Proust and Fashion

Fashion plays an important role in Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The narrator pays close attention to the fashion choices of major female characters like Albertine, Odette, and the Princess and Duchesse de Guermantes. Fashion provides a lens for the way an individual constructs personal identity while remaining mindful of the rules of social class. Interested readers may wish to consult two works on Proust and fashion referenced throughout this post. Fashion in Proust's Novel: Reality and Imagination, a dissertation written (in French) by Andree Carruthers in 1999; and Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore, a novel written by Terry Newmann in June of 2017.

A Brief Look into Fashion History

The blossoming of fashion in France was closely linked to the political and economic stability of the time. Technical innovations were numerous: the spinning machine was developed, production accelerated, and prices began to drop. Trade and transport increased notably in 1878, 1889, and 1900 (Carruthers, see below). This opened the foreign market to Europeans and Americans and helped develop love of the other and the exotic, notably with Japanese and Chinese textiles, fashion, and furniture: "If Proust's description of clothes weren't always faithful to the fashion of the day, it may be because he sometimes made up for the lack of direct observation by studying prints and photographs of famous paintings such as those by Renoir" (Newmann, below).

This certainly can be seen with Albertine and her interest in Venice/Oriental fashion. While speaking with Elstir about "Venice-point" fashions, Elstir responds:

'You may, perhaps, before long, be able,' Elstir informed her, 'to gaze

upon the marvellous stuffs which they used to wear... I hear that a

Venetian artist, called Fortuny, has recovered the secret of the craft, and

that before many years have passed a woman will be able to walk abroad,

and better still to sit at home in brocades as sumptuous as those that

Venice adorned, for her patrician daughters, wth patterns brought from

the Orient.'

(In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)

Couturiers; the Innovative Mariano Fortuny

Proust saw the birth of department stores, such as Le Bon Marché in 1852 and Galaries LaFayette in 1895, in 19th-century France (Carruthers). But haute couture – luxury clothing designed exclusively for upper-class women in lieu of the common dressmaker – also flourished. English couturier, Charles Frederick Worth, established the first haute couture house in Paris in 1858 and coined the terms "fashion designer" and "haute couture." Other notable couturiers include: House of Babani, est. 1894; Mariano Fortuny, est. 1906; Maria Monaci Gallenga, est. 1914.

Proust speaks primarily of Mariano Fortuny throughout In Search of Lost Time. The couturier thought himself a painter first, a fashion designer second, and pursued innovative textile design. His garments fused history, anthropology, fashion, and art; Fortuny blended various dyes together to create luminous and bright colors often complimented with lamé, fabric woven with thin ribbons of metallic fibers, and was known for resurrecting the lost art of delicately and precisely pleating fabric (Carruthers). His influences were, like Elstir contends, "exotic." He drew influence from renaissance, medieval, Greek, Byzantine, Ottoman, Japanese, and Chinese styles:

Like the theatrical designs of Sert, Bakst and Benois, who at that moment

were re-creating in the Russian Ballet the most cherished periods of art

with the aids of works of art impregnated with their spirit and yet original,

these Fortuny gowns, faithfully antique but markedly original, brought

before the eye like a stage décor, and an even greater evocative power

since the décor was left to the imagination, that Venice saturated with

oriental splendor where they would have been worn and of which they

constituted, even more than a relic in the shrine of St. Mark, evocative as

they were of the sunlight and the surrounding turbans, the fragmented,

mysterious and complementary color.

(The Guermantes Way).

This quote certainly provides descriptors that match what is known about Fortuny's design style and references: "faithfully antique but markedly original," as Fortuny drew inspiration from antiquity; "saturated with oriental splendor," as with the influence of Japanese and Chinese textile; and even "evocative as they were of the sunlight," as Fortuny's pleating was often considered to represent beams of sunlight.

Fortuny, Exoticism, and Birds

Fortuny's designs evoked imagery that combined floral, exotic prints with repetitive and abstract Art Deco patterns. The pieces were often constructed from silk velvet (he was a pioneer in what is known as "stenciled velvet") and were fashioned in styles of the "other," or the exotic. Fortuny fashioned gowns that closely resembled tabards, sleeveless coats that had been common for men in the Middle Ages and that were open at the sides and meant to be worn over work clothes, typically long-sleeved shirts. Fortuny also played around with shape, transforming the rigid silhouettes of the 1700 and 1800s into flowing, delicate gowns of silk, crepe, cotton, and silk velvet:

The tempting phantom of that invisible Venice. It was overrun by Arab

ornamentation, like Venice, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultan's

wives behind a screen of perforated stone, like the bindings in the

Ambrosian Library, like the columns from which the oriental birds that

symbolized alternately life and death were repeated in the shimmering

fabric, of an intense blue which, as my eyes drew nearer, turned into a

malleable gold by those same mutations which, before an advancing

gondola, change into gleaming metal the azure of the Grand Venetian

that is called Tiepolo pink.

(The Guermantes Way)