Layers of Pleasure: Women, Fashionable Dress and Visual Culture in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Professor Lynda Nead discussed the age of crinoline in a plenary lecture at a conference at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Professor Lynda Nead discussed the age of crinoline in a plenary lecture at a conference at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville on 12 March.
The theme of the conference was leisure, entertainment and fun. Professor Nead's lecture ‘Layers of Pleasure: Women, Fashionable Dress and Visual Culture in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ examined fashionable women’s dress from around 1855-1865.
It argued that dress played a significant part in the performance of femininity that, in many ways, challenges conventional and conservative images of respectable Victorian womanhood. It gave women access to a bodily language that involved imaginative projection and fantasy, pleasure and the senses. Like the layers and folds of fabric, the pleasures of fashionable dress for women who wore it (and the women who write about it today) are multiple and sensual, involving sight, sound and, above all, touch.
In researching this lecture Professor Nead was struck by the very public debate in the middle of the nineteenth century about the ethics and aesthetics of the crinoline.
'On the one hand, there were those who regarded them as a health hazard and as literally taking up too much room; on the other hand, advocates of the crinoline described them as light, convenient and an icon of the modern age. Critics often described the particular zig zag sway of the crinoline as women walked and I decided to try on a crinoline myself in the teaching collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was light and very mobile, creating a kind of dynamic form around the body….sitting down was very awkward, however!’
Lynda teaches on the BA History of Art and MA History of Art programmes as well as supervising PhD students.