Orientalism and Opulence

“A CULTURED ELITE DRESSED WITH DISTURBING OPULENCE. JAPONISME SUPERSEDED THE POTPOURRI THAT WAS HISTORICISM…” (URSULA VOSS, 1986)

The Orient has been a source of inspiration for fashion designers since the seventeenth century, when the waters of India, China, and Turkey were first widely seen in Western Europe. While the sue of the term “Orientalism” has changed over time, around 1900 it referred to the appropriation by western designers of exotic stylistic conventions from diverse cultures, and the Asian continent. This trend reached and apex in the early twentieth century, and the sources for this mania for ‘all things oriental” ranged from a nostalgia for the legends of Persia and Arabia, as popularized by A Thousand and One Nights, to the Paris debut of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1909. This burst of Orient-inspired creativity in the realm of fashion also had lesser-known sources, including the avant-garde art movement Fauvism and Japanese kimonos made expressly for the western market.

French couturiers, such as Paul Poiret and Jeanne Paquin, were inspired by the Ballets Russes’ performances of Cleopatre, Scheherazade, and Le Dieu Bleu. This Russian dance company took Paris by storm with their revolutionary choreography, music, and costume and set designs by the Russian artist Leon Bakst (1886-1924). In addition to these fantastic costume shapes and opulent decorative elements, couturiers incorporated the vibrant colour palette of Fauve artists such as Henri Matisse. Not only did designers create garments with Orientalist influences, so did the modistes: turbans topped with aigrette or ostrich plumes and secured with jeweled ornaments were paired with neo-classic and exotic silhouettes.

The modern couturiers’ adoption of the construction elements in East Asian garments was another crucial innovation in twentieth-century fashion. One prime source was the flowing Japanese kimono, a garment that began to be exported to the West after 1854, when this island-nation was opened to the West. The reverence for textiles held by the Japanese (and many other non-western cultures) discouraged the cutting of fabric necessary for European, body-fitting fashions that divided the female form into a corseted of bodice on top and a full, floor-length skirt below. In the decade prior to the onset of World War I, the demise of the corset was imminent. Revolutionary couturiers like Marie Callot Gerber (1895-1937), for the House of Callot, found inspiration in the drapery-like quality of kimonos, Loosely cut sleeves and crossed bodices were incorporated into evening dresses while opera coats swathed the body like batwinged cocoons.

Madame Gerber created some the earliest versions of the harem pants, “Turkish” pants. From 1910 to the outbreak of World War I, acclaimed beauty and woman of style, Rita de Acosta Lydig, worked with Gerber to create versions of Oriental costumes that were composed of vests made from seventeenth-century needle lace or one-piece garments that were made like pants instead of skirts. Often called the tango dress, after the new dance craze imported from Argentina, this style was popularized by couturiers like Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon, 1863-1935) and by fashion illustrators Paul Iribe (1883-1935), Georges Barbier (1882-1932), and Georges Lepape (1887-1971).  

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