservators at the McCord utilized “invisible” forms to support the garments on display, taking the body out of the dresses entirely (Figure 6.11). In her review of the exhibition, Alison Matthews David was positive about the decision to custom-make mannequins that stopped the interpretation of the body at the boundaries of the garment, emphasizing their emptiness:
The headless dummies are hollow and almost sculpted in black burlap. Their non-representational forms did not aim at any kind of false historicism. It seems appropriate for an exhibition on bodies and their social and physical malleability to craft forms individually rather than displaying the garments on
“one size fits all” mannequins. The result is an elegant presentation that allows the viewer to focus his full attention on the cut, construction, colour, and fabric of the garments on display, while keeping in mind that they were worn by flesh and blood people with very different body shapes and sizes. (Matthews David 2010: 250)
However, given the exhibition’s explicit focus on the body, an emphasis on the materiality of clothing was perhaps less successful than Matthews David suggests. A view of one section, “Hemline History” (a clever allusion to the description of classical fashion history in Breward 1995: 1), demonstrates this.
High hemlines expose the female leg, but in an exhibition where mannequins are not possessed of limbs, all that is exposed are awkwardly empty shoes, placed under an improbable floating dress.
The body was dematerialized: neither revealed nor concealed in this representation, and this arguably led to a loss of meaning. As Doris Langley Moore had written nearly fifty years earlier,
The relationship between a hat and a head, décolletage and a bosom, a ruffle and a wrist is so inalienable that it is a loss to be obliged to leave it to the imagination; for the fact is that it takes knowledge and training to be alert to mere suggestions. (Langley Moore 1961: 277)
This is just as true for male fashion as for female fashion; the McCord had previously featured male torsos to demonstrate the varied degrees of exposure in historical swimwear in Clothes Make the Man/Lui: la mode au masculin (2002–2003) (Figure 6.12), but the rest of the exhibition was criticized for
Figure 6.11 Installation view of Reveal or Conceal?, February 22, 2008 to January 18, 2009 © McCord Museum.
Figure 6.12 Installation view of Clothes Make the Man, 17 May 2002—5 January 2003
© McCord Museum.
the disembodied presentation: “The almost invisible mannequins used for display betrayed a discomfort with the idea of the ‘wearer’” (Champroux 2002: 64).
Meaning in fashion is derived from the proportion for clothing to body, and this is also true in the gallery space. To once again quote Doris Langley Moore,
After experimenting over many years with display techniques, I have found that dummies which look human, with just the degree of idealization that has always been a feature of successful fashion plates, serve our purpose much better than headless and armless or highly stylized models, and there are good reasons why they are more in favour with the public. Realism certainly ought not to be as obtrusive as in waxwork portraiture, but those to whom costume is an unfamiliar subject will find little interest in a sleeve with deep ruffles unless it is set off by an arm, or in a man’s starched neckcloth and collar without the semblance of a neck. (Langley Moore 1969: 1)
The effects achieved by referencing the aesthetic body ideals (silhouettes, postures, and hairstyles) of past epochs in this abstracted manner help to evoke a period presence with a physicality that does not impose on the viewer’s own, as audiences perceive these mannequins as sculptures rather than as uncanny persons.
A headless or featureless mannequin is therefore representative of a cerebral, or at least subtle, approach to fashion history, and this is probably another reason why dress has been devalued in museums—fashion’s close links with the body, when displayed, evoke embodied personal memories that are nostalgic, not the rational critical distance of historical discipline (Shaw and Chase 1989).
The widely varied interpretations that result from incorporated memories threaten the intellectual authority of the museum. Yet the very relatability of fashion, because of its universal presence in society, can make the work of the museum to interpret it easier.