The New Taste

A fascinating consideration of the dynamic relationship between fashion, art, and the modernizing forces of the early nineteenth century

Across the visual arts in France and Britain in the 1820s and 1830s a novel concept of fashionability took shape. Driven by a quest for the new and wide-ranging in taste, fashion flourished in the period's expansive print production, while the fine arts negotiated the demand for novelty by, paradoxically, reviving styles from the past. Susan L. Siegfried argues that the intersections between fashion, costume, and art in these pivotal decades embody the fractured conditions of early-nineteenth-century visual culture.

The New Taste examines depictions of clothing and hairstyles in fashion plates, paintings, prints, and sculpture by artists including Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Horace Vernet, Achille Deveria, and Bertel Thorvaldsen, alongside texts on clothing and art by writers such as Honore de Balzac and Thomas Carlyle. Siegfried reveals how both the commercial and the fine arts responded to transformations in social dynamics, colonialism, print technology, textile manufacture, perceptions of the male dandy, and the role of women as consumers. Highlighting a largely overlooked period in art and fashion, this richly illustrated volume offers insights into the social, artistic, and gendered questions that troubled the shift from classicism to realism.