Tailored For Freedom: The Artistic Dress in 1900 in Fashion, Art and Society - Hardcover

"This comprehensive book is academic in tone, but accessible and readable, and includes extensive scholarly endnotes. The book contains lovely, high-quality reproductions of dresses, textiles, fine art, and photographs from this period."--The Art Libraries Society of North America "The present volume, like the 2018-19 exhibition it catalogues, focuses on the importance of women's dress around 1900 as captured through fashion design and fabrication--artistic renderings expressed via paintings, photographs, and innovative technology reflecting the changes in modern revolutionary European society. The volume is more than a catalogue; it includes, in addition to a profusion of color and black-and-white images, 19 well-documented essays by specialists knowledgeable about in wide-reaching ideas reflected in the 1900 show. Women's dresses (and accessories) of the day incorporated innovative decorations and ornamented design from widespread sources (folklore costumes, Orientalism, Art Nouveau, the Arts and Crafts movement, African images) and are treated as haute couture works of art." --Choice

Seen as an expression of individuality and personality, fashion around 1900 became a synonym for the physical and social emancipation of women and progressed to become an object of artistic interest. The clothes designs of famous artists like Heinrich Vogeler, Henry van de Velde, Josef Hoffmann and Sonia Delaunay reveal both a new aesthetic and a new attitude to the role of women.

The unity of art and life which the reform movements of around 1900 strove to achieve inspired artists to experiment with th e design of women’s dresses. The artist’s dress as a part of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk reflects the image of woman in its various facets: as a decorative object, as an artist and as an emancipated businesswoman. This volume will delight readers with the beauty of the clothes and artworks it shows, which it classifies controversially and under new interdisciplinary perspectives in the period of change at the beginning of the twentieth century – from the German Reform Movement and the Wiener Werkstätte to the English Arts and Crafts Movement and the development of Haute Couture in Paris.