Seeing Through Dress Analysis

Popular belief about clothing is that it is the intellectual property of its creator and a product of creativity. Anne Hollander was a woman who studied fashion, clothing, and style from the perspective of clothing as a form of art that revealed information about the wearer and the designer. She believed that “clothing revealed far more than it concealed--about art, about perceptions of the body and ourselves.” She focused on clothing depicted in paintings in museums and in her book Seeing Through Clothes she analyzes how clothing had been portrayed by artists and writes about how “it wasn’t just the clothes that were changing, but that it was the ideal of the nude body that was changing.” This thought, while intriguing, is lacking in fullness

Prior to WWI, many women wore billowing, cumbersome Victorian style clothing and were regarded by their counterparts as weak, but as time progressed and WWI came about, women undertook a new role in society. They filled in the jobs of men and did lots of heavy lifting in factories to help the economy and the war effort. Restrictive corsets were unsuited for work in the factory and women needed to dress with practicality and “a reduction in the amount of material and the use of black de saved on the cost of dresses.” Investment business owner and Progressive Jewish convert Bev May explored the relation between the infamous little black dress and its relation to the garment industry that was driven by many female Jewish immigrants and writes that “the design of the LBD was embraced as it met the functional and economic requirements of women who were entering the work place as a result of the dire economic straits that prevailed in the U.S. and Europe during the early 1900s.”, The abandonment of corsets for this dress was symbolic of “women’s power to determine their own shape within fashionability.” “Young women in the 1910s began to reject the Victorian moral sensibilities—and the fashions inspired by them—which symbolically and literally restricted women’s mobility in both private and public spheres. Women’s claims to wage work, to academic and physical education, to public protest over access to suffrage and birth control, and to pleasurable leisure activities such as dancing at tango parties all brought the daily corset wear into question.” The little black dress was “enthusiastically embraced by women of all races, ethnic backgrounds, and social and economic classes—was emblematic of the democratization of fashion