Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion

Good evening everyone. I am Erica Piola, Director of the Visual Culture Program, and I'm delighted to be the host of tonight's conversation with Dr. Elizabeth L. Bloch, who is here to talk with me and you about her new book, Dressing Up, The Women Who Influenced French Fashion. Before we start tonight's conversation and my formal introduction of Dr. Bloch, I wanted to quickly introduce the Library Company and VCP to those not familiar with us, as well as provide an overview of tonight's format. Today, a research library, the Library Company was originally started in 1731 as a subscription library by then-printer Benjamin Franklin and his discussion group, the Jinto. Today, we are a special collections repository for the research of American cultural history before the early 20th century through our rich holdings of over one million books, graphics, ephemera, and art and artifacts. Subject strengths among our holdings include African American history, women's history, and visual culture, the latter inspiring the implementation of the Visual Culture Program with the mission to promote visual literacy through the creative use of historical vision materials, as well as to foster our understanding of the social construction of our visual field and the visual construction of our social world with programs such as tonight's. For this evening's program, we will begin with Dr. Bloch talking to us about the concepts behind dressing up, and then I will provide a succinct virtual tour of the Library Company's collections of fashion advertising and imagery that speaks similar to Dr. Bloch's work to the visual culture and socioeconomic networks of early dressmakers, dry goods stores, and department stores that sold clothing goods, French and otherwise. There will then be time for questions. Feel free to place questions in the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen during any point of the program. With that said, let me please introduce Dr. Bloch. Elizabeth L. Bloch is an art historian as well as senior editor in the Publications and Editorial Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has contributed to publications including American Art and West 86, a journal of decorative arts, design history, and material culture. Her current book, the topic of tonight's discussion is Dressing Up the Women Who Influenced French Fashion. Thank you for joining us tonight, Elizabeth. The screen is now yours. Oh, you're muted, Liz. This is such a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Erica. I can't wait to show Dressing Up and to share some of the highlights of the book as well as some works of art that did not make it in. So let's get started. The topic of American women buying French fashion in the 19th century is endlessly fascinating to me. 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 are spending money on the garments. Many of the names of the American women are familiar to us today, especially in Philadelphia and New York. The Astors, Vanderbilt, Skirmerhorns, Goulds, Glessners, McKays, Stanfords, Drexels. Yes, these were wealthy women spending family money, but they were doing it with intention and in many cases a surprising amount of practicality and frugality. Now for some context, a high-end couture dress in the 1880s might cost $1,600. That's the equivalent of $47,000 today. As with many art historical and fashion historical inquiries, mine started with John Singer Sargent's Madam X painting here in the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1883 to 84. I was working on an article about women's fashion and hairstyles in portraiture, and I sent a draft to a colleague from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. And he said, Liz, I think we need to know more about the maker of this dress. And that launched a longtime research project into the Maison Elite, who we believe may have designed the slender black dress, the infamous slender black dress that Madame Goutreau wears in the painting. The subject, Madame Goutreau, she was from a New Orleans family and she married a financier in Paris, and she spent her years in Paris as a socialite. I include an entire chapter on the Maison Elite and its American clients, like Madame Goutreau, in Dressing Up. And I introduced the owner, Emile Martin Trousseau, who was called Félix. I began tracking all the known garments by Félix, which are in the U.S. and throughout Europe. And this firm was in business from the 1860s all the way through to 1901. This extraordinary opera gown is in the collection of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. And they also have a matching opera gown that was worn by the owner's daughter, who was in her late teens or 20s. And this museum that they go by FITM, they've been wonderful partners in my quest for Félix, and they've been growing their own collection. So it's been such a treat to see what has turned up. This wonderful opera gown is cream-colored silk. You can see the gloves go all the way to the upper arm, the bustle protruding from the lower back, which was the style for this period in the late 1880s. And it's just, it's exquisite. And now we can look a little bit behind the scenes into where this woman would have ordered such a gown. This is the Maison Félix Salon in Paris at 15 rue de Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It was spread out on several floors, and it was remodeled in 1892. So these are newspaper photographs from a Parisian paper, newspaper, and they were taken in 1894 to celebrate the finishing of the renovation. But you can see how turned out the space is. It was meant to resemble a high upper-class home, so a salon in an upper-class home. So you can see the greenery of the ferns, the drapery, the mirrors, there's plenty of seating, soft seating, and the warm carpeting. They also commissioned paintings by women artists like Louisa Boehme to paint portraits of theater performance performers like Sarah Bernhardt and Lily Langtry on the walls. And there's another photo that shows those. Also, live women models would circulate throughout the rooms, and Émile Postnod's wife was one of the models. So the point here is that this was very much a women's space. There likely would have been a waiting room downstairs for the husbands, or the husbands more likely would have been at home, because women did shop by themselves or in pairs or in threesomes. Women were very much out on the street and doing their own shopping. The Maison Félix was a household name in the United States. It was spoken in the same breath as the work of Paquin, Doucet, but it has fallen out of the historical record because we don't have business documentation for it. I've contacted the family and I'm gathering as much as I can, and in my book Dressing Up, I look at the reasons why the firm may have ended so abruptly in 1901. I also begin to restore our collective knowledge about other designers, many of them women, who we have lost in the historical record, and to name just a few to get the names out there, Madame Rodrigues, who designed in Paris and for whom there is a blue and red dinner gown, which is exquisite, in the Kyoto Costume Institute, and I'm very grateful that they allowed me to reproduce that dress in my book. Other names, Le Ferrier, Paquin, Lippmann, Pascode, and the list goes on. We can set the scene here using a painting by Jean Barraud, known for painting Parisian city life. We see a bustling shopping day on the rue de la Paix. The house of Doucet was at number 21 on this famous street. At the very upper left, we can make out part of the sign of Doucet's shop. We can spot the O, U, part of the O, the U, C, E, T. In the center of the composition, we see a shop girl holding a dress box as the client approaches her horse-drawn carriage. In another Barraud painting, we see the Maison Paquin on the same street. Now, at the upper right, we can make out part of the P, A, and Q of this famous shop. These signs dotted the city, and as Professor Anya Lusk says, they marked the urban landscape with names. I like how she says that, and many of the names were women's names. We see a pair of women turned out in summer afternoon dresses at the front right of the composition, and they have their fashionable hats on, of course, as well, and they're perhaps discussing their shopping excursion. Another customer exits the store. She's glancing at the women, and the doorman and valets are looking on, as well. Meanwhile, another woman is exiting a carriage, perhaps beginning her shopping day. One of the main themes in Dressing Up is how vast the fashion industry was in Paris. When we look at the industry as a whole, we see all the components that made it function. The couturiers, who are the dressmakers, the coiffures, who are the hairdressers, seamstresses, the makers of lingerie, perfumers, accessory makers of parasols, the milliners, who are making bonnets and hats, trunk suppliers, and shippers for transnational customers. All these specialties relied on one another to make the fashion industry a success, and here, for a moment, I'll focus on hairdressers and perfumers. Sometimes they were the same person or firm. For example, Lenteric. We are looking at Lenteric's hair salon, and we can see in the caption from this newspaper print that shampooing hair was done in the American fashion, which meant with water, and you can see the male hairdressers working on women's hair and the running water that they're using to wash it, and then I must draw your attention to the apparatus in the center, center right of the composition. That's an early hairdryer, so the first hairdryer was invented in 1892, so this is 1893, and it's one of the earliest ones, and you'll see it's on wheels, so the dryer could be wheeled from station to station to dry women's hair at a faster rate. Now, this is Lenteric's florist's workshop, and women are working on silk flowers to sell, but you'll also see in the back on the shelves would be perfume bottles. There was a floor in the basement where Lenteric's nail staff made perfume, and there's an image of them sort of stirring the perfume in barrels, which almost looks like they're stirring beer or something. Now, people ask how did I come to find, how did I come to link the makers of the garments with the coiffures and the perfumers? Well, I was spending time in Watson Library here at the Metropolitan Museum looking at fashion plates in many different periodicals, and I noticed that in the credits at the bottom of the fashion plate that multiple makers were being credited on a consistent basis, and that included the hairstylists and the perfumers. Here's an example from 1858 with the dresses by the House of Gagelin and coiffures by Madame Comprojet, who I will be working on, and a later one from 1878 with the dress designed by Lefebvre and the perfume by Legrand. Legrand was a favorite of many of these French periodicals, and it may be because they were large advertisers in them, so you can see how the industry all works together. And it struck me that the perfumers were credited in these fashion plates because you, I mean, the perfume is scent, so it's ephemeral, and it's not something that, you know, you can, you know, visually grasp onto the way that you can with the dresses and the beautiful textile patterns and the hairstyle. So that was a message to me of how central the perfume industry was to the fashion industry as a whole and to women's lives. And these periodicals described perfumed silk sachets that were sewn into couture garments so that when you put the dress on, you would have your favorite scent emitted. They would also put the scent into, if you were a wealthy woman from the U.S. and you went to Paris and you ordered your dresses, and then they took a while to ship them to you, they would pack the silk sachets in the box so that when you opened the box at home, the dress would have your favorite scents like vials or roses or what have you. They were floral scents rather than sort of spice scents. Someone asked me that recently and I looked into it. So now that we have a sense of the fashion industry in Paris, let's talk about how the French styles disseminated in the United States. This is Lord & Taylor's Elevator from their newer store in 1873 in lower Manhattan. And as you know, department stores were the hallmarks of democratic marketplaces in the U.S. We know many of these names, Lord & Taylor, B. Altman, A.T. Stewart, Bloomingdale's. Erica will tell us a couple of Philadelphia-based ones in a few minutes. They sold American goods, but also a large array of French fabrics, trimmings, and finished high-end garments. Many of them were imported directly from Paris. And famously, the buyers went to Paris to see the So the relationship between French couture and American department stores was symbiotic, and it did not take long for knockoff goods to come into the marketplace, a topic that I cover in my chapter called The Underworld and Afterlife of French Couture in the United States. Another way that styles disseminated was through pattern books and periodicals. And here is a colored lithograph put out by Butterick showing the summer fashions for 1875. It is economically designed to show as many styles as possible and for a range of ages, including many children. Many of the hand-colored fashion plates were taken directly from French periodicals and reused in American periodicals. One of the most influential women's magazines was Godey's Ladies' Book, which many of you may be familiar with. It began in 1830 with the title The Ladies' Book and was published in Philadelphia. It relieved fashions from both London and Paris and carried accounts of royal events and massed falls. Many of the hand-colored fashion plates were taken directly from French periodicals once again. Frank Leslie's magazine and Peterson's provided similar coverage, with the former putting out several volumes of Frank Leslie's Ladies' Gazette of Paris, London, and New York in the middle of the century, an indication of when the quote big three cities had become ensconced in the U.S. fashion consciousness. So women could gather ideas from magazines and then buy materials to sew their own versions of the garments at home or bring them to their local dressmaker to do so. Here we have a trade card for the Paris Dauphin at 18 East 14th Street in New York, using a French name for an American business to draw that cachet. Advertising text printed on the reverse promotes W. Dauphin's City of Paris, where flowers, garnitures, fall and bridal outfits, morning goods, and hairdressing services were provided. And at the right, an invoice for Edwin Hall at number 28 South 2nd Street in Philadelphia, who was offering silks, shawls, dress goods, cloths, and morning goods. And here a calling card for a dressmaker in New Orleans, and a trade card for a product that protected skirt bindings. And I'm showing this because I want to give a sense of how many dressmaking establishments were run by women, and how many businesses were run by women, and that the fitting room scene was a women's space and very much a social space. Women's social norms were conveyed by etiquette books, like this one in the library company's collection. I love this binding. I love the blue and the image on it. And there, as you know, there are just so many of these etiquette books telling people what to do, what to wear, how many times per day to change. This wonderful photograph, I wanted to bring this photograph in because I talked quite a bit about weddings in Dressing Up because they are the most frequently documented events and garments that survived because they are handed down through the generation. And this is a photograph of Elizabeth Canby Morris from the Morris collection in the library company. And I almost can't stop looking at it since I found it. The light is, you know, it's rather haunting in a way, but the light is set up so that really the dress is the focus of the image. So this is a bridesmaid's dress. They could be very light colored, even white. It was not considered to rival the bride's white dress. I just wish we knew the maker of the dress. Maybe the family knows and we can find out someday. Another main category for fashion that I talk about in Dressing Up is fancy balls. And we really cannot talk about this period with this is an invitation for one dress, fancy dress party, but we must talk about the Vanderbilt ball, famous Vanderbilt ball of March 22nd, 1883. This was the great Vanderbilt ball that was a housewarming for William Kissam Vanderbilt and Alva Vanderbilt at 660, 660 5th Avenue at 52nd Street in New York. It took place on a Monday and it was a fancy dress ball with hundreds of guests. The Vanderbilts were rumored to have spent $250,000 in total, which would be close to $7 million today on one night's party. At the left is the electric light dress that was worn by Alice Playful Gwyn Vanderbilt. She was the sister-in-law of William Kissam Vanderbilt. And this was just the height of the zeitgeist at the moment. She, you know, electric light was just coming into businesses and homes in the period. And it was made by the House of Worth specifically for her. And they even included a prop, which you can see at the photograph at right by Jose Mora. She's holding a battery powered torch. And this, the electric light dress is in the Museum of the City of New York. But I had the pleasure of viewing it in 2019 downtown at the Museum at FIT. And I was just struck by just how, how vibrant it is still today. So there's the, you can see the tinsel on the shoulders that catches the overhead light, and it would have caught it then, probably even better than exhibition lighting today. It's also fairly petite. It is made to fit probably a woman of five foot two stature. And it's, it's, it's a little bit less yellow than it looks in photographs, which I like to point out. But it was made by the House of Worth. And it also brings up this, this point from the book that there was no strict division at the time between the makers of high-end couture and fancy fall costumes. So the House of Worth was making opera gowns, as well as costumes for events. And here you can see Vanderbilt, she's in, she's sitting now in her dress. Now she has a headpiece on. And at the left is Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and her husband, and he was dressed as an 18th century Duke. He's got his powdered wig on, and the stockings, and he does look very pleased with his outfit. So how did people get ideas for their costume outfits to wear to these fancy balls? One way that they did so was to get ideas from these, these handbooks, like Arden for Ardern Holt's Fancy Dresses Described, which went into nine printings, the nine editions. The first one was 1878. This image is from 1880, but this Hornet costume shows up throughout all the different editions. But it really gives you a glimpse into what was on the minds of people in the U.S. at the moment, especially at this sort of upper 1%. And so we see in the book, themes of electric light, newspapers, photography, postage, and telegrams, to name just a few. But the Hornet was especially popular. And here, you can see that at the right, Constance Reeves Forlan's dressmaker stuck to the program fairly closely from looking at Holt's book, although she altered the top piece so that it's sleeveless, lower cut, than almost the black turtleneck type top in Holt's book. And don't forget to notice that she also has the Hornet wings at the back, which is such a great touch. And this is Jose and Maria Mora's photograph. He was hired to take photographs at the Vanderbilt Ball. Some were taken on site with backdrops and others were taken in his studio in lower Manhattan afterwards. So this, of course, is a photographic backdrop from a studio that she's standing in front of. Finally, I have a chapter in Dressing Up about recycling and repurposing of clothes in the period, which speaks to the larger theme of how American women came to the couture marketplace with a deep knowledge of fabrics, sewing, and caring for garments. We see at the left a two-piece dress made by French couturier Malini Pascoe about 1878 when it was purchased by Frances Drexel Paul of Pennsylvania. In the portrait of Paul on the right by Charles E. Drake from about 1890, she wears an alternate bodice made by a Philadelphia dressmaker. So people would stretch their purchases, if you will. Some bought extra fabric in France and then had additional pieces made at home. Women rewore their outfits over the course of years as well. When they were finished with them, they might sell them to a second-hand purveyor or donate them to middle-class women or to their maids. This led to a trickle-down effect of disseminating styles over the course of years. So these women were trendsetters. They were dictating styles, in my view, just as much as the couturiers in Paris were. As you know, Frances Folsom of Buffalo, New York married sitting President Grover Cleveland on June 2nd, 1886, when she was 21 years old. For the wedding, she wore a gown believed to be by the House of Work, and there are photographs of her in the dress. She became a style icon with women across the country copying her garments and her signature hairstyle, which we see here with the curled bangs in front. We get a further sense of Frances Cleveland's style when we look at this ensemble of a skirt and two bodices at the National Museum of American History. The green bodice was made by a Baltimore dressmaker, Lottie M. Barton, and it was made after the peach bodice that was made by the House of Doucet in Paris. So we have a French maker and an American maker all joining forces to create an outfit for the First Lady. There was a rootedness then in familiar local practices, and it produced an entrenched frugality that was not relinquished quickly, even for First Ladies like Mrs. Cleveland. Some wealthy American women would bargain down prices quoted by French couturiers, and many did what Frances Cleveland did, which was to bring extra French fabric to a local dressmaker to produce supplementary pieces or to ask them to rework fabric already in the ensemble. To conclude, women were exerting their influence on one of the key industries in France's economy, which was couture, and in the United States, they were influencing local dressmaking and department store businesses. They were impacting the economics of this era on their own terms. They relied on their own expertise of social norms, as well as their knowledge of fabric, and they could make or break reputations. They had a significant impact on a major industry, both as consumers and as influencers. Thank you. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. That was wonderful. I just, you know, from your PowerPoint presentation and also seeing the illustrations, and I hope folks will get her book, because the illustrations in the book, oh my gosh, they, you know, brings out like kind of the girly in me. I want to wear those clothes, but then I think about putting on the corset and everything else, and it's like, yeah, maybe not. Maybe I do just want to, you know, look at them and appreciate them from a distance, so yeah. Thank you again, and I'm going to just give, like I said in my introduction, share some visual fashion treats from the library company's collection, and let me just share my screen, if you will bear with me for a moment. To open my discussion that aims to provide a snapshot of the library's commercial graphics related to fashion, I thought I would begin with an antebellum advertising print for a clothing business in operation before the era of department stores. This 1858 color-printed lithograph for a lip and cotton company and fourth and market streets is included in our Philadelphia on Stone digital catalog of 19th century lithographs of the built environment of the city. I share it as a starting point to see how the act, as well as the visual culture of purchasing clothing and fashion advertising evolved over the century. Men's fashions predominate, as well as the promotion of one-price clothing and cheap for cash sales, as opposed to on credit. And although a promotion for a men's clothing establishment, a woman's presence imbues the scene, as well through the elegantly attired lady riding side saddle in the foreground. Also of note is that this is purportedly the store where department store pioneer John Wanamaker was introduced to the clothing business when employed there. This plate is from an 1859 volume of panoramic views of businesses on multiple blocks of Chestnut Street, published by wood engraver DeWitt Clinton Baxter. The print provides another view of clothing retailers and evidence of the rise of French fashion before the department store. It came from a large format directory that also contained advertisements for the businesses that subscribed to or purchased the volume, like J.W. Proctor at 706 Chestnut Street. It was meant to be issued regularly and included views of storefronts that did not subscribe to the volume, evident from their signage not depicted, such as Mrs. E.W. Brown's dressmaking establishment at 720 Chestnut, which you can see in the right. The directories were likely on display in the business's advertised and public lobbies, like those hotels. Ray issued a similar concept panoramic business directory of Chestnut Street earlier in the decade. Notice the other clothing businesses included, such as Winchester and Company. This image shows a circa 1880 trade card with French text for Madam Demarest's cosmopolitan emporium of fashions, located on Ladies Mile for shopping in New York. Madam Demarest was Ellen Louise Demarest, who was a milliner who invented mass-produced tissue paper dressmaking patterns, and with her husband published five different periodicals in fashion, in addition to operating the emporium. A trade card was a hand-sized, typically color-printed card that became the primary medium for advertising in the later 19th century and for the rise of photomechanical periodical advertising. The prints were easily transportable and very collectible. This one comes from the collection of Emily Phillips, who was a woman of means from a philanthropic Philadelphia family, who gave the library her trade card collection in 1883. These cards often did not show the place of business or the product advertised. Their promotional value was the cachet of their colorful imagery. In this case, a charming fairy-like figure rendered with details in soft pastel colors and a gilt background. Women-owned fashion forward businesses are further represented in our holdings through other trade cards, such as this one for Maggie M. Peebles. Peebles immigrated from Scotland to the United States in 1886 and set up a millinery shop at 2930 Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia in 1894, when she was just 27 years old, and that store was before she relocated to 2816 Germantown Avenue in 1897, which is the store that's being advertised in the trade card. Ms. Peebles was one of a number of immigrant women, as noted by Liz in her work, who could open a shop that alluded to French origins to sustain their business with goods of equal quality to those thought of a higher-end nature. The woman shown attired as a courtesan implies a European fashion sense to be had at Peebles, and yet Peebles' promotion of quick sales and small profits indicates she catered to not just the wealthy, but also a middle-class clientele. This slide shows a circa 1873 photographic view of the Temple of Fashion of Mary Ann Binder at 1101 Chestnut Street. Likely one of two photographs meant to be mounted and viewed in 3D as a stereograph and a stereo viewer, the image documents the storefront of a woman in business over 16 years and who was a registered traveler to Paris in 1869, as well as a former employee of the aforementioned Madame Demarest. By the year of this photo, Binder had relocated her business a few times and would have held a number of exhibitions of holiday goods that included not only clothing, but fancy goods and toys. By 1878, she was listed as a milliner on Walnut Street, a few blocks from this storefront. By the late 19th century, department stores began to predominate in name and concept. As a means to shop for clothes and to see what was in fashion, Wanamaker's in Philadelphia was one of the earliest departments to earlier department stores and its name still resonates today. The first department store with electrical illumination and a phone, Wanamaker's advertised itself through trade cards in the 19th century and postcards in the early 20th century when the Grand Depot, a former rail station, became a 12-floor emporium on the 1300 block of Chestnut. Ties to French couture and the mode of shopping through browsing and handling the merchandise is on display in the interior views shown on these pieces of ephemera that circulated in the millions during the early 1900s. Another agent in the continuum of the French influence on fashion in America and vice versa is viewable in this slide, showing a circa 1890 trade card for the Paris department store, often considered the first department store, Le Bon Marché, founded in 1838. Elizabeth's book references Bon Marché. It was known to be at the forefront of retail innovations such as fixed prices, seasonal sales, and entertainments for children and was one of the department stores that later 19th century travel books instructed Americans to visit while in Paris. This advertisement is from our Robert Staples Metamorphic Collection and shows a card that when opened would cause the puppet figure to move and could have been enjoyed by child and adult alike. The advertisement also includes a view of the exterior of the store. The architecture often described as innovative for the era. Unlike Wanamaker's, Darlington Runkin Company is not a name that many remember today as a department store. Started in 1835 by John W. Thomas, the dry goods store tenanted a building on the 1100 block of Chestnut Street by the late 1870s. During the 1880s and the era of the trade cards shown, Darlington was described in a trade directory as a representative dry goods house, not a department store mind you, despite having 25 departments and 400 employees. The entry noted Darlington as having a thorough application of the wants of the public, a monument to their enterprise, completely stocked with everything of value and artistic beauty in the dry goods trade. The stock was based in there being the most active importing house in the city with their own establishment in Paris as well as overseas buyers. This advertisement reflects their French ties in commercial aesthetic through this portrayal of Napoleon and Josephine-esque figures in a disagreement as captured in French, possibly a disagreement over Darlington's quote splendid array of goods and lowness of prices end quote. The dress in the right in the collections of the Met demonstrates the artistic beauty of their fashion sold. It felt compared to share the Met image given the interplay between the blue, red, and white colors of the fashion of the female figure in the trade card and that of the that of the extant dress and of course the French flag. To dovetail the previous slides I wanted to end with two images of fashion related graphics that are not necessarily of French-made garments but still speak to the economic, social, and cultural influences of women's fashion. The first shown here is a photographic advertisement for the Pennsylvania department store Dives, Pomeroy, and Stewart. Their near lifelike mannequin bust models the Hollywood hat specifically manufactured for Dives and a part of their mourning collection. Emblematic of the style of the period the black silk velvet hat comprised of a rectangular shaped brim that is turned up in the rear and is layered with dark ribbons and a black ostrich feather is fanciful rather than dour. Dives, Pomeroy, and Stewart originally called the Globe opened in Reading an industrial town and transportation hub near Philadelphia in 1876. By 1887 the store had three branches in eastern Pennsylvania. The business formally changed its name to Pomeroy's in 1923 and officially went out of business in 1989. Finally I could not make this presentation without sharing a view of a recent acquisition to the graphic arts department. Handmade paper dolls, clothing, and accessories by Evangeline Coombs, a woman in her teens. The collection is comprised of 10 paper dolls and over 300 1910s era costumes and paper fashion accessories that were ingeniously housed by our conservation department as shown. The clothing delineated by Coombs between the ages of 15 and 19 epitomizes the fashions of the day and includes day and evening dresses such as off the shoulder designs for skirts with small trains, shirtwaists, blouses, and ankle length skirts, tea and bed gowns, lingerie, and shawl and coats, as well as accessories of hat, umbrellas, and neckties. As for the artist of this pedagogical fashion show, Coombs was born in New York and resided and attended high school in Berkeley, California by 1910. She had previously lived in Newark, New Jersey and relocated to Montclair, New Jersey with her parents by 1920. Her artistry may have come from her father James E. Coombs, who was an artist and who worked in the fields of lithography and portraiture. Thank you, and I hope this presentation has given you a sense of the breadth of graphic materials held at the library company related to fashion and French goods, and we now will welcome your questions. Let me just stop sharing my screen, and we do have a few questions in the Q&A, but to sort of get things started, I thought if you don't mind, Liz, I was going to ask you a question for my own personal interest, given this is a visual culture program, and so I was wondering if you could further discuss, which you did discuss a bit in your talk, that the research process you had with the visual materials and how it influenced the themes and arguments of dressing up. For instance, did you close look at paintings differently than photographs or advertisements, and what differences and similarities were spotted, particularly in terms of the depicted fashion? I like how you say close looking, and that really is the entire project. Close looking and very close reading of women's writings, women's periodicals, diaries, you name it. So both text and image at the same time, and so I, you know, I'm an art historian by training, and I don't, I've never seen the boundaries between, you know, what was formerly called high art or low art or, you know, masterpieces versus, you know, visual ephemera. To me, it's all a piece. So, you know, American studies, French studies, it's all, it's so interdisciplinary that I really look at a range. So I had the enormous honor of being able to go downstairs into the Costume Institute and spend some time with some of the garments by the Maison Félix, which is, you know, just an experience that I think everyone should have with a garment at some point or other if you're interested in this material. But spending two hours down there with three dresses and just, you know, going inch by inch with a technician and a real, you know, dress specialist was, you know, just extraordinary. And there's nothing like, you know, I couldn't touch them, but there's nothing like that near tactile experience. But then also hours in the Watson Library here at the Metropolitan Museum, going slowly page by page through French periodicals. And that process of the slow looking, slow reading is really the way that I struck upon, you know, how the different forces in the industry were working together. It was all there in the fashion place. Yeah. I was also just thinking in terms of, you had the side by side of the original dress that was from Vanderbilt Ball versus the Mora photo. And I was thinking how with the bustle, it's just so prominent in the dress, but then in the photo, it's sort of the way that she's positioned post, you don't notice the bustle and size, you know, how intense it just, it gives a different dimension to her, right? And to them. Yeah. I mean, there's something very sculptural about these dresses and to be able to see them in three dimensions and to walk around them like that time I did in 2019 around the electric dress, I learned so much more about it than I ever had by looking at flat reproductions of it. But at the same time, thank goodness, they're flat two-dimensional photographs of it. And thank goodness the Vanderbilts had the foresight or the ego to hire a photographer like Mora to come and document the event. But it's so true to look at the garment, which is full color and three dimensions and very sculptural and architectural. And then with the photographs as documents, they all are of a piece and work And what I also really appreciate with the illustrations that you showed in your PowerPoint and in the book, as I was mentioning, as I was like gushing over them, that they're just so rich and vibrant. And I always feel like you can feel the tactility, even in that the two-dimensional images that you're showing are just through the color, the vibrancy. I mean, I know you were saying that that one dress was photo, it looks more less yellow in real life and does in the photo. But for 21st century, isn't it, you know, actresses or actors, performers, you know, sort of thinking about like how a fashion is going to photograph more so or look on camera more so than how it looks in real life. And I don't know if you were thinking that in that period of time, but that was also just sort of thinking. I think so. I think so for sure. And I would be remiss if I didn't give massive amounts of credit to the publisher, MIT Press, who really worked with me when I insisted, absolutely insisted on full color for this book. It's just, to me, the only way to respect and study these women and what they were collecting, what they were buying, and the artistry is to see them in color. Yeah. And indulge me one more and I'll get to the question. How many, do you know, do we know how many costumes survived from that Vanderbilt ball? Is there? There are very few costumes that actually survive. So the Electric Light Dress at Museum of the City of New York, but also Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles has a really terrific little Bo Peep costume that I also reproduced in the book and the curator there acquired and then was able to match up to a Mora photograph in the New York Historical Society. So again, like we do need all sources working together, you know, cross country, but the fact that that one exists is really, really special. Yeah. And actually, and I will stop in a moment, those paper dolls I shoot at the end, there's actually a little Bo Peep costume that goes to one of the dolls. It seems that it's probably based from a movie as opposed to one of that period, possibly, but Bo Peep is also in the Ardern Holt handbook. So I think it was quite popular for at least 25 years. So let me get to the, I'm sorry, but let me get to your questions. And so one of the first questions I have for you is, do you know if Paris drove London fashion 1880 to 1900, as well as New York City and Philadelphia? And when did the Basel, the Basel, go out of fashion? So, um, so the first part, Paris was the leader of fashion, and both the US and London were looking toward Paris for, you know, the epitome of what we now would call haute couture. There's no question about it. But, but London had its Sylvia Rowe and it's, and it's smart suits that it was known for. And there were very many important designers and makers there, as well. So it would have been a, you know, a book twice the length if I went into, you know, London and all the other patrons who are buying from Austria, Germany, they do all come into the picture. This is a transnational story, for sure, an international story. And then as for the Basel, there are people who study like when, you know, what year the Basel was low on the, on the lower back when it went a little bit higher, and it's wonderful work that they do. The, the, the late 1880s that I show, it's, it's sort of like a medium protrusion, and it's not, you know, as large as you might see in other moments. But reading through the periodicals, there's, you know, people very, very intense on bring back the Basel, no, get rid of Basel, never bring it back. So it's very fun to watch it go up and down. Thank you. Next question is excellent presentation. Thank you. I'm always struck by the length of these 19th century dresses and how soiled they must have become in the course of a day, especially when ladies went on outings. Have you come across much discussion of how the dresses were cleaned or how often? Was there anything done to these dresses to limit soilage? Excellent question. Cleaning is a whole industry that is part of this fashion equilibrium that we've been talking about. And so for one of the women who we have invoices for, she spent, Madame Belay, she spent in Chicago, she spent, she would go to Paris twice a year and spend several months there. And remarkably, there are invoices from her shopping trips that landed in a drawer of a chest that then was handed down and made its way into the Newport, into a collection in Newport, Rhode Island. So thank goodness for these invoices. But in the invoices, she delineates, you can track where she was shopping for garments, where she was getting her hair done, where she was buying a bulldog for a pet, but then also where she got her cleaning done. And it was quite costly. As far as the process of the cleaning, that's something that I would be looking into soon. There's etiquette books that say, dry cleaning, meaning don't add water, because some of these beautiful silts, or even with wool, you wouldn't want to ruin them by adding too much water. So I think it was probably very much a dry brushing off system, similar to what people were doing with dry shampooing for hair. But it is, it's a great question. I think there's more research to be done on cleaning. That makes me think, Liz, at the Met for your fashion collections that are on display, I mean, how often are they clean? I mean, what's the, you know, the preservation? We have such a wonderful, wonderful conservation staff that works with the garments. And it's so meticulous. And I will be asking them more what their techniques are today. I was just downstairs looking at, there was sort of a refresh of the garments in the American Anthology exhibition downstairs. And it's true that there's discoloration, of course, and there's wear on garments, and some, some conservators can get out and some they need to leave in. And I think, in some ways, we're better off for it. Because you can see sort of where women's elbows were, you know, rubbing into things. And then of course, the dust at the bottom of those skirts would eventually dust and dirt from these streets would have made an impact. I can't help with this sweat stains. I'm at I don't know. Oh, yes. Yeah, that's for sure. And you do see them in the arms. And there's a wonderful book called Worn, W-O-R-N, where a scholar looks into how garments show signs of wear and how sometimes we learn more from leaving the stains in. Now, thank you. Another question, with Mary Cassatt on your wall, can you say a few words, her engagement with fashion in the Paris Philadelphia nexus, especially her relatives, Mrs. Alexander Cassatt, and Mrs. Thomas Scott. So Mary Cassatt is an impressionist painter, and she was very much a buyer of fashion. And I like that question, because it brings in sort of, you know, we think, again, that there may have been a divide between collecting fine art and collecting dresses by couture makers. And that's one of the myths that I'm trying to bust in this book is that these upper class women like Mary Cassatt were buying impressionist paintings, they were, you know, guiding collectors like the Havemeyers in their paintings, but perhaps also in dresses as well. And that would be a very interesting topic to look into Cassatt's writings and her letters to see what she was collecting. So I don't know other questions in the Q&A, but I just want to give like another moment if there are any other questions going to pop up. But I was wondering, Liz, did you, I'm going to put myself, have any questions for me about any of the- I wanted to say how spectacular those, yes, how spectacular the fashion plates are. I mean, they're a little later than the period we're talking about, but they're so invaluable because in many ways, the, these paper, that these, these dolls, paper dolls and fashion plates, they give you this look into the undergarments that you don't see in formal fashion plates that are in the periodicals. So in many cases, they're most interesting to me, the most clean, you know, like negligee or undergarment is most interesting to me because you don't get to see that in formal presentations. And then I love just sort of this, you know, envisioning, you know, like the layering, you know, because they did wear so many layers of putting the dress on top of the undergarment, but they're so evocative. I loved that. And the Darlington and Runk dress up against, you know, the visual material, that dress is so spectacular. If you look closely, it has almost like Christmas bells on it in a pattern. And when you look really closely, it, it evokes Art Nouveau and, but yet it's, you know, 1880, early 1880s. So I loved that juxtaposition. Yeah, no, I couldn't help when, so when I was sort of trying, you know, I was going to use the Darlington Runk trade card and I must have been, I needed to like, get some information or bone up on Darlington Runk. And I found that dress in my online research. I'm like, oh, this is just amazing. I mean, I must admit, blue is my favorite color. So I was like, this is just great. Yeah. So I, I had, I had to share it. And we have a few, three more minutes to go. And I just actually had one more question myself, which I just thought was interesting. And based on the, one of the photographs I showed of the morning attire, like everyone mentioned that morning attire, you know, was one of their, their specialties. And the photo that I showed with the mannequin head, like, I mean, that was, that's not dour, you know, that's not dour morning attire. It seemed like the dress could be very stately or, you know, not really a wage, but, you know, the hat at those period of time were just kind of, you might, you might be mourning, but you were going to look good. You were going to look good and you were going to look fashionable. And another really fascinating area of research I think is how well preserved so many of the morning dresses are. I mean, we think about how beautifully preserved so many of the wedding garments are, but the wedding garments would have been worn down the generations, but some of the morning dresses come through in almost, you know, perfect condition and those were saved as well. So, yeah, fashionable. And you can see the silhouettes change every few years and probably women were adjusting them year by year when they needed them to mourn another family member. And so, I'm sorry, there is a question in the chat. So give me, I missed it there for a second. Thank you, Blanche, for alerting me. Were trains of dresses lined is the question. I do see lining in the trains of the dresses. Yeah. I mean, talk about like heavy, you know, these fabrics in times were so heavy, especially fall and winter and then early spring. In the summer, you start in the US, you start to see, you know, the cottons and the muslins and the more, you know, the lighter, you know, fabrics that would let the air through. But in fall and winter, the fabrics really are so heavy and that includes the long train and those wedding trains. I can only imagine how many bridesmaids needed to help carry them through. Yeah. I was also thinking about that even with the, you know, the costumes and the fashion show, like, you know, you kind of getting a workout wearing, being fashionable. Pounds upon pounds, for sure. And imagine changing, you know, between four and six times per day. Yeah. Yeah. I remember it's like that reading that in your book. So we're going to bring the program to a close. But, you know, thank you so much, Liz. It was a pleasure to talk with you and to, like I said, see your PowerPoint presentation and, you know, reading, looking at your book before we had the discussion. So I would, I highly recommend all of you who are here to please go and purchase Liz's book. It's really, I mean, she didn't even mention there's a tariff situation going on and, you know, fake labels and, you know, sort of issues with fashion today that, you know, were occurring a hundred or even over a hundred years ago. So, again, thank you so much, Liz. I hope everyone has a really great evening. And I guess, you know, the weekend is here soon. So I hope you have a great weekend. So, again, thank you, everyone, for attending tonight. And thank you, Liz. Thank you, everyone. Such a pleasure.