Medievalism and High Fashion--two terms you would never expect to see together, right?
Renaissance Faires are fun, of course, and Medieval themed weddings are one of the most popular “themed weddings,” but usually the people participating in these events are not your typical Coco Chanels or Miuccia Pradas. Medieval clothing is cute, costume-y, and sometimes a little naughty—but fashionable?
This following tidbit may come as a surprise to you fashionistas (and fashionistos)—the fourteenth century is considered the birth of High Fashion. The following excerpts from the Morgan Library’s description of their current exhibition Illuminating Fashion (which I am dying to see) describes exactly what made the fashion of the fourteenth century so different from that of any previous centuries:
The “Fashion Revolution” began around 1330 with the invention of the set-in sleeve. Earlier garments were T-shaped, with sleeves of a piece with the body or sewn on a flat seam. The new technique (still in use today) cut sleeves with rounded tops and gathered them along basted threads into armholes in the bodice. This new tailoring, combined with the use of multiple buttons, made possible a snugly fitted bodice and tight sleeves. While providing more freedom of movement, the new garment for men—the cote hardy—also revealed the shapes of the wearer's torso and arms. The “Fashion Revolution” gave birth to men's modern dress, creating an outfit that was sharply differentiated from the dress of women. Women's fashions, however, were also affected. Tighter bodices and sleeves became popular, as did exposed necks and shoulders. The sides of the outer garment, the surcot, now sometimes featured seductively large, peek-a-boo openings.
The nearly 200 years just prior to the Renaissance in Northern Europe constituted a fertile era for fashion, a period in which clothing styles changed rapidly, often from one decade to the next. (http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?id=45)
The clothes fit better, revealing the bodies underneath. As the years went on, men’s skirts became shorter and shorter, revealing their legs and codpieces, and women’s necklines plunged lower (even though women always covered their shoulders and bosom with some sort of lace veil, of course).
Although I will return to the “Fashionable Middle Ages” theme a lot in the future, I am only giving an introduction right now in order to describe a specific work of craftsmanship that came out of this period of High Fashion.
This fourteenth-century ivory mirror case from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was a gift that a man would have given his future wife as a courtship present. On the back of the mirror case (the side shown in the picture), two sets of knights joust in front of a castle, filled with maidens. Two of the knights wear flowers on their shields, while the others have birds on their helmets—both standards are symbols of love and fertility. Through this scene, the man who gave such a present to his future bride would be suggesting not only that he would be courageous and strong in honor of his lady, but also that he compared his future wife to the beautiful young maidens (with ivory-white skin) on the ramparts of the castle.
Most importantly, the man suggests to the woman that she will possess a sense of power and autonomy in their relationship. In this image the relationship between the women and men, subject and objectified, appears flipped on its head. Typically in the art of patriarchal societies, men are the ones who gaze at women, the objects of their desire. This image, however, shows the men at the full mercy of the women’s gazes. Although similar themes were carved on the backs of numerous mirror cases, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' example stands out by suggesting a deeper penetration of the woman’s gaze into the man—the knight on the lower left has his helmet knocked off. Michael Camille describes the usual comparison between depictions of medieval males and females as objects of desire, in his Medieval Art of Love:
But by contrast to that of the female, which is always presented as naked…, as open to the gaze, the male body is all surface, a carapace or hard shell surrounded by and protected by armor and heraldry that announces its strength and impenetrability (Camille).
This mirror case, therefore, suggests a sense of agency for the recipient. Are we then to believe that with the fashion revolution came an act of women’s liberation? Well, maybe if the image on this mirror case actually reflected reality. We must first remember when looking at this image that it is not a work of art meant to hang on the wall. The image on the back was simply decoration for the more practical object on the front—a mirror. This might not seem too terribly important at first; however, when we stop to discover the relationship between the image on the back and the use of a mirror, we discover an entire tradition of men manipulating women, very similar to traditions today.
By presenting the woman with images of idealized ladies on the back of a mirror, the man would be telling his future wife that she now has the means of keeping herself as beautiful as the women on the mirror case. And if she stays beautiful like the women in the image, she will have agency in the relationship. Disgusting, right?
Well, sadly this same phenomenon happens today.
Millions of women subscribe to fashion magazines like Cosmopolitan each month, looking for advice in fashion, cosmetics, and luxury living. These female subscribers see page after page of flawless women, in a world made for women, in which men are their subordinates—simply bodies used for pleasure. By reading these magazines women are expected to feel a sense of empowerment. They can find everything in the magazine’s pages, from the cosmetics and clothing to the jewelry that could make them as perfect as the women depicted in the magazine. The readers subconsciously begin to correlate beauty and wealth with autonomy and success. The effects, however, are somewhat detrimental.
I just recently read my friend Annie Brown’s honors thesis, which provided a lot of the inspiration for this post. Her thesis, titled The Best that You Can Be: Conflicting Messages of Liberation and Oppression in Indian Cosmopolitan Magazine, focuses on the effects Indian Cosmo has on the women of India—effects like eating disorders, environmental degradation, and economic stratification. I quote a couple of passages from her thesis below:
Indian Cosmopolitan is an example of a discourse-disseminating product developed by professionals in both India and America to extract resources from middleclass women, and ensure the preservation of patriarchy and capitalism so that future generations will also have gender-specific problems that can be exploited for profit.
It is in their best interests to invoke discourses that will create a dependence on their magazine as well as the manufacturers that support the Hearst Corporation, and their personal lives, financially.
Cosmopolitan cannot offer any complete solutions to women’s oppression, hardships, and insecurities, because doing so would eliminate women’s need to turn to consumer magazines for advice and product recommendations.
Okay, so I am getting a little off-topic, but I highly encourage everyone who has free time and might be looking for something very informative to read to please read this thesis (I’ve provided a link at the bottom).
To get back to its relationship with the mirror case, I will provide one more quote from Annie’s thesis:
Cosmopolitan magazine, aimed at women 18-34, is the number one women’s magazine in the world, ranking first in circulation figures and advertisement pages. When asked why Cosmopolitan is so successful President of Hearst Magazine’s International, George Green, responded “it’s about empowerment.” Helen Gurley Brown believes that Cosmopolitan is facilitating a feminist consciousness among women worldwide. However, Cosmo’s feminism is tied to western-centric ideas of modernization and progress.
I now want to ask If you see this ivory mirror as something empowering, or something self-destructive. Every time the lady looks at her mirror, she is presented with the promise from her future husband that she will have power in the relationship if she remains beautiful, so she will most likely spend the rest of her life staring into the unforgiving lens of the mirror.
Sources:
- Annie Brown’s Thesis: https://digitalarchive.wm.edu/handle/10288/2023
- The Morgan’s Illuminating Fashion exhibition: http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?id=45
- Michael Camille. The Medieval Art of Love. New York: Abrams, Inc., 1998.
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