Dress historian Anne Bissonnette's recent study of neoclassical white dresses could make other historians reassess a major turning point in world history.
Bissonnette researched Parisian women's dress in the five years between France's Reign of Terror (1793-94) and Napoleon's overthrow of the revolutionaries' Directory government in 1799, which effectively ended the French Revolution.
Reform was the rallying cry of the Directory era. Government was reorganized, and architecture and decorative art reflected the new political structures that looked to ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration.
Based on the era's paintings, social historians claim women's fashion became quite daring, too. Gone were the heavily trimmed and voluminous silk brocaded gowns worn with numerous quilted petticoats, that reflected Rococo taste. Minimalism rushed in, in the guise of sheer-white columnal gowns with short sleeves and deep necklines exposing a fair amount of décolletage.
"Clothing history books are filled with stories describing women wearing sheer dresses and dousing themselves with water so the gowns would cling to their bodies," said Bissonnette, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Ecology.
Yet she was puzzled by how styles and attitudes could change so rapidly and aggressively. In fact, her research suggests historians have erred about how quickly and thoroughly society altered as the Revolution ebbed.
In 2006, Bissonnette received unprecedented access to a trove of Paris's Journal des Dames et des Modes, the most successful fashion paper of the Directory period. In painstakingly executed fashion plates, JDM artists and writers recorded what real women were wearing in the shops and streets. Its editors also added comments, noting extreme styles.
Bissonnette applied quantitative research to the fashion plates and comments, and found that not only was the sheer-white column dress quite rare, so was daring body delineation through dress. While bosoms were on display, the lower body's contours were concealed by most women until 1799.
By studying the entire series of JDM fashion plates and realizing a tendency for observers to focus on what's rare and extreme, she believes historians took single pictures out of context, which is akin to saying everyone wore punk-rock spikes in 1972, she said.
We should care about this for a couple of reasons, said Bissonnette. It says that dress behavior, like a lot of things, occurs on a continuum: "You have to advance in a way that also addresses the past."
Establishing the exact roots of what led to our modern era of body-conscious dressing also helps in our understanding of the current media's obsession with perfect bodies, which now targets us from childhood to our senior years, she said.
"This has not always been the case. So where is this coming from? How is it being interpreted? How is this part of our psyche? This the root of a lot of other current issues."
In trying to get at the origins of something, it's important that researchers examine relevant history, she said: "Now they'll have an accurate timeline and an awareness of the root of this obsession with the body through dress."
Bissonnette's paper, Dessiné d'après nature: Renditions from Life in theJournal des Dames et des Modes, 1798-9, was published by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Bissonnette researched Parisian women's dress in the five years between France's Reign of Terror (1793-94) and Napoleon's overthrow of the revolutionaries' Directory government in 1799, which effectively ended the French Revolution.
Reform was the rallying cry of the Directory era. Government was reorganized, and architecture and decorative art reflected the new political structures that looked to ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration.
Based on the era's paintings, social historians claim women's fashion became quite daring, too. Gone were the heavily trimmed and voluminous silk brocaded gowns worn with numerous quilted petticoats, that reflected Rococo taste. Minimalism rushed in, in the guise of sheer-white columnal gowns with short sleeves and deep necklines exposing a fair amount of décolletage.
"Clothing history books are filled with stories describing women wearing sheer dresses and dousing themselves with water so the gowns would cling to their bodies," said Bissonnette, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Ecology.
Yet she was puzzled by how styles and attitudes could change so rapidly and aggressively. In fact, her research suggests historians have erred about how quickly and thoroughly society altered as the Revolution ebbed.
In 2006, Bissonnette received unprecedented access to a trove of Paris's Journal des Dames et des Modes, the most successful fashion paper of the Directory period. In painstakingly executed fashion plates, JDM artists and writers recorded what real women were wearing in the shops and streets. Its editors also added comments, noting extreme styles.
Bissonnette applied quantitative research to the fashion plates and comments, and found that not only was the sheer-white column dress quite rare, so was daring body delineation through dress. While bosoms were on display, the lower body's contours were concealed by most women until 1799.
By studying the entire series of JDM fashion plates and realizing a tendency for observers to focus on what's rare and extreme, she believes historians took single pictures out of context, which is akin to saying everyone wore punk-rock spikes in 1972, she said.
We should care about this for a couple of reasons, said Bissonnette. It says that dress behavior, like a lot of things, occurs on a continuum: "You have to advance in a way that also addresses the past."
Establishing the exact roots of what led to our modern era of body-conscious dressing also helps in our understanding of the current media's obsession with perfect bodies, which now targets us from childhood to our senior years, she said.
"This has not always been the case. So where is this coming from? How is it being interpreted? How is this part of our psyche? This the root of a lot of other current issues."
In trying to get at the origins of something, it's important that researchers examine relevant history, she said: "Now they'll have an accurate timeline and an awareness of the root of this obsession with the body through dress."
Bissonnette's paper, Dessiné d'après nature: Renditions from Life in theJournal des Dames et des Modes, 1798-9, was published by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.