Dress design $b: an account of costume for artists & dressmakersHughes, Talbot
History
Dress design $b: an account of costume for artists & dressmakers
Hughes, Talbot
Clothing and dress; Clothing and dress -- Great Britain
In the third place, we would have this series put artistic craftsmanship
before people as furnishing reasonable occupations for those who would
gain a livelihood. Although within the bounds of academic art, the
competition, of its kind, is so acute that only a very few per cent. can
fairly hope to succeed as painters and sculptors; yet, as artistic
craftsmen, there is every probability that nearly every one who would
pass through a sufficient period of apprenticeship to workmanship and
design would reach a measure of success.
In the blending of handwork and thought in such arts as we propose to
deal with, happy careers may be found as far removed from the dreary
routine of hack labour, as from the terrible uncertainty of academic
art. It is desirable in every way that men of good education should be
brought back into the productive crafts: there are more than enough of
us "in the city," and it is probable that more consideration will be
given in this century than in the last to Design and Workmanship.
* * * * *
The designing and making of Costume is a craft--sometimes artistic--with
which we are all more or less concerned. It is also, in its own way, one
of the living arts, that is, it is still carried forward experimentally
by experts directly attached to the "business." It has not yet been
subjected to rules of good taste formulated by Academies and
Universities; but when Inigo Jones, the great architect, was asked to
make some designs for fancy dress, he based them on the Five Orders of
Architecture, and ponderous fancies they were.
If we look for the main stem of principle on which modern Costume
develops, we seem to find it in the desire for freshness, for the clean,
the uncrushed, and the perfectly fitted and draped. Probably a modern
lady's ideal would be to wear a dress once, and then burn it.
A correlative of the ideal of freshness is the delight in perfect "cut,"
and the rapidly changing fashions are doubtless conditioned in part by
the desire for the new and unsullied. "Novelty" is a guarantee of
newness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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