We like to think we invented the expression “fashion victim,” but as the Bata Shoe Museum’s newest exhibition reveals, it’s so 19th century.
Indeed, Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of Dress in the 19th Century, co-curated by Bata senior curator Elizabeth Semmelhack and Alison Matthews David, an associate professor with Ryerson’s fashion school, is about a lot more than shoes. Semmelhack is interested in material culture and what our consumption choices say about us.
In this latest show, which focuses on the sartorial mores of the 19th century, questions arise about how far we will go to jeopardize our health and the safety of others when it comes to expressing an idea of beauty that is still relevant today. For instance, the term fashion victim was one that very much in use at the time.
“This metaphor, of being slaves or victims of fashion, is not a new expression,” says Matthews David, who delved deeply into Victorian medical journals and back issues of Punch and the London Times for the exhibit pulled together with Semmelhack.
“But when we use the expression we tend to think of someone who has gone to crazy extremes in their wardrobe. The way it was used back in the 19th century, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, was literally, that one was in danger of risking their health by following the latest fashion trends.”
Prime examples of these risky behaviours in dress, which are shown in a colonnade of elegant vitrines intended to convey the atmosphere of a 19th century department store, include a gown brought in expressly for the show from a collector in Australia. The gown was dyed with arsenic (“We tested it in the Ryerson labs and it was still full of the stuff,” says David) for a funny, poisonous looking green that was widely popular at the time and has been called “arsenic green” by designers ever since (Farrow & Ball still offers a presumably poison-free version of the same name).
Shown with it is a portrait of Queen Victoria sporting a dress in the same shade before her days of mourning black (a pair of her very own beaded black slippers from the Bata collection are also on show), as well as a trellis wallpaper from William Morris, the foliate greenery of which proved to contain arsenic.
Indeed the 19th century, which we always think of in the full mourning black (in some measure due to what Semmelhack calls the “cult of death and mourning”), was actually brilliant with new colours as a result of technical innovation, many of which were essentially poisons.
After a mauve dye was developed using the plentiful yet toxic coal tar sludge in 1856, the colour became the latest wave for literal fashion victims who developed violent skin reactions dubbed the “mauve measles” after wearing it head to toe. Three darling pairs of silk slippers in the shade glow in one vitrine like dangerous snakes.
Beaver hats too — our nation’s founding export and every worthy European gentleman’s necessary topper — had their perils for both their wearers and their makers as many of the more affordable versions were lined with a substance laced with mercury. Hence the expression Mad Hatter, which I had always assumed to be pure invention on the part of Lewis Carroll’s fevered imagination.
The exhibition also presents a discussion of such unhealthy Victorian vogues as the wearing of corsets (the poster child of the era apparently being the much-admired Empress Elizabeth of Austria, a notorious “tight-lacer”) as well as impossibly narrow boots and shoes, many of which required the European wearer to pre-bind the foot, as in Asian custom, merely to squeeze into them.
Crinolines too, and the fashion for tulle trimmings and hair combs made from the popular celluloid (essentially made from the same stuff as highly flammable film) all presented significant safety risks in an era where everything was lit by gas.
But the show’s larger point is more political.
“History reveals that fashion is not just a whim or a tangential preoccupation but a primary economic mover and significant cultural force,” Semmelhack says.
As the show reveals, this transcends class and reaches everyone at all levels, from the terrible circumstances of the shoe shine boys who had to maintain the Victorian gentleman’s extreme level of polish, to the fine embroiderers of Pinet’s silk shoes who crafted them in the poor conditions of their own homes so that the fine ladies could wear them in their own better-lit parlours.
One cannot escape the subtle conclusion that the Victorian conundrum of fashion and class and health and safety is still being played out today in the perils and pleasures of uncontrolled offshore manufacturing. Except as Semmelhack says, thanks to globalization those perils — at least for the makers — are no longer right under our noses but far, far away.
Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. Contact her at email@example.com .