A Look at Fashion One-Hundred Years Ago: 1912
What were women wearing one-hundred years ago?
Women of Family of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, 1912
Women's fashions in the U.S. Southwest were influenced by a variety of women and cultural dress including the Mexican traditions, those of the indigenous Native Americans of the region, and pioneer and rancher women; however, other outer influences brought fashion and styles into our region as well through the wives of military men, merchants, shopkeepers, politicians and even through mail order catalogs.
We are aware of the regional cultural styles and influences but what were the external influences happening? It is fun to take a look back to one-hundred years ago, just pre-WWI, at what was being designed and worn abroad as these styles eventually made their way to the United States and to the Southwest. Below, we have a peek at the designs of the day from Paris, London and Russia.
A 1912 Parisian Fashion Illustration: Manteau de Zibeline,
from the Journal des Dames et des Modes
by George Barbier
A Jeanne Paquin Gown, illustrated by George Barbier
from the La Gazette du bon ton
Fashions Abroad
Oriental opulence
Evening gown, designed about 1912 by Lucile (1863–1935). Satin, trimmed with chiffon and machine-made lace; cummerbund of silk velvet; bodice lined with grosgrain and supported with whalebone
About the Designer:
Lucile was born Lucy Sutherland in London in 1863. She began dressmaking for friends, and in 1891 opened her own fashion house. She married Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon in 1900. Lady Duff Gordon became a celebrated fashion designer with branches in New York (1909), Chicago (1911) and Paris (1911). She was famous for her clever use of fabrics to create soft and harmonious effects, subtle colour schemes and romantic dresses, particularly suited to evening wear. As she wrote in Discretions and Indiscretions (1932): 'For me there was a positive intoxication in taking yards of shimmering silks, laces airy as gossamer and lengths of ribbons, delicate and rainbow-coloured, and fashioning of them garments so lovely that they might have been worn by some princess in a fairy tale'.
During the early years of the 1910s the fashionable silhouette became much more lithe, fluid and soft than in the 1900s. When the Ballets Russes performed Scheherazade in Paris in 1910, a craze for Orientalism ensued. The couturier Paul Poiret was one of the first designers to translate this vogue into the fashion world. Poiret's clients were at once transformed into harem girls in flowing pantaloons, turbans, and vivid colors and geishas in exotic kimono. The Art Nouveau movement began to emerge at this time and its influence was evident in the designs of many couturiers of the time. Simple felt hats, turbans, and clouds of tulle replaced the styles of headgear popular in the 1900s. It is also notable that the first real fashion shows were organized during this period in time, by the first female couturier, Jeanne Paquin, who was also the second Parisian couturier to open foreign branches in London, Buenos Aires, and Madrid.
Two of the most influential fashion designers of the time were Jacques Doucet and Mariano Fortuny. The French designer Jacques Doucet excelled in superimposing pastel colors and his elaborate gossamery dresses suggested the Impressionist shimmers of reflected light. His distinguished customers never lost a taste for his fluid lines and flimsy, diaphanous materials. While obeying imperatives that left little to the imagination of the couturier, Doucet was nonetheless a designer of immense taste and discrimination, a role many have tried since, but rarely with Doucet's level of success.
The [Venice]-based designer Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo was a curious figure, with very few parallels in any age. For his dress designs he conceived a special pleating process and new dyeing techniques. He patented his process in Paris on 4 November 1910. He gave the name Delphos to his long clinging sheath dresses that undulated with color. The name Delphos came from the bronze statue of the Delphic Charioteer. Each garment was made of a single piece of the finest silk, its unique color acquired by repeated immersions in dyes whose shades were suggestive of moonlight or of the watery reflections of the Venetian lagoon. Breton straw, Mexican cochineal, and indigo from the Far East were among the ingredients that Fortuny used. Among his many devotees were Eleanora Duse, Isadora Duncan, Cleo de Merode, the Marchesa Casati, Emilienne d'Alencon, and Liane de Pougy.
A dress by the Callot Soeurs fashion house, 1912
Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of Russia in 1912 from the
Beinecke Library
Large hats with wide brims and broad hats with face-shadowing brims were the height of fashion in the early years of the decade, gradually shrinking to smaller hats with flat brims. Bobbed or short hair was introduced to Paris fashion in 1909 and spread to avant garde circles in England during the war. Dancer, silent film actress and fashion trendsetter Irene Castle helped spread the fashion for short hairstyles in America.
Mlle Gabrielle Dorziat wearing one of
Chanel's first hats. Photograph by Talbot. Date May 1912
Coco Channel became a licensed modiste (hat maker) in 1910 and had by 1912 opened her first boutique at 21 rue Cambon, Paris, named Chanel Modes, just a year before she established a boutique in Deauville, where she introduced luxe casual clothes that were suitable for leisure and sport. She would just three short years later launch her career as a fashion designer when she opened her next boutique, titled Chanel-Biarritz, in 1915. But by 1912, her famed hats were already on the streets of Paris and beyond.
Pictured here, some various women in fashions of the day:
Women in Buenos Aires 1912
Jewish women in London, 1912.
In the U.S.
Two daughters of Woodrow Wilson, Miss Jessie Wilson, standing, and Miss Eleanor R. Wilson, seated, reading and fashionably dressed. 1912
Fashions in the Southwest U.S.
As for the Southwest specifically, 1912 was pre-artist colonies, pre-Georgia O'Keeffe, pre-Santa Fe style, and had only barely begun to start the move from the rough frontier life into the realm where the rest of America resided, and this included women and their fashions.
Statehood was not granted to New Mexico until January 6, 1912 and Arizona on February 14, 1912. From 1880 to 1910 the territory grew rapidly. With the coming of the railroad, many homesteaders moved to New Mexico. In 1886 the New Mexico Education Association of school teachers was organized; in 1889 small state colleges were established at Albuquerque, Las Cruces, and Socorro adding appeal for women who were relocating here. In Arizona in 1912, women gained suffrage (the vote) in the state, eight years before the country as a whole which may have fueled the rebel feminine spirit here as well as to have presented encouragement to others relocating into Arizona. And with these new women came the dress and styles from their previous environs and socio-economic sub-cultures. The wide-brim hats so popular in the time would most certainly have been beneficial in the Southwest.
Carl Van Vechten (1879-1962), Portrait of Mabel Dodge Luhan ,
1934. Though taken over two decades later, Dodge-Luhan's 1912 residency in Florence was later to add to her New Mexico bohemian style.
Though it was to be another seven years before her arrival in Taos, famed Mabel Dodge-Luhan, was residing in 1912 at her villa near Florence where she entertained local artists, as well as Gertrude Stein, her brother Leo, Alice B. Toklas, and other visitors from Paris, including André Gide, which no doubt added to the bohemian flair she brought with her once reaching New Mexico where she became an infamous, fashionable and notable icon.
Photo portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz.
Though this photo was not taken until 1918, many of the
portraits he made of her were done in the early 1910s.
Stieglitz photography and images of O'Keeffe, further
served to add intrigue to the bohemian image,
rapidly becoming fashionable in this time.
In 1912 Georgia O'Keeffe had not yet arrived in New Mexico either but was already nearby at a teaching post in where she taught art in the public schools in Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle offering her first look at the shapes and colors residing in Palo Duro Canyon and becoming the subject in her works. And though O'Keefe was certainly not known for making fashion statements, her simplistic, elegant and yet practical utilitarian approach to clothing most definitely became an influence on women in the Southwest in later years.
So though fashions in the Southwest evolved in part from the regional and cultural influences herein, they were also most likely influenced by the clothing and designers of the day as these made their way westward with the women who came here and we have taken an interesting look at what some of these women may have been wearing, or at least have been exposed to, one-hundred years ago.
