The New Taste

A fascinating consideration of the dynamic relationship between fashion, art, and the modernizing forces of the early nineteenth century

 

Across the visual arts in France and Britain in the 1820s and 1830s a dynamic culture of fashion was taking shape. Wide-ranging in taste and driven by a quest for the new, fashion flourished in the period’s expansive print production, while the fine arts negotiated demands for novelty more paradoxically, partly by reviving styles from the past. Susan L. Siegfried argues that the intersections between fashion, costume, and art in these pivotal decades embody the fractured conditions of early nineteenth-century modernity.

 

The New Taste examines depictions of clothing and hairstyles in fashion plates, paintings, prints, and sculpture by artists including Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Horace Vernet, Achille Devéria, and Bertel Thorvaldsen, alongside texts by writers such as Honoré de Balzac and Thomas Carlyle. Siegfried reveals how both the commercial and the fine arts responded to social and economic transformations, including colonialism, changes in print technology and textile manufacture, as well as perceptions of the male dandy and the active role of women as consumers. Highlighting a largely overlooked period in art and fashion, this richly illustrated volume offers insights into the social, artistic, and gendered questions that troubled the shift from classicism to realism.