1THE DELPHOS
Goddess Dressing
The dawn of a new year—or a new century—is a time for retrospection as much as anticipation, reevaluating what worked and what didn’t, what’s destined for the dustbin of history and what’s worth hanging on to. In the first decade of the twentieth century, fashion looked backward: beyond the sprung-steel crinolines and steam-molded corsets born of the Industrial Revolution, beyond the oppressive luxuries of the ancien régime, to the vanishingly distant past. Thanks to new technologies—the mechanical cotton gin, the power loom, the sewing machine, the metal grommet—female dress had become mired in ornament over the course of the nineteenth century, the female body pinched and padded beyond recognition, twisted into unnatural curves, and topped with hats so large, so laden with feathers that women looked like “decorated bundles,” in fashion designer Paul Poiret’s phrase.1 In order to move forward, fashion had to go back—all the way to the beginning.
In ancient times, those seeking guidance consulted an oracle. The most famous oracle inhabited the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the Grecian city named for Apollo’s son Delphos. It was to Delphi that fashion designer Mariano Fortuny looked for inspiration—specifically the Hellenistic bronze sculpture of the Charioteer of Delphi, rediscovered in an unusually good state of preservation by French archaeologists in 1896, the same year that the first modern Olympic Games took place in Athens. The life-sized statue is clothed in a long, pleated tunic called a chiton, belted above the waist, with thin straps crossing its back and shoulders; the garment’s lines emphasize the youthful figure’s tall, slim build. It is as unexpected as it is striking, for Greek athletes competed in the nude; the sculptor probably intended to depict a victory lap rather than a moment in the chariot race.
Instead of being tailored according to the complex clothing architecture perfected over the course of the early modern period, ancient garments often consisted of uncut cloth taken straight off the loom, which was draped and pinned or tied in place, with minimal stitching. Yet they can be deceptive in their apparent simplicity. In ancient Egypt, linen garments were pleated horizontally, using a method that has never been discovered but was so effective that surviving examples retain those pleats to this day. The Roman toga had to be precisely woven to a semicircular shape in order to drape correctly, as anyone who tries to re-create the look with a rectangular bedsheet quickly learns.
The Greeks, however, created clothing out of carefully folded and pinned rectangles of fabric, and Fortuny did the same. The three main garments worn by men and women alike in ancient Greece were the himation, a shawl or mantle; the chiton, a rectangle folded in half then fastened along the upper arms to create sleeves; and the peplos, a square folded in half then pinned at each shoulder and belted and folded over at the waist. Fortuny’s Delphos gown of 1909 was constructed of four or five pieces of pleated fabric hand-sewn into a tube, gathered at the neck, and fastened at intervals by beads interlaced with cording along the upper arm (the ancient version used decorative pins called fibulae).
Instead of translucent linen, he used imported Japanese silk, hand-dyed in rich monochromatic hues and pleated using a time-consuming, patented process involving heated porcelain tubes that has never been successfully replicated. Albumin, made from egg whites, was brushed on to fix the pleats while enhancing the silk’s brilliance and softness. “Sheer Tanagra loveliness,” Vogue pronounced the Delphos, invoking the terra-cotta figurines first produced in Greece in the fourth century BC. The dress tapped into a time-honored ideal of beauty, turning mortal women into goddesses and infusing an ephemeral garment with the weight of thousands of years of history.
A variant of the Delphos, the Peplos had a waist-length over-tunic attached along the neckline to a sleeveless underdress. The hem of the tunic approximated the apoptygma, or overfold, at the waist that was a feature of the classical peplos. It was longer at the sides, a structural detail of a true peplos that Fortuny recreated for decorative effect. The pleats and gathers of the gowns echoed the fluting of ancient architectural columns. But they were not just decorative elements. The pleats lent the fabric an elastic quality; unlike Poiret’s notorious hobble skirt, the Delphos achieved its cylindrical silhouette without impeding movement. In the absence of seaming or understructure, the pleats also gave the dress its shape—or, rather, they ensured that the dress conformed to the contours of the wearer’s body, moving, expanding, and contracting with it. “They clung like a mermaid’s scales,” remembered Fortuny’s client Lady Diana Cooper.2 As curator Harold Koda has pointed out, “this celebration of the natural female form, together with the idea of apparel based on simple geometries manipulated into diverse effects, made the dress of the ancient Greeks an apt paradigm for twentieth-century designers who were engaged by the strategies of modernism.”3 The dresses were long enough to pool around the wearer’s feet, a detail borrowed from ancient vase paintings. Murano glass beads strung on silk cords and applied around the hemlines were not only eye-catching but functional, weighing down the silk and ensuring that it fell smoothly. The dresses could be worn on their own or paired with one of Fortuny’s long “Knossos” scarves or coats and tunics block-printed and stenciled with motifs from Cycladic art.
FIGURE 4. Dancer Isadora Duncan’s daughters Margot, Anna, and Lisa in Fortuny gowns, c. 1920. (Museum of Performance & Design)
Fortuny was a scientist as much as an artist. Born amid the Islamic splendor of Granada, he moved to the equally storied and opulent city of Venice at the age of twenty. He spent the rest of his life there, at the crossroads of Orient and Occident, opening his design house in 1906. Surrounded by Byzantine luxury, and working in isolation, far from the strictly regimented ateliers of Parisian haute couture, he developed a unique sartorial vocabulary and pioneered innovative techniques for dyeing and weaving, printing and pleating cloth. He received more than twenty patents for his inventions—though he noted in the margin of his patent application for the Delphos that he shared the credit with his wife, Henriette.
Fortuny was hardly the first designer to take inspiration from classical antiquity. The neoclassical revival of the late eighteenth century—which touched furniture, art, and architecture as well as fashion—was, like the Delphos, inspired by archaeology: excavations of the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum began in the mid-eighteenth century, exciting widespread interest in ancient art and culture. Marie-Antoinette and other ladies of the French court adopted simple white muslin gowns imitating unearthed marble statuary, even if that marble was originally painted in vibrant colors. Lady Emma Hamilton, the wife of the British ambassador to Naples, became known for her “attitudes,” a form of performance art inspired by her husband’s collection of ancient statues and vases. Scantily clad in diaphanous robes and shawls, she entertained friends and visitors by striking a series of dramatic poses inspired by classical art. Melesina St. George recorded in her diary: “She disposes the shawls so as to form Grecian, Turkish, and other drapery, as well as a variety of turbans. Her arrangement of the turbans is absolute sleight of hand, she does it so quickly, so easily, and so well.”
The “Empire line” of the early nineteenth century was actually the high, belted waist of ancient Greece; ladies of Napoleon’s court wore it with jewelry and hairstyles “à l’antique” copied from busts of Roman empresses. “Etruscan” motifs or designs “à la Grec” replaced the undulating ribbons, flowers, and feathers of the ancien régime; cameos and gold armbands replaced diamonds and pearls. While Marie-Antoinette had kept her arms and ankles covered, the French Revolution introduced relaxed sexual mores along with radical political reforms. Thin white muslin sheaths with high waistlines and low necklines mimicked the clinging drapery of classical statues, baring the upper arms and outlining the legs for the first time in centuries. The Duchesse d’Abrantès complained: “No way to cheat nature anymore. These days a plain woman tends to look even plainer, and a woman with a bad figure is lost. It is only the slender ones with a mass of hair and a small bosom who triumph.”4 The emperor’s wife, Joséphine Bonaparte, was among the lucky few.
Imaginative accessories completed the Hellenic tableau. High-heeled shoes were replaced by flat cothurnes; these lightweight sandals laced up the leg, calling attention to bare flesh or flesh-colored stockings. Cashmere shawls mimicked the drapery of antique statues and provided much-needed warmth; the traditional teardrop-shaped pine cone pattern and discreet floral motifs added visual interest to plain white gowns. These shawls first appeared in French fashion magazines and portraits in 1790, although they did not become widely available until Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt, where Indian shawls were easily obtained from traders.
Copyright © 2022 by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell
