Browse Exhibits (1 total)

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain, fashion was a primary site in which the normativization of gender occurred. For instance, in the early 1770s, as Amelia Rauser notes in her article "Hair, Authenticity, and the Self-Made Macaroni," there was a rise of British men who wore enormously tall wigs (often with a hat on top), signifiers of their sophistication; these wigs reflected their worldly travels and knowledge. In short, it was the very fashioning of hair that communicated the sophistication--a distinctly male sophistication--of these individuals. Likewise, in describing a couple from the early-18th century--the Earl and Countess of Strafford--Hannah Greig, in her monograph Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London, describes how fashion functioned beyond materiality for the beau monde (the "people of fashion") who lived during the era. Their clothing articles had lives; atop the material value of the fashion goods, there was also social currency, granting the beau monde access to elite society. Gender, ergo, at least as it was performed by the beau monde during the Georgian period, can be understood within a framework of exclusionary politics, wherein men and women performed their identity--gender refracted through elite status--through their clothes.

In my exhibit, entitled "Dressing up Gender: Fashion, Embellishment, and the Invention of the 18th- and 19th-Century British Woman," I explore the ways in which womanhood was engendered in not only clothing worn during the Georgian and Victorian eras, but also items that embellished women's appearance and their depictions in art. In one instance, I look at a clothing item, a corset, to better understand how the politics of size and space were incorporated into gender norms and fashion, specifically as they pertain to women. In other cases, I use artistic representations of women--namely the clothes they are seen wearing, and the things that contribute to their overall appearance or air--as my nodes of critical analysis. I then distill the sexist underpinnings of these works, which seek to: delineate women from men; limit their aspirations; confine them to the domestic; prove what their natural inclinations are; force them to adhere to respectability politics; subordinate them altogether. It is through women's fashion and associated adornments (as well as artistic renditions of such), I argue, that one can immediately see the process of constructing the 18th- and 19th-century British woman.