Reading Fashion in Art

Abstract

In Reading Fashion in Art, Ingrid E. Mida offers a guide to analyzing representations of dress in the visual arts. She argues that “dress can be read as an artistic tool of expression that can be unraveled to reveal something about the ideas that were percolating in society at that time” (15). Such ideas include the shared understandings of gender, beauty, power, status, race, and ethnicity that form the context in which the works of art are created. Because of the importance of representations of fashion in the communication of aesthetic, social, and cultural norms and ideals, close-looking at dress in art becomes a tool for the study of both art history and dress history, as well as other related disciplines. This beautifully illustrated book thus offers a series of guidelines for the reader to adopt in the study of works of art depicting human bodies, both dressed and undressed. The objective of the book is to offer a method to engage in the “slow approach to seeing” that Mida has championed through her scholarship and to teach the readers how to “confidently develop a critical analysis of what they see” in art (9). Through the combination of a checklist-based approach and a series of case studies that offer interpretations achieved using Mida’s proposed methodology, the book is a powerful handbook for analyzing the politics of representation of dress in art. Reading Fashion in Art is divided into ten chapters with an introduction, a coda, and three appendices with the checklists for the process of “reading” fashion in art. The book is richly illustrated with images printed in colors that often fill an entire page. Each chapter contains several images of the works of art being analyzed as well as related works of art, drawings, costume plates, and photographs of historical garments. Mida introduces her book with an analysis of what is arguably one of the most famously dressed images in the history of art—Elisabeth Louise Vig ee Le Brun’s portrait of Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress (1783). Using this painting as a starting point, Mida offers a justification for the importance of analyzing representations of fashioned