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45 KimberlyWahl l 2 A DOMESTICATED EXOTICISM Fashioning Gender in Nineteenth-Century British Tea Gowns Victorian fashion has often been examined in terms of its regulation and control of the female body. The rules and rituals of fashionable dress have been perceived as limiting women’s choices rather than enabling them. Work in the fields of fashion history and theory have complicated this picture, with scholars such as ElizabethWilson, Christopher Breward,Valerie Steele, and Joanne Entwistle all arguing that fashion, as an facet of material culture, allows women various degrees of self-expression,autonomy,and choice within a larger social sphere of physical and sartorial convention. Evidence for this may be found in a perusal of the fashion literature and visual culture of the late nineteenth century, which presents a rhetoric of freedom and self-expression addressed to a largely female readership. However, even analyses of late Victorian fashion that question accepted notions of containment and control have overlooked the destabilizing effects and subversive potential of Aestheticism, the degree to which the discourses of Orientalism shaped arguments about fashion and social decorum, and the resulting debates surrounding female sartorial creativity, autonomy, and choice. TheVictorian tea gown, as the fashionable garment most impacted by British Aesthetic culture in the nineteenth century, was a unique form of dress wherein Aestheticism and Orientalism converged in important ways. While few women wore Aesthetic dress publicly, many women indulged in exotic or artistic themes through the wearing of tea gowns, which were often cited in the fashion literature as a fashionable and comfortable mode of dress designed for use in the privacy of one’s own home. The original function of the tea gown was to facilitate comfort and mobility , and it did not require corsets, crinolines, or bustles. Worn at tea 46 Fashion and Relationships time, between visiting or shopping trips and the formality of dinner, the tea gown was praised for allowing women forms of creativity and selfexpression , often while hosting intimate get-togethers in a space of female leisure and comfort.Through artistic manifestations of the tea gown, experimentation and exploration of themes current in the art world were facilitated by the growing market of consumable goods from the East.The tea gown was especially valued for its ability to accommodate a wide range of styles;selected examples from the 1890 volume of Woman’s World illustrate this diversity (figures 2.1 and 2.2). Heavily influenced by the historicism rampant throughout theVictorian period, various details of tea gowns point to a pronounced emphasis on past sartorial modes and exotic locales. In figure 2.1, the figure on the far left wears an Empirewaisted gown reminiscent of the early 1800s. Paired with this is a cloak with a high ruff collar, resembling styles popular in Europe at various times from the Renaissance through the seventeenth century.The figure on the far right wears a garment with an extra fabric panel extending to the floor from between the shoulder blades at the back.Referred to as a “Watteau panel” or “plait,” this feature references eighteenth-century fashion and is closely tied to Aesthetic forms of dress in the 1870s and 1880s. In figure 2.2, the looseness of the gown, combined with its asymmetrical wrap closure, and overcoat/dress with short sleeves, are heavily influenced by the Orientalism of the period.Visual cues in the illustration underscore the gown’s exoticism;the fan held by the wearer and the screen visible in the background both suggest an Aesthetic interior. As one of the most visible and celebrated areas of lateVictorian fashion , the tea gown was understood as a garment that empowered wearers through both creativity and comfort. Inflected by the artistic discourses of the Aesthetic movement, which favored dress reform principles, the tea gown gave women the opportunity to explore the margins of mainstream fashionable dress without an excess of social censure and public scrutiny, and was thus an outlet for self-expression and a potential means of resistance against mainstream cultural norms. The tea gown, when actually worn, was primarily viewed by an exclusive and rarefied audience —those invited into the privileged spaces of upper- and middle-class women’s homes.This setting often guaranteed wearers a relatively sympathetic and appreciative audience. In addition, the flexibility and expressive qualities of the tea gown, as well as its prominence in the published fashion literature, signaled an active effort by someVictorian women to participate in the cycle of display, spectacle...

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