Fashion as a Mirror of Romantic Society
Any society is defined and reflected by multiple factors. However distant the political, social, and philosophical factors may at first glance seem from the idea of fashion, these constituted a defining part of the evolution of the Romantic era fashion. After all, it is obvious that how society fares is bound to reflect on what society wears. Social, political, philosophical, as well as literature, art and music- based influences all highly contributed to the development of fashion. This essay will try to explore several of these factors in order to give a wide angle on Romantic era society and fashion.
Several political and social movements formed in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The Romantic Movement held a philosophy which liberated the individual as well his emotions from the 18th century strict ideals of emotional constraint. In politics, this gave rise to Liberalism and Nationalism, which began as struggle for individual as well as national identity. The social notions of the exaltation and purity of human emotion ungoverned by set rules and the unique approach to the individual all found its way into Romantic literature, art and music. Romanticism began in Germany with the “Sturm und Drang” (“Storm and Stress”) literary movement, notably with Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. In England, William Blake and William Wordsworth found Romanticism as a way of coming back to the poetic realm of nature at the threshold of the Industrial Revolution. One of the Romantic ideals was the synthesis of the arts. We can see this best in the imaginative songs of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, which unified the words of Romantic poetry with the sounds of the Romantic soul.
Fashion played an important part in all these artistic and social movements as it reflected their search for the ideal. In the French Post-Revolutionary times the entirely new fashion was the result of a new philosophy. As Katherine Aaslestad writes, “Fashion, embodying new social values, emerged as a key site of confrontation between tradition and change" (Aaslestad, 283). The Empire style had disposed of corsets and favored loose, open gowns of light material. Likewise, men abandoned their laces and embellishments in favor of plainer clothes. However, with the end of the Napoleonic wars, France picked up the style which had meanwhile developed in England, called neo- Gothic. It was in part influenced by the growing English Romantic movement characterized by the chivalrous writings of authors like Lord Byron. This chivalry was later picked up in art by the English Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The neo-Gothic style soon evolved into the Romantic style of the mid-1800s as social values started emphasizing women’s traditional family role and her fragile femininity. “The slope-shouldered, full sleeved silhouette suggested a weak body, and a butterfly-like decorative quality” (Jirousek). The new men’s fashion, starting in the late 1700s as a way for men to state their liberal …
