Fashion Book Friday: O espiritu das roupas. A moda no século dezenove. (The Spirit of Clothes. Fashion in the Nineteenth Century) by Gilda de Mello e Souza

 

This is my archive of fashion related books. Most of them are in English, but many are not. Some are new, but many are real finds. Depends on the topic, really...

I bought this little book on a whim on a holiday in Brazil, and I´m very glad I did. While there are no great names, no celebrities or famous designers on its pages, the concept of fashion it offers is both unique and insightful. The author, a philosophy and literature professor from Brazil, treats fashion as a minor art (one chapter is actually called "Fashion as Art") that reflects and takes part in architectural, social, economical developments of the society it exists in (picture below)

       She looks at how fashion defines divisions of gender and class, always following the newest

technological developments, how fashion effectively becomes an expression of a "female culture" - at the same time as women are expulsed from the public and working spaces, defined by then as exclusively male, and men claim to lose all interest in "fashion" (the slower pace of change in male clothing, loss of all colour from male dress etc - at the same time as technical progress made more and new colours available for the textile industry).  Fashion, or the indulgence in it, functions here also as a signifier of social and economic inequality between the sexes (see illustration on the left). Quotations from contemporary literature, mainly Machado de Assis,  support her theory. 

The book´s focus is mostly on international fashion, but as an uniquely Brazilian example, she looks at rich provincial landowners, and how their attitude to clothes changed: throughout most of the century, wealth was never shown through clothes or furniture (the couple on the left, ca. 1870), even if the fortune, consisting of land, cattle and (until 1888) slaves. The latter couple, ca 1900, belong to a generation that begins to flaunt their wealth through clothing and generally consumption, a general change in attitudes.
Mind you, this by no means a coffee table books. Although there is a whole gallery of pictures at the back, they are all black and white, sometimes even grainy, as if gone through too many photocopiers (first edition was in 1987). In fact, my only peeve are the pictures: while there is an extensive and excellent annotations corpus in the book, I didn´t find a list of illustration, and the captions themselves are unhelpful, especially in the case of painting.
Still, if you like to read an analysis of fashion on the crossroads between aesthetics and social issues, this is the book.  Pity it hasn´t been translated apparently.
The ISBN is 85-85095-24-5