Constructions of Beauty: Sexuality and Issues of Gendered Dress

Classical Greek art, including dress, has formed the basis of constructions of ideals of male and female bodily and facial beauty in the Western world, as witnessed by the continuing rereferencing of images such as the charioteer of Delphi, a bronze, life-size, votive statue from the Apollo Sanctuary, Delphi, dating from 475 b.c.e., at the end of the early classical period. In her study Fabrics of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting (2002) Anne Hollander notes that the cutting and shaping of cloth was unknown in ancient Greece. Rather "the beauty of clothing dwelt in the distinction of its woven fabric and the elegance or aptness with which it was draped around the individual body" (pp. 13–14). Typically, the charioteer of Delphi wears a long, simple, Ionic tunic held in place with cords over the shoulders that tie at the front waist. This system frees the arms and allows drapery to fall over the waist and then straight down to the ankles. Hollander notes that "the life likeness in carved Greek clothes and bodies has often produced perfection—a stylization of natural appearances so subtle as to seem absent" (pp. 13–14).

This classical draped perfection has been continually reworked within European-American dress design, nearly always in white fabric, and usually with a high waist. It was most famously appropriated as the symbol of freedom and equality during the French Revolution. Originating in the 1770s anti-establishment, neoclassical paintings of Jacques-Louis David, the style was adopted for use by women in French revolutionary festivals in the period from 1790 to 1795 and became, in modified fashion form, the fashionable attire of European and American women from 1800 until about 1825, when the high waist was abandoned. The next revivals came out of the English arts and crafts and aesthetic movements in the period from 1878 to 1910, favored by progressive, antifashion dressers. This reflected the very same search for natural feminine perfection at a time when the shape of fashionable women was distorted and restricted by corsets and bustles. The search was repeated again by Mariano Fortuny, who famously created his own "Delphos" dresses in finely pleated, plain-colored silk, modeled exactly on the tunic of the charioteer of Delphi. Fortuny produced these from his Venetian palazzo from 1910 until his death in 1949. They were worn by a group of progressive women, in defiance of the fashion of their time. Paris couturiers too, however, have famously reworked classical Greek drapery into the height of seasonal fashion, including Madeleine Vionnet, from about 1918 into the 1930s; Alix, also known as Madame Grés, through the 1930s and 1950s; and since the 1980s, John Galliano.