Although components of Hellenic attire have appeared throughout Western fashion’s 600-year history, it is only from the 1790s to the 1810s that classicized forms are embraced as the prevailing mode.
Dress of the eighteenth century is not without anachronisms and exoticisms of its own, but that singular, changing, revolutionizing century has become an icon in the history of fashion.
In the absence of any surviving clothing, art and literature provide the only evidence of classical dress, opening a Pandora’s box of confusion and contradiction.
The richness and variety of the costumes represented in ancient Greek art are often the result of simple manipulations of the three basic garment types: the chiton, the peplos, and the himation.
Greek vase painting and traces of paint on ancient sculptures indicate that fabrics were brightly colored and generally decorated with elaborate designs.
In the mid-1840s, the Scottish painter-photographer team of Hill and Adamson produced the first substantial body of self-consciously artistic work using the newly invented medium of photography.
No longer experimental or unreliable but not yet industrialized, photography in the 1850s was still very much a handcrafted medium with technical treatises that provided the foundation of knowledge on which individual photographers could build their experience.
Louis Lang’s Art Students presents an intriguing window into the professionalization of women’s art education in the United States during the nineteenth century.
