Jacques Henri Lartigue & French Fashion, 1910s

Photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue captured the French elite at play - whether at motorcar racing or at fashionable promenades. 

His work capturing fashion may be seen in numerous examples, such as "Carriage Race Day, Auteuil, Paris, 1911"

Hats, gloves and beautifully designed silk dresses were on display. For a comparison, see a striped silk afternoon dress, c. 1912 by Jeanne Hallee - it is a perfect complement to Lartigue's photo from Race Day.

For more on the Hallee dress, see http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/94861…

And more stripes – Paris street style in 1912, photo by Lartigue

Lartigue's images here capture a pre-WWI moment -- a world which will soon experience a crippling war and a devastating pandemic.

 

A Fashionable Neoclassical Dress, 1800-1805

This formal dress, c. 1800-1805, of white cotton gauze, features small floral sprays across the textile. It is detailed with a border design “composed of vine and a modified Greek fret worked in a chain stitch with fine red and white wool.”  This is a classic example of what is known as the Regency, Empire or Neoclassical style which began in the last decade of the 18^thcentury (post-American and French Revolutions) and continued to inspire women’s fashions into the 1820s, and in some places, beyond.

A dress like this would not have been out of place in the first quarter of 19^thcentury in Boston. By the time of Henry Sargent’s painting of The Tea Party(c.1824) showing the elegant attire of the age – although clad in long columnar dress, with shawls and hats of every variety, we begin to see additions of pouf sleeves, decorated hems, fancy trimmings altering the silhouette and profile. The setting for this elegant gathering was none other than Boston’s Beacon Hill, and is a companion piece to his masculine habitués detailed in The Dinner Party.[1]

 (Via the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston https://www.mfa.org/collections/object/formal-dress-67396⁾

Accession #22.665

1. For additional information on Sargent’s painting, see Jane C. Nylander, “Henry Sargent’s Dinner Party and Tea Party,” Magazine Antiques, May 1982.