Paulette Hamilton 
Students in Professor Anne Higonnet’s courses created a website and an Instagram account to inform the story of the most radical upheaval in garb history.
By Eve Glasberg
June 17, 2019
In 2017, art historian Anne Higonnet became checking footnotes for an essay she turned into writing while she came throughout a cryptic catalog entry from the Morgan Library & Museum. It indicated that the Morgan owned an entire set of extraordinarily rare and modern style plates on the history of the gown.
“Very specialized pupils were ignorant of the location of any complete set of these plates, so it regarded unlikely to me,” stated Higonnet, chair of the art records department at Columbia’s Barnard College. “But the Morgan is simplest a subway ride away, so I went to analyze.”
To her astonishment, the museum did indeed have a complete set of engravings from the Journal des Dames et des Modes, a groundbreaking Parisian style mag that commenced publishing in 1797, after the French Revolution upended European society, including style.
From its inception until it closed in 1836, the guide dominated what women and men wore on both sides of the Atlantic, supplying Europeans and Americans a startlingly new manner to dress. The magazine’s first seven years have been especially reducing edge. It “rejected the regulations, shapes and materials that had signaled static social rank in want of mobile and sexual self-expression thru purchaser preference,” Higonnet said. “This dramatic experiment in individualism freed men to get dressed as they have ever when you consider that, and for a short time, liberated girls.”
After alerting Morgan curators to her discovery, Higonnet proposed that her college students digitize the style plates and construct an internet site to showcase them. The Morgan agreed and inside the fall of 2017 her graduate seminar, which covered students from Columbia, Bard College and New York University, partnered with both the Morgan and Columbia Libraries’ Digital Humanities Center to create a website, Style Revolution. It makes to be had for the primary time all 499 of the Journal des Dames et des Modes photographs, from 1797 to 1804, together with transcribed and translated captions. It additionally consists of maps, a timeline, essays, shade guides, apparel glossaries and a macroscopic have a look at of the plates.
For centuries, European sumptuary laws confined inordinate spending on luxury items, upholding social status hierarchies. The French Revolution in 1789 enabled Parisian women and men to reinvent themselves, together with how they dressed. After the phobia phase of the Revolution ended in 1794, a one-of-a-kind kind of rebellion of simplicity unfolds throughout Europe and North America, proclaiming that clothes need to use democratically available substances—including imported Indian cotton, way to worldwide exchange—to explicit private style alternatives.
For guys, this riot marked the abandonment of such froufrou as embroidery, lace, silks and ornate courtroom costumes, changing them with a precursor to the strong-coloration three-piece fit still worn these days. Women have been not trapped rigid interior corsets and voluminous petticoats, or forced to teeter on impossibly excessive heels. They opted as an alternative for tailor-made jackets, draped shawls, flat shoes and attire so light and directly that Frankenstein’s author, Mary Shelley, stated they appeared greater like curtains than robes. For girls mainly, this jettisoning of restrictive patterns changed into a political decision and a contravention of gender norms.
“The radical style plates we see in Style Revolution inform the story of this sudden and brief-lived upheaval in apparel records,” stated Higonnet.
Napoleon Bonaparte, scandalized by the freedom those new clothes represented, started to roll back women’s revolutionary style at the occasion of his 1804 coronation. By 1825, girls had been obliged by way of inflexible social standards to wear more quite gendered and problematic clothes than ever before each in Europe and the US.
In spring 2018, Higonnet taught an undergraduate route in which her college students created Style Revolution’s Instagram account, which features the Journal’s fashion plates in a modern-day idiom. In addition to modeling recreated 1797-1804 seems, college students put up on subjects which includes routine revivals of the style innovations stimulated with the aid of the magazine.
Even with the internet site and the Instagram account, Higonnet and her Morgan colleagues concerned that there were no complete copies of the textual content for the years 1797 to 1804 in a public series. Then, in magnificence sooner or later, she mentioned that perhaps the most effective entire reproduction of the Journal turned into inside the Design Museum in Copenhagen. By hazard, there has been a traveling Danish scholar inside the elegance who had labored on the museum before arriving at Barnard. She offered to contact colleagues there to discover if the Journal des Dames et des Modes text in its collection become complete or fragmentary. As success would have it, their model was whole. It has now been digitized and is being added to the website.