The Modern Venus

Philadelphia was a major capital for the latest fashions in the 18th century. In the Revolutionary era, the people of Philadelphia had access to a wide variety of goods and became substantial consumers of luxury items. Imported items like porcelain, silk, printed fabrics, and tea transformed buying habits. Fashion illustrations from England enticed women to buy the latest fabrics to be converted into the newest gown styles. But no outfit is complete without its accessories! What do these items tell us about the women who wore them?  What can we learn about their social and political ties?  

In her book, The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear and Accessories in the late 18th-Century Atlantic World, author Elisabeth Gernerd unpacks the smaller items of a woman’s wardrobe. Using historical prints, satires, and objects in museums and collections around the world, Gernard explores how women expressed themselves creatively, socially, and politically in the late 18th century.   

Excerpt

In his 1747 London Tradesman, Robert Campbell observed that ‘Ladies Heads [are fashioned] in as many different Shapes in one Month as there are different Appearances of the Moon.’ Never was this astrological observation more true than twenty years later when women’s hair climbed to new heights and widths, and an outpouring of hats, caps and decorative headwear were made to match. The latest ladies’ headdress was reported in magazines, complained about at the theatre and portrayed as a parade on paper in fashion plates produced for periodicals, almanacs and pocket books. Graphic satirists took no time to seize upon the towering coiffeurs of the 1770s and wide, frizzed styles of the 1780s, producing a body of satires focused entirely on the enormous coiffeur. Even when wrapping their sitters in classicizing, draped constructions of satin and gauze, portraitists carefully delineated the fashionable hairstyle of the day, often only to change the style at the sitter’s bequest a few years later. 

Of dress and accessories, the rapid progression of hair, headwear and hats is perhaps the fastest rate of fashionable change, setting the pace of fashion from the head down. One fashion report observed that hats and headwear ‘change with inconceivable rapidity’. Returning to the anonymous author of the ‘Levities of Fashion’, in his attempt to pin down the changing winds of fashionable dress, he observed that the ‘insensible gradations’ of fashion are: 

like the vivid visits of a rainbow, the variation of whose colours defy the accuracy of human attention – it is like the delicate and interesting humours of a lovely woman, which though never the same for a moment, increasingly possess a charm which captivate [sic.] the heart.  

Following his metaphorical musings, he turned his attention to three hats that ‘were sported in succession with infinite glee and variety. The magnitude of hats produced and worn, both in quantity and scale, became a particular focal point during the period, as headwear was produced of ever- expanding size, shape and levels of ornamentation. It is not the intention of this chapter, nor the style of this book, to list every fashionable variation, but rather to let the frothy tide of fashionable brimmed headwear wash over us, before focusing on one stalwart that arguably sailed above these infinite permutations, successfully surviving the tides of fashionable change. 

Over the late eighteenth century, women’s heads became sites of significant coiffeurial construction. Frisseurs, or hairdressers, sculpted natural and false hair over cushions of wool, horsehair and wire to create teased, frizzed and curled edifices. Between June 1772 and September 1782, Elizabeth Motley Austen (née Wilson, 1751–1817) bought ten cushions for her hair for three to four shillings each, along with pomatum, powder, lavender water, curls and a cignon, and the services of her local frisseur, Arkell.  Structural additions and stylization were held into place with pomatum, a scented pomade made of animal fats and flour, which could be either purchased ready-made and scented or made up at home using recipes from didactic hair and beauty treatises like The Toilet of Flora (1779) and Plocacosmos (1782) Volumizing white, grey or coloured hair powder, whose primary ingredient was starch, was dusted on top. Stylistically, 1770s coiffeurs were predominantly tall and narrow in shape. Typified by a flat edifice in front, flanked by curls and finished with a chignon down the back of the head, the coiffeur was an incorporation of natural and false hair. Plumed with ostrich feathers, the height of women’s hair crested in the 1770s. As the female silhouette rounded into a serpentine juxtaposition of globes in the early 1780s, so too did the coiffeur. Rather than reaching upwards into a sculpted narrow peak, the hair was frizzed into a lower and broader orb, commonly known as the ‘hedgehog’ style. Though women’s wigs were made and worn, the majority of hairstyles were a confection of natural hair, false hair, products, pins and cushions, innately connected to their mortal hosts and thus surviving primarily on paper. 

Fashion plates, first engraved annually for pocket books and almanacs in the 1750s, and published within monthly serials with the advent of The Lady’s Magazine, or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832) in 1770, disseminated these styles, as Campbell predicted, like the changing phases of the moon. As hair grew, a plethora of soft headwear, including poufs, caps, turbans and bonnets, along with the more fanciful appendages of the 1770s, were fashioned. As Lady’s Magazine fashion correspondent Charlotte Stanley bemoaned in March 1776, ‘I have seen several ladies, very handsome, so disguised, and features quite distorted, by the horrid drag of their hair, to a height absolutely half as tall as themselves, and so loaded with gause, flowers, fruits, herbs, ribbons, pins &c.’. Stanley and her fellow correspondents became the first arbiters of a new genre: fashion news. Printed sporadically through the 1770s and 1780s and appearing with seasonal regularity by the 1790s, fashion reports became one of the features of the periodical, accompanied by the even more sporadically printed fashion plate. With the object of bringing the latest fashions beyond the boundaries of the cosmopolitan capital, fashion was disseminated in print discursively and visually in the new-found medium of the fashion magazine. 

Significantly more than full size dress, fashion plates of the late eighteenth century centered on hair and headwear, printing a procession of paper heads. In British publications, ‘Fashionable Head Dresses’ by month or by year became the reigning format, featuring ten to twelve busts of women on a page in a variety of hair styles, caps, hats and headwear. This assemblage of floating busts contrasted the French format, where, in publications like Gallerie des Modes (1778–87), which was specifically dedicated to engravings of fashion, heads were individually framed like tête-a-têtes and miniatures, titled and printed in grids of four or sixteen a page. Like trading cards, they were cut, pasted and collated into albums and scrapbooks, like those made by Sarah Sophia Banks, Barbara Johnson and Anne Damer. These haptic practices extended playfully to paper dolls, whose heads were dressed with interchangeable coiffeurs rather than bodies dressed with full-length gowns. Echoing the framed style of fashion plates, a set of watercolours on pasteboard sold by prominent Paris publisher Philippe-Denis Pierres features a framed nude quarter-length woman with a set of twelve different coiffeurs, providing their owner with a selection of appearances at their fingertips. This haptic interchange on paper, which reflected the changeability of hair itself, evokes the fleeting temporality of fashion. As Serena Dyer has argued, the temporality of fashion plates acts as ‘time capsules and epitaphs of their cultural context’. Together they can be read as a miscellany of polaroid pictures capturing the present pulse of fashion – how widely worn or representative these fashions were arguably another matter entirely.