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Dressed: The History of Fashion
Fashioning the Gilded Age: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion with Dr. Elizabeth Block (Dressed Classic)
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- [00:00]
Cassidy Zachary
With the Venmo Debit card, you can Venmo everything.
- [00:02]
Unknown
Your favorite band's merch.
- [00:04]
April Callahan
You can Venmo this or their next show.
- [00:05]
Cassidy Zachary
You can Venmo that. Visit Venmo Me Debit to learn more. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp bank and a pursuant to license.
- [00:11]
April Callahan
By Mastercard International, Inc.
- [00:12]
Cassidy Zachary
The card may be used everywhere. MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply.
- [00:15]
Unknown
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- [00:45]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Dress Listeners, Bonjour from Paris.
- [00:48]
April Callahan
Yes, we are currently on our annual summer hiatus from the show as we conduct our summer fashion history tours of the City of Lights. But worry not, we will be back in August with brand new content dedicated to all of the exciting fashion history exhibitions and other behind the scenes experiences we have encountered while here.
- [01:06]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Until then, please enjoy this episode from the Dressed archive of over 500 past shows. The History of Fashion is a production of dressed media. With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day, we all get dressed.
- [01:26]
April Callahan
Welcome to the History of Fashion, a podcast that explores the who, what, when of why we wear. We are friends, fashion historians and your.
- [01:34]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Hosts April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary. One of the consistent themes of this podcast, dress listeners, as you will know, is expanding the narratives of fashion history. So really digging deeper into what we think we know or have traditionally been taught to get to the heart of the story sewn into the clothes we all wear. And one of these traditional narratives has to do with centering Paris and of course the Parisian based haute couture industry led by famed haute couturiers as the end all be all of fashion tastemakers. Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, haute couturiers reigned supreme in both literal royal courts across Europe and in the court of public taste and opinion, especially in America.
- [02:17]
April Callahan
And of course these accolades are not without merit. French fashion had a seismic impact in the 19th and 20th centuries. We've talked about this many times on the show, especially in the context of the quote unquote father of haute couture, Charles Frederick Worth, who was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the modern fashion system that we are all familiar with today.
- [02:38]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
But it must be said, he did not do it alone. And in fact, another common but deceptive fashion narrative is that somehow designers like Worth were these singular creative geniuses right? When in reality, they were part of a much larger fashion team, both in house and out of house and fashion system, both locally and internationally, made up of everyone from seamstresses and tailors to perfumiers and milliners to the international fashion press. And all of these people collectively secured the success and the maintenance of the myth that only through French fashion and French fashion alone could women's sartorial dreams come true. And French fashion supremacy was achieved in no small part thanks to their wealthy American clientele, who, as consumers and tastemakers, helped to define the haute couture industry and, by extension, fashion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
- [03:28]
April Callahan
This is a particularly apt topic with the much anticipated launch of season two of HBO's hit TV show the Gilded Age this week. Last week, we dove into the etiquette that dictated the social interactions of the American elite during this prosperous late 19th century period. And as promised, today we are going to dive into the fashions of the era and the women who shaped them with our guest, Dr. Elizabeth Block, senior editor in the publications and editorial department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She joins us to talk about her book, Dressing the Women who Influenced French Fashion, which has been published by MIT Press. Dr. Block, we are so pleased to welcome you to the show.
- [04:15]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Liz, welcome to Dressed.
- [04:18]
Cassidy Zachary
Thank you, Cassidy.
- [04:20]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
I'm so excited to talk to you today about your beautiful book. And before we kind of dive into what's in the book, I was hoping you could tell us a little bit inspiration behind writing it.
- [04:30]
Cassidy Zachary
Yes. So as with many art historical and social history projects, the inquiry for this one started with John Singer Sargent's painting Madame X, which is in the Met, and It dates to 1883-84. Most people are familiar with it at this point. It's the portrait of Madame Gautreau, and she's wearing a slender black dress. And very famously, there was a strap falling down the right shoulder, and Sargent needed to repaint it after it caused so much of a scandal at the Paris Salon of 1884. So I was working on an article about women's fashion and hairstyles in portraiture, and I sent a draft to a friend at the Graduate center where I got my PhD. It's part of the City University of New York. And he said, liz, I think we need to know more about the maker of the dress. And so that launched a longtime research project into the Maison Felix, who I'm sure we'll talk a little bit more about later. But we believe that the house that designed the slender black dress worn by Madame Gautreau was possibly made by the Maison Felix in Paris. Madame Gautreau was from a New Orleans family, but she married a wealthy Parisian banker and became part of Parisian society. And so that started the inquiry. And in the book, I include an entire chapter on the Maison Felix and its American clients. And I introduce the owner, Emile Martin Poussinot, who was called Felix. And remarkably, this Parisian house was in business from 1846 to 1901, and yet.
- [06:17]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
We know nothing about it. Right. But within that historical narrative of French haute couture, it's one of those lesser known or unknown names.
- [06:26]
Cassidy Zachary
It's incredible. They were in business for so many years. And I can't tell you what a joy it is to track as many of the existing garments by Felix, but it's. It's really been the hunt of a lifetime.
- [06:39]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
So this book is beautifully illustrated and includes numerous extant garments, many of which are accompanied by the portraits that immortalize them. And you have this method called following the dresses, which is central to how you researched this book. So how did you follow the dresses and what did this method reveal to you?
- [07:00]
Cassidy Zachary
As an art historian who focuses on representations of women, it's always struck me as peculiar that although the majority of a canvas of a painted portrait of a woman in the late 19th century, perhaps three quarters of the canvas is taken up by the garment worn by the sitter. Given all of that, however, traditional art history tends to focus on the painter and maybe the pose of the sitter, and maybe the biography of the sitter or the husband of the sitter and the biography of him. But your question really goes back to the original impetus of my book, which was Sargent's Madame X. So what happens when we start with the origin of the image of the dress in the painting? So, setting aside, in the case of Madame X, setting aside the well known scandal at the Salon of 1884, and Madame Gautreau's mother's disappointment in the painting and thinking that Sargent didn't portray her as a proper woman, setting aside that in this case, the simple question of who could have possibly made a dress like that, if not the exact one, which we will never really know, but who could have made that slinky form fitting black velvet and silk dress, that one question opened up an entire world to of makers to me, especially the Maison Felix, which by now, you know, is one of my favorites.
- [08:34]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
And I made a point of kind of pointing out Maison Felix is not one of the well known names, because that is actually one of the main goals of your book, which is to, quote, disrupt the conception of major couturiers of the period as unparalleled geniuses. And then so you're really trying to reframe that narrative and show all of the different people and professions, customers, who are involved with elevating the French haute couture to this supreme status in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And this is actually something we talk about on the show. Our listeners will be familiar with what Elizabeth Hawes, who's an American fashion designer, called the French legend. So it's this idea that all the beautiful dresses are made by French haute couturiers and all women want these clothes. But this is an idea just like this idea of the singular creative genius of the haute couturier, which is what you talk about in the book. It's actually the result of a very carefully crafted campaign perfected over hundreds of years, that sought to elevate French fashion and French culture above all else. And you talk about this in the book, and I'm hoping that you can tell us a little bit more about where this started and how it developed over the years.
- [09:44]
Cassidy Zachary
That's right. So France emerged as the dominant purveyor of stylish clothing all the way back in the late 17th century. And this was when Louis XIV's finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, led the transition of the town Lyon, or the city of Lyon, from a city of importers to manufacturers and exporters of silk cloth. So instead of bringing in silk from Italy or the eastern Mediterranean or China or Japan, Lyon now acquired silkworms and trained their own workers to make its own own silk cloth. So Lyon developed into the largest market for silk cloth and maintained the stature until the mid-1890s. And Parisian couturiers benefited from their proximity to the Lyon suppliers of this, quote, aristocratic fiber. And the House of Worth, of course, was one of the most influential customers. So the quality of materials and the expertise of, of creating and presenting fashion emerged among the cultural touchstones of Paris, which has lasted to the present. That good taste and good style of Paris.
- [10:57]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Oh, absolutely. And it must be said that the French did more than just export fashion. They exported the idea that their fashion and their fashion alone was supreme to all else. And they did it incredibly well. Can you talk about how this belief in the supremacy of French fashion was created and how it was also maintained in the US Imagination. Specifically.
- [11:17]
Cassidy Zachary
Specifically, yeah. The idea of French fashion reigned supreme and the styles were disseminated in several different ways. One of the ways was through pattern books, but also through periodicals like Godey's Ladies Book, Peterson's Magazine and Frank Leslie's various publications. These were affordable magazines that relayed fashions from both London and Paris, and they carried accounts of royal events and mask balls in Europe. But another way that we're familiar with still today that fashions disseminated was through department stores. And in the United States, department stores were the hallmarks of democratic marketplaces. We know the names Lord and Taylor B. Altman at Stewart Bloomingdale's. These stores sold American goods, but also a large array of French fabrics, trimmings, and finished high end garments, many of which were imported directly from Paris. And the buyers at the department stores went to Paris to see the designs and to place orders so that they could give the best of the best to the American customers.
- [12:31]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Yeah, and you also write about import houses, milliners, dressmakers, many of whom created, you know, touted their designs as being French or French inspired. But we also know as historians that many of them created their own designs and sold them as French designs or French inspired designs. Because this idea of French fashion and the supremacy of fashion just had this vice grip on American consumer taste at this time, which is so fascinating.
- [12:58]
Cassidy Zachary
That's right.
- [12:59]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
And it's also predicated on American women thinking that they have to get their fashion from Paris and in some ways that they can't really dress themselves in America or they have to dress themselves by the French haute couturiers. And we're of course talking about a very specific class of women. But in a lot of ways, these same American women are driving forces of this industry. And this is something we're going to dig into in a bit. But first I want to talk more about the French haute couture industry, because as we mentioned, one of the main premises of the book is to disrupt this traditional narrative that centers French haute couture as singular geniuses. And in reality, as you so effectively show us, they are just the most visible and lauded parts of what is an intricate, international, multi tiered fashion network that's supported by other fashion professionals, including a profession you take particular care to focus on in the book. And I absolutely love this. I learned so much in this chapter. And that was your chapter on coiffures or hairdressers. And to me, this is one of the most exciting interventions in the book because it elevates an incredibly important profession that is central to the maintenance of any fashionable silhouette and yet is so often marginalized or just we don't pay as much attention to it because we're looking at the clothes. So can you tell us about this really important relationship between haute couturiers and coiffures and introduce us to some of the latter?
- [14:21]
Cassidy Zachary
Oh, yes, I would love to. I can talk about the hairdressers for ages. You'll have to stop me. Right, so you hit on one of the salient points of the book. So one of the main themes of the book is how vast the fashion industry was in Paris. And the. When we look at the industry as a whole, we see all the components that made it function. So you have the couturiers, the hairdressers, the seamstresses, the makers of the underclothes perfumers, accessory makers for those parasols and gloves. Then the milliners, who are making the bonnets and the hats, but also the trunk suppliers and the shippers for transnational customers. All these specialties relied on one another to make the fashion industry a success. However, they were mutually reliant on one another. But that also led to friction and some serious rivalries. And that brings me to hairdressers and milliners. So the hairdressers would malign the milliners if the milliners made hats that covered too much of the coiffure. And the milliners needed to align their output with the styles and fabrics brought forth by the couturiers each season. So already you can see this network happening. I want to bring in the perfumers too, and then I'm going to get really deep into the hairdressers.
- [15:41]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
But the.
- [15:41]
Cassidy Zachary
The perfumers needed to work with the hairdressers and the couturiers to devise the best placement of scent in the hair and in the linings of dresses. So by evaluating the interdependence of these specialties, each profession comes into view as an indispensable gear of the fashion engine. Okay, now for hairdressers, or coiffures, in. In French, they were central to the fashion system, as you say, they were not a marginal service. And I look at the partnerships between the hairdressers and the designers, and it gets really interesting. Two of the professions, so along with those of the milliners and the perfumers, the hairdressers and the designers, now stick with me. Were mutually dependent, but they were also, to an extent, Inbred. So several couturiers began business as milliners, expanding from hats to gowns only after their names had been established. The Maison Felix touched on all of the different specialties. We'll again come back to Felix later. But Felix started with hairdressing. The founder of the house was the coiffure to Empress Eugenie.
- [16:57]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Wow.
- [16:59]
Cassidy Zachary
Now, similarly, the coiffure Guillaume Louis Lenterique became best known as a perfumer. His brand continued well into the 1940s with international distribution. So, as I mentioned, the mutual reliance and the shared business concerns between these practitioners resulted in partnerships, but also frictions. So Jean Philippe Worth, who was the son of Charles Frederick Worth, would later say, quote, if the milliners had had their way, they would have done away with hair.
- [17:34]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
But.
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Cassidy Zachary
But hair. But hair wasn't going away.
- [17:38]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
And something that I loved and something that I learned while reading your book is things like fashion plates mentioned the hairstylists and where the hair was done or that particular style was developed, at least on the model. It's so incredibly fascinating how intimately connected they are, all of these different professions are. But it makes sense when you realize all of these things go into the creation of a woman's fashionable silhouette. Right. And her completed look. And you mentioned scent and gowns. And I'm hoping you can go back a bit because this is so incredibly fascinating, this idea that women would put perfume. Or that the o. Couturiers would put perfume into their gowns.
- [18:21]
Cassidy Zachary
Yes, Scented gowns. Can you imagine? So, as you mentioned, I struck upon this topic when I was flipping through pages of fashion periodicals. Specifically, I was flipping through pages in Watson Library at the Met. One example is this periodical called La France Elegante, and It was an 1878 volume. And I was looking at a fashion plate, and I noticed that. That the dress design was by a maker called Lefebvre, a name that I had seen. But then the perfume maker was listed, and the perfume maker was Legrand. And then I kept flipping, flipping, flipping through multiple volumes, and I noticed that the perfumers were credited in many fashion plates, even though you can't smell perfume on the page. So perfume is ephemeral. You know, you can't see. You can't smell it off the page of a magazine that you're paging through.
- [19:19]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Well, at this time you can now.
- [19:21]
Cassidy Zachary
Yeah, that's right. There were no. There were no inserts at the time. And so this phenomenon spoke to me about how important the perfumers were. And the periodicals also describe perfumed silk sachets that were sewn into couture garments such as. So this sent me on a real research trip. So you could pick your favorite floral scent, like violet or iris leaves. And you could have your couturier fill a small silk square with those leaf cuttings, and then you could have your signature scent in your gown. So there are a couple of existing examples. There's one in the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. This example is so exciting to me. They have this gorgeous red velvet evening gown by a Parisian house made about 1897. And inside the bodice on the left side is a small sachet. It's about an inch square, and it was for perfume, so that the dress would have the scent that the patron wanted. And in this case, since we don't know the wearer of the dress, we'll have to use our imagination to conjure up, you know, what scent it may have had. You know, maybe it was lavender, maybe it was rose. And there's another example. This was super exciting to find as well. There's a wedding dress of about 1887 in the Joseph Allen Skinner Museum at Mount Holyoke College in the United States in Massachusetts. It was worn by a member of the Skinner family. So I love a good wedding dress. I'm sure you do, too, as far as research goes, because wedding dresses often give us the most documentation for a garment. This one still has its ivory silk satin perfume sachet in it, and it's tied with a small ribbon, a satin ribbon. And I just think, gosh, how perfect for the bride to have her signature scent. Okay, so we have the sachets that were sewn into the dresses. Now, another aspect of scent in the period connected to fashion was that you could also have your dress designer or your dressmaker add your signature scent to the packaging of your dress.
- [21:53]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
So.
- [21:53]
Cassidy Zachary
So if you were Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Vanderbilt, and you were in Paris shopping for a few weeks, and then you returned home and you had your dressmaker making your. Your custom dresses. You're waiting for your shipment, and then your trunk arrives, and you open up your package with your dress box. You lift off the top, and you see your new dress, and the box emits your signature scent. So you could have your dressmaker put in touches of your own perfume in the packaging, on the paper, and in the box. And I just love this sort of image in my mind of Carolyn Astor, whose favorite scent was described as wild lavender and garden roses mix. That's from a period newspaper. So that's what her dresses smelled like, and then Alice Claypool Gwyn Vanderbilt, we're going to come back to her maybe a little later if we talk about the 1883 Vanderbilt ball in New York. But her scent was verbena. And then finally, First Lady Frances Cleveland, she preferred Parma violet.
- [23:04]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
And I love that you have uncovered all of these little nuances and things you just don't think about. But as I'll remind our listeners, perfume is part of dress, right? Scenting your body and your clothing is part and an intimate part of getting dressed, especially in this period. And something that of course continues well into today. So I loved learning about that detail in your book just as much as I loved learning about the importance of hairdressers. And something that you did that I really appreciated was you kind of took us into some of these hairdressing establishments. Something at this time would have been a very discreet practice. This wasn't something that women necessarily advertised because they were going to male hairdressers, maybe unchaperoned. You pull that veil back and you take us into these establishments and we get to learn what it would have been like to get your hair done at one of these places. Specifically Lynteric, which you've already mentioned. Can you tell us a little bit more about this hairdresser, who he was and what it would have been like to visit his salon?
- [24:09]
Cassidy Zachary
That's right. So as you said, it was a very discreet affair for a upper class woman to get her hair done. It was not the social outing that we think of for men in a barbershop, for example, or how it would become in the 20th century for a woman to visit a hair salon. So discretion was necessary. And as you say that most of the first class hairdressers in Paris especially were male and they were also leading the professional societies. But we can get a sense of this discretion at play when we look closely at the salon that was run by Len Tarique. So what was that salon like? There's a wonderful series of newspaper images from the New York Herald. This is from the Paris edition of 1893, showing his establishment. And it was an advertisement in a way. Linterique's establishment, which was on multiple floors of a building, had been fully refurbished the year before. And so there were multiple images in this newspaper spread. So the rooms were well appointed with mahogany tables and they could accommodate several customers at a time. So I show this one image. It's of the actual hair salon in Latin, Tariq's establishment. It shows three male hairdressers. They're fully Suited, fully dressed, formally dressed. And they're working on women clients hair. The women sit in chairs. They're upright sort of standard chairs. They're not elaborate in any way. And the sinks are in front of them. That's different than our hair salons today. There are these Japanese divider screens in between each area so that each client had their privacy. The caption for this image is fascinating. It reads, shampooing in the American and French styles. So what does that mean? Well, American shampooing used water and was considered very au courant. So the fact that the salon could offer wet shampooing indicates that it had invested in the necessary plumbing and. And heating apparatus to which American clients had become accustomed. So American buildings had newer plumbing because American buildings were more recently built than most of the buildings in Europe.
- [26:38]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Right.
- [26:39]
Cassidy Zachary
What was French shampooing? Well, French shampooing was done without water. And that's what we would consider dry shampooing today. Applying or spraying powder to the hair to absorb the dirt and oil. But my favorite aspect of lenturique Salon in 1893 is that it includes a large metal hair dryer. And it's on wheels. I know when I noticed this detail, you can't imagine my excitement. So it's on wheels and it could be rolled right over to the client's seat. So remember, the three clients are separated by these decorative screens. And there's all this, you know, there's privacy. You can't see someone, the woman next to you can't see her wet hair or her hair being dried. This is one of the earliest hair dryers. The first one was invented in 1890.
- [27:30]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Fascinating.
- [27:31]
Cassidy Zachary
It is, it is. It's one of my favorite pieces of machinery from the period. Now, the establishment also included a perfume sales room. We can see images of bottles of perfume on the shelves that were for sale. They also had a perfume laboratory. And in this lab there's images of men who were mixing perfume in large vats. It almost looks like they're mixing beer or something like that. And then there was a florist workroom. This is all women working. Remember, women were in the workplace and we see the women fashioning and arranging silk flowers for sale. So again, you see this whole world coming together in this one establishment. Lenturique was really an emporium for beauty.
- [28:15]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Absolutely. And you do such a beautiful job, as you just did, bringing that to life for us. In the book, in your book, we meet both lesser known coiffures and lesser known haute couturiers, one of which you've already mentioned that I want to hear more about. Can you introduce us to quote unquote, Worth's foil, Maison Felix and why you think this successful house is not better known in the fashion history narrative today.
- [28:39]
Cassidy Zachary
Right. Maison Felix was located at 15 Rue de Faubourg Saint Honore. And as I mentioned earlier, it was in business for a very long time, 1846 to 1901. And it was a direct competitor to Worth and Doucet, Pequin, Leferrier and others. The owner was Emile Martin Poussinot. He called himself Felix after the original owner from whom the Poussinot family bought the business. Remarkably, the Felix firm was a household name in the United States. It was spoken in the same breath as Worth to say Paquen. The patrons included royalty. We already mentioned Empress Eugenie, but also Queen Margarita of Italy and actresses Sarah Bernhardt, Sophie Croisette and Lily Langtree. But it has fallen out of the historical record, as you mentioned, because we don't have business documentation or ledgers for it. And this happens. So the garments have survived in lesser quantities than for the house of Worth, whom for whom we know so much about. But the Felix designs are gorgeous. And I wanted to mention one garment in particular. There's an extraordinary opera gown in the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising Museum in Los Angeles. It's made of cream colored silk and it's worn with these long opera gowns above the elbow. There's a gorgeous headpiece that comes with it. The bustle protrudes from the lower back, which was the norm for the 1880s. And then remarkably, another survivor is that the museum has the matching opera gown that was worn by the owners daughter.
- [30:26]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Wow.
- [30:27]
Cassidy Zachary
I know. So the daughter was in her teens or early twenties. And I just love envisioning this mother daughter duo entering the opera house in these gowns by Felix that were custom made. Now there are also Felix garments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, and in a few museum collections in France. And I'm still on the hunt for more. So if anybody knows of any, please send them along.
- [30:59]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Absolutely. And again, it's one of those names that you see that's in museum collections, that's in, you know, well documented within these historic magazines, but just something that has fallen out of use today because as you say, like they closed early, Right. They closed a lot sooner than say, Charles Frederick Worth. So just as there are no great haute couturiers without their coiffure counterparts, without their millinery counterparts perfumiers. There are certainly no great haute couturiers without their clientele and we are going to meet some of those women when we come back from a sponsor break.
- [31:35]
April Callahan
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- [31:49]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
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Cassidy Zachary
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Dr. Elizabeth Block
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- [33:44]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Welcome back. Trust listeners. As we mentioned before the sponsor break, there are certainly no great haute couturiers without their clientele and specifically their American clientele who as some of the primary consumers of French fashions are in many ways the driving forces of the industry. And this is something that you write about extensively in your book. Liz, can you introduce us to a few of These influential women and what was their relationship to the haute couture?
- [34:10]
Cassidy Zachary
Right. So what I try to do in dressing up is restore the sense of equilibrium between the creators of couture and the patrons of couture in the period, specifically by looking at the women who were spending money on garments. Many of the names of the American women are familiar to us today. Morgan, Astor, Vanderbilt, Schermer, Horn. Those are names on the east coast, in the Midwest and on the west Coast, Gould, Glessner, McKay, Stanford. But two of the main protagonists were Caroline Astor and Alva Vanderbilt. Their rivalry is famous, as are their shopping trips, which were done separate, separately, of course, never together, to Paris. And both are believed to to have patronized Felix Doucet and of course, the House of Worth. Now, the Astors were a respected and old Knickerbocker family, whereas the Vanderbilts were considered ariviste or new money. Caroline Astor's father was a Skermerhorn and descended from settlers who came to America from Holland in the late 17th century. That's pretty early. Although the family had built a fortune through mercantile and real estate businesses by the 19th century, the way the money had been earned was separated by a sufficient amount of time, and the family was more associated with their cultural capital rather than cash. The Vanderbilts, on the other hand, although they were descended from 17th century settlers, they made their money through the new shipping and railroad enterprises and were continuously trying to counteract the perception that the family was, by one account, quote, raised to social eminence by vulgarly gotten wealth. Okay, so I said that both Astor and Vanderbilt patronized the large Paris houses. So how did they differ? Carol and Astor preferred dark colored dresses, like purple and black, and she often had them reworked. Again, this is some of the practicality that comes in with the Americans shopping in Paris. Caroline Astor's dresses were so well known, and these were written about in the press, that specific ones were understood to be her favorites, like her dinner gown of dark blue satin with gold embroidery. And she would pair that with a blue and gold hat. That specifically that account is from the 1890s, also from the 1890s, and this one's in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She had a dark purple velvet ball gown. And we think that it, in its current state does date to the 1890s. It had been significantly reworked. And she would pair these dresses to make, you know, to mix things up a little bit. Since she was re wearing the same dresses, she would mix up her jewelry. Her jewelry was very well known to the public as well. They would read about it in the papers, but she would wear a tiara of diamonds and then she had this famous diamond encrusted stomacher that she would wear with her gowns. Yes, I know. All right. Now, Alva Vanderbilt was a little bit more showy. Her given name was Alva Smith and she was from Mobile, Alabama. I love this quote from one of the period newspapers. It's so snarky. And it says she refers, the reporter refers to her as plain Ms. Smith, mind you. But in reality, plain Ms. Smith's parents, both her parents families, had money and stature in the south in the local and national government. And she writes in her memoir, Alva Vanderbilt writes in her memoir from It Was dictated. In the 1930s, she wrote of her mother's avid preference for French dress, both for herself and for her daughters. All right, well, the family's fortunes declined about 1875, and the family moved to New York to try to reclaim some status. Alva Smith married William Kissam Vanderbilt soon after moving to New York with her family. And she certainly enjoyed spending this new money, and she spent it on fashion and architecture. For her, Alva, always looking for a leg up in society, emulated European royalty. And we know from her famous housewarming ball in 1883 that she dressed as a Venetian princess and she based her outfit on a painting by Alexandra Cabanel.
- [39:00]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Something I love about your book is that you paint American women as sophisticated customers or you reveal to us how they were sophisticated customers. Right. They're incredibly knowledgeable. They perfected this international language of clothing. And you actually write women from the United States used fashion as one means of becoming significant agents in international society. And couture may be viewed as a powerful instrument in European U.S. diplomacy. And these women, it must be said, invested extraordinary amounts of money and time into couture. You talk about how they change outfits as many as five or six times a day. So from those dressing gowns to afternoon dresses to fancy dress ball outfits, to tea gowns to ball gowns, I mean, they amassed this extraordinary wardrobe. But it was an incredibly powerful tool in projecting their status and as you said, even in projecting US And European diplomacy. So can you talk about the performative role that haute couture played in American high society, especially in relationship to something you've already mentioned, that I'm so excited for you to talk about, and that is the grand balls of the era.
- [40:06]
Cassidy Zachary
How can we not talk about fancy balls and especially the fancy ball that was held by Alva Vanderbilt herself? This was the very Famous Vanderbilt Ball of 1883. It was a housewarming for this grand house at 660 Fifth Avenue at 52nd street in New York that Alva had built with her husband, William Kissum Vanderbilt. It was held on a Monday and this ball reportedly had hundreds of guests. These reports are famously unreliable, but some people say there was a, you know, 1200 people were invited and 600 people attended. We'll never really know, but they. The family was rumored to have spent $250,000 on this one night at the time. And that is the equivalent of $6.8 million today on one evening. Wow. Another very famous aspect of this ball that listeners may be familiar with is this famous electric light dress that was worn by Alice Claypool Gwyn Vanderbilt. She was the sister in law of William Kissam. And this dress was made by the House of Worth. It was custom made for her. It came with a battery torch as a prop. I love a fancy ball costume with a prop. I've seen it in person. It's held in the museum in the city of New York, but it was on display at the Fashion Institute of Technology Museum a few years ago. It's made for a woman who is probably 5 foot 1, 5 foot 2, which would have been Alice Claypool Gwen Vanderbilt's height. And in images, it looks very yellow. It's a little less yellow in person, but it's no less spectacular. And there's tinsel on this dress and all over the place. In fact, the shoulders especially have strings of tinsel on them to catch the electric light that would have been above them at this evening party. And I also, I love envisioning the electric light dress on Vanderbilt sort of moving through these spaces of the party in this brand new mansion, but also thinking about the maker. So it was made by the House of Worth and this was a costume. This was for a fancy ball. And it brings up the important point that at the time, there was no strict division between the makers of couture and fancy ball costumes. So Worth and Felix made costumes for the theater. They made costumes for fancy balls as well as haute couture, for going to the opera or going to an evening dinner party. There was overlap and there was no stigma attached to being on one side or the other.
- [42:58]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
And famously too, they turned these fancy dress costumes around extraordinarily fast. There's like stories of them making them like overnight, which when, you know, the intricacies of haute couture and the hand finishing and all that stuff, it's kind of extraordinary.
- [43:13]
Cassidy Zachary
Imagine all the seamstresses working all those hours to get these outfits finished and to get them just, you know, in perfect bespoke condition for one evening of wear. So where did people get ideas for their fancy ball outfits? One of the places that they got their ideas was a book by Arden Holt called Fancy Dresses Described. This is a really famous handbook of costume ideas. It went into several editions, mostly from 1880 and on. I think it went into nine different editions. But it's really fascinating from the historian's point of view because the book provides a zeitgeist of the period with the themes that were on people's minds. So we have electric light in there, but also newspapers, photography, postage, telegrams, chocolatier. There's drawings and ideas and descriptions so that you could choose from this handbook, bring the description to your dressmaker, and have them make the costume especially for you. However, I want to point out that there were some duplicates.
- [44:24]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
So I was going to say didn't ever show up in the same costume.
- [44:28]
Cassidy Zachary
This happens, and we have documentation for it. The Hornet was especially popular in 1883, and at the Vanderbilt Ball, both Constance Reeves Borland and another woman showed up in very similar outfits as hornets, which I imagine was a faux pas. What do you think?
- [44:51]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Absolutely. It would just be like them showing up in the same dress. I mean, that would be an incredible faux pas to see one another in the opera in the same dress. But I'm assuming that they communicated with their clientele to the point of not creating duplicate dresses. I don't know how that would have.
- [45:07]
Cassidy Zachary
Worked, but I think they probably did. But remember that women were coming from all over and they were their dressmakers. So you had women in New York who had their dressmakers making their costumes. But then the Vanderbilt family and the Astor family also had branches in Pennsylvania and other cities. So I don't know if those dressmakers were in contact with the New York ones. So we get these duplicates.
- [45:32]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
It's super fascinating. And something that's so fabulous about these fancy dress balls is they're incredibly well documented because they would hire photographers. Right. So you have pictorial images not of the balls themselves, but of the people in their costumes. And so you get this incredible breadth of images, including the woman who's wearing the taxidermied cat on her head and she has puss.
- [45:58]
Cassidy Zachary
Oh, yes.
- [45:59]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Cross her across her choker on her neck, and she had cattails all the way down her skirt.
- [46:05]
Cassidy Zachary
The taxidermy and cat, I don't think has been topped since that one was worn. That is one of the most valuable photographs we have of a Fancy Ball Cass.
- [46:16]
April Callahan
I think the taxidermied cat costume has to be one of the most macabre costumes in fashion history.
- [46:23]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Oh, for sure.
- [46:24]
April Callahan
Many of our listeners have probably already seen images of it, even if it was intended to be play on the wearer. Her name was Ms. Kate Fearing Strong. Her nickname was Puss, so it was intended to be a play on her nickname, of course. But she obviously had a dark sense of humor.
- [46:44]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
Yes, she certainly did. And I mean also, you know, people went to incredible lengths to outdo one another at these Gilded Age era balls. I mean, it's kind of astounding when you look at all of these images and dress listeners, we have done multiple Fancy Dress Ball episodes that we will link to in our show notes. And we've also done an episode on the history of Halloween costumes and fancy dress, which, considering this season, you might be particularly interested in as you might be in Thursday's episode because our conversation with Elizabeth is not over. She is going to be back to discuss the scandalous and pervasive act of smuggling French fashions into the US And Thursday is also when we're going to talk a bit more about the fashions for the Gilded Age TV show.
- [47:24]
April Callahan
Until then, dress listeners, may you consider the influences that may just inform the clothes you wear next time you get dressed. Remember, we love hearing from you, so if you'd like to write to us, you can do so by emailing us at helloressedhistory.com dressedhistory.com is of course our website where you can find more information on our upcoming fashion history tours, classes, and anything else that we have up our sleeves. Currently, you can also DM us on Instagram at Dressed Podcast and that is where you'll find images and reels accompanying each week's episodes. If you would like to find the Instagram content specifically connected to this episode, check out the hashtag dressed328 that's dressed and the numbers 32 8.
- [48:09]
Dr. Elizabeth Block
And remember, you can find it in an array of our favorite and podcast featured fashion history titles on the Dressed Bookshelf through the independent bookseller bookshop.org a purchase from our Bookshelf helps support the author, an independent bookseller, and two of your favorite podcasters. You'll find a link to our bookshelf in our show notes as well as a link to sign up for the ad free version of the show, which as always is just $3 a month. And as always, thank you so much. More stress took your win on Best.
- [48:41]
Unknown
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