The Fashion Historian

Part 1: Snow White from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

As a fashion historian, I find that an interesting aspect of Disney is how the animated features serve as records of the visual culture of their day. The Disney Princesses, a successful sub-franchise launched by Disney in the late 1990s, are everywhere these days. They have not been without controversy, but they are certainly popular. They are also records of changing standards of beauty for women in the 20th century. This post series will discuss selected Disney Princesses, exploring how they embody the ideals of femininity of their time.

As a fashion historian, I find that an interesting aspect of Disney is how the animated features serve as records of the visual culture of their day. The Disney Princesses, a successful sub-franchise launched by Disney in the late 1990s, are everywhere these days. They have not been without controversy, but they are certainly popular. They are also records of changing standards of beauty for women in the 20th century. This post series will discuss selected Disney Princesses, exploring how they embody the ideals of femininity of their time.


Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a landmark moment in the history of film. It was the first full length animated feature produced by Walt Disney, and is one of the top ten performers at the North American box office. Based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, it tells the story of an evil queen who is jealous of Snow White's superior beauty and orders her murder. After a huntsman, Snow White's would-be murderer, shows mercy, Snow White begins a life of hiding in the woods and befriends seven dwarfs. Furious that Snow White is still alive the evil queen disguises herself and visits Snow White in her woodland cottage giving her a poisoned apple. Snow White takes a bite and seems to die but is ultimately awoken and rescued by the kiss of a handsome prince. And they all lived happily ever after.

Marjorie and her animated counterpart dance.

Illustration of two women wearing dress coats from Croquis de bal, 1930s. The New York Public Library.

Hat designs from the 1930s.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Baudelaire on Fashion
Part 3: Tissot's Paintings

Tissot was intimately connected with fashion. One writer remarked, “At present time in England, Mr. James Tissot and Mr. George du Maurier exercise considerable control over the fashions.” Another wrote that Tissot “seems to have devoted himself chiefly to recording the fleeting fashions and affectations of modern costume, sometimes choosing for this purpose the most bizarre and the most hideous… the heads are quite subordinate to the turbulent mass of millinery which occupies the principle part of the canvas."

James Tissot. Too Early. 1873. Oil on canvas. London: Guildhall Art Gallery

James Tissot. Hush! 1875. Oil on canvas. Manchester: City of Manchester Art Galleries.

James Tissot. The Ball on Shipboard. 1874. Oil on canvas. London: Tate Gallery.

One of the most curious aspects of the three works I'm analyzing is the repetition of dresses, both within each painting and within the group as a whole. The woman who dominates the center of the canvas in Too Early wears a light salmon-pink dress with burgundy trim, the skirt falling in endless layers of ruffles. In the same work, a woman can be seen ascending the stairs, the coloring of dress and trim suggesting the same garment. The same dress is also worn by the woman sitting closest to the violinist in Hush!. The layers of ruffles and burgundy trim are also on a snippet of garment viewable at the edge of the canvas. The same dress is seen three times in The Ball on Shipboard, worn by a woman climbing the stairs, a seated woman, and a woman walking with a gentleman.

James Tissot. The Ball on Shipboard. 1874. Oil on canvas. London: Tate Gallery.

The Ball on Shipboard presents the most obvious set of duplicates. The two women standing by the railing wear identical dresses of white with black trim. In a group seated in the back corner, two women wear identical green dresses while another two wear low cut light blue dresses. These light blue dresses also look very similar to the gown worn by the subject of The Bunch of Lilacs (1875), and the two central figures in In the Conservatory (The Rivals) (The pink and burgundy dress also makes another appearance in this work).

Several explanations have been suggested for this repetition. Sometimes twins or sisters dressed alike. The repetition may have been derived from the multiple views of a single dress shown in fashion plates of the period. It may suggest the social faux pas of multiple women wearing the same dress at a social event. Or it may suggest a passage of time, with a single woman moving to different parts of the canvas. One of the most popular explanations is that Tissot had a limited number of actual dresses which he used as studio props, and so he simply repeated them in his various paintings.

However, the most compelling argument is that this repetition is a commentary on society and a reflection of Baudelaire’s modernity. Nancy Rose Marshall argues that “this sort of repetition suggested that ‘Woman’ in 1870s society was little more than a mass-produced commodity.” With the popularity of the department store and the rise of the ready-to-wear clothing industry, fashion was becoming more homogenized and democratized. Class lines were no longer easily distinguishable through dress. Women could purchase garments which were fashionable, but mass produced. While in previous centuries luxury was relegated to the few, increasingly in the nineteenth century luxury—or at least an appearance of luxury—could be gained by the many. As noted by Baudelaire, a womans dress was connected with her very being, thus indicating that a woman in a mass produced dress is a mass produced figure herself. This idea is reflected in the fashion in Tissot’s art, the repetition of clothing creating duplicates. The women are literally mass produced. Continuing in this line of reasoning, the women then become commodities, just like the clothing they wear. Their fashion sells the woman. As one commentator wrote, “The reason for the present extraordinary luxury in dress is that the surplus million of women are husband-hunting and resort to extra attractions to that end.” In the case of the women in Too Early, The Ball on Shipboard, and Hush!, the ostentation of their dress suggests that what they are promoting is their wealth and new status in society.

Tissot’s paintings emphasize the artificiality of society through the artificiality of fashion. As one writer wrote in 1867, it was an “age of shams”. He continues, saying “unreality creeps into everything… the consequence is that woman has become an imposture and men have learned to fear that what they most admire may be but a successful art.” With the elaborate construction of fashion in the early 1870s, women had literally become scaffolding on which to display ideas of wealth and beauty. Yet for the nouveau riche, this was a false portrayal, masking the reality of a newly emerging upper class which did not fully understand the rules of society. This was the reality of modernity, or at least the perceived reality of social commentators.

Selected Bibliography
Ash, Russell. James Tissot. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992.

Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life. Translated by Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon Press, 1986.

Garb, Tamar. Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siecle France. New York: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1998.

Hollander, Anne. Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting. London: National Gallery Company Limited, 2002.

Marshall, Nancy Rose. “’Transcripts of Modern Life’: The London Paintings of James Tissot 1871-1882.” PhD diss., Yale University, 1997.

Marshall, Nancy Rose and Malcolm Warner. James Tissot: Victorian Life/Modern Love. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Perrot, Philippe. Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Simon, Marie. Fashion in Art: The Second Empire and Impressionism. London: Zwemmer, 1995.

Wood, Christopher. Tissot. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1986.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Baudelaire on Fashion


Too Early (1873) is one of Tissot’s most celebrated and famous works. Louise Jopling, an artist and friend of Tissot, wrote that the painting “made a great sensation” when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1873. She continued in her praise, saying that the painting was “a new departure in art, this witty representation of modern life.” Too Early shows a snapshot in time, a moment of awkward embarrassment in which guests have arrived too early to a party. As proclaimed by contemporary etiquette, “A ballroom should be entered at an hour suited to the habits of those who invite you. It is extremely inconvenient however, to be too early, as you may disconcert your friends.” The hostess administers last minute instructions to the musicians, while her guests fidget and avoid eye contact. In the back corner, too servants peer through a slightly opened door, seeming to laugh at the awkwardness of the scene before them. This social faux pas indicates that the guests are only pretenders, members of the nouveau riche with plenty of money but none of the social graces of a true aristocrat. Critics praised Too Early for this “truthfulness and delicate perception of the humor of the ‘situation,’ for a parallel to which we must look in the novels of Jane Austen, the great painter of humor in ‘polite society.’”


Hush! (1875) presents another snapshot, perhaps from a later moment at the party seen in Too Early. Like the previous painting, critics found themselves able to identify with the scene. “This is a picture which cannot fail to interest the majority of the visitors to the academy, because it deals with incidents and people with which the are abundantly familiar,” wrote one. Although all the guests have arrived, they still appear vastly uncomfortable. No one is interested in the impending performance, too concerned are they with appearing fashionably nonchalant. The sweeping curve of the staircase, viewed through a back doorway, and the circle of chairs around the violinist suggest a literal social circle, into which the viewer is invited. The room depicted is a salon in Kensington, and the party has been identified as one hosted by the Coope family and attended by Tissot. Although Tissot claimed the subjects were anonymous, scholars have identified various real figures: Sir Jules Benedict (the pianist), artists Giuseppe de Nittis and Ferdinant Heilbuth, and Vanity Fair publisher Thomas Gibson Bowles. Hush! was Tissot’s greatest commercial success, selling for 1200 guineas.


The Ball on Shipboard (1874) presents a different, although no less awkward, social scene. The painting is set on the royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. The ship is decorated with various national flags, and various members of London society have gathered for socializing and dancing. Yet once again, there is an overtone of boredom. The woman closest to the viewer, wearing a black and white striped gown, stares blankly into the distance. Two women in matching white dresses stand awkwardly, looking away from each other with neutral expressions while their elderly companion leans lazily against a railing.

Critical reception to The Ball on Shipboard was negative. The work was described as “vulgar”, a loaded term in the nineteenth century. According to John Ruskin, vulgarity could be defined as “an undue regard to appearances and manners… and an assumption of behavior, language, or dress, unsuited to them, by persons in inferior stations of life.” Indeed, although the figures on the ship seem to be members of good society, a deeper analysis suggests otherwise. The women in green and blue, seated in the background on the left of the canvas, display too much décolletage for the daytime. One commentator described the image as “a set of rather showy than elegant costumes, some few graceful, but more ungraceful attitudes, and not a lady in a score of female figures.” Furthermore, the gowns worn by many of the women are unnecessarily showy, with bright colors and multiple ruffles, suggesting the ‘vulgar’ ostentation associated with social climbers and the nouveau riche. These elements combine to suggest the instability of society of the period, where wealth was replacing heredity, an uneasy notion for many.

Part 1: Introduction



Tissot’s London paintings provide a detailed and nuanced look at contemporary society. He captures ‘modernity’, a word coined by Baudelaire in The Painter of Modern Life (1863). For Baudelaire, an important element of this modernity was the correct representation of contemporary fashion. He writes:

“The draperies of Rubens or Veronese will in no way teach you how to depict mouire antique, satin a la reine or any other fabric of modern manufacture, which we see supported and hung over crinoline or starched muslin petticoat… Finally the gesture and the bearing of the woman of today give to her dress a life and a special character which are not those of the woman of the past. In short, for any ‘modernity’ to be worthy of one day taking its place as ‘antiquity’, it is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it to be distilled from it.”

Baudelaire places emphasis on fashion and beauty, citing it as one of the key visual indicators of modernity. He argues that for a work of art to take its place in the annals of history, a human essence and sense of life must be present. The artist can best portray this intangible concept through capturing his surroundings, for example, the clothes, gestures, and particular beauty associated with that particular moment in time. It is that which the artist is most familiar with, which the artist truly understands, because that is the context in which the artist lives. As Nancy Rose Marhsall summarizes, “The clothing of the body in fashion, a procedure representing its socialization, worked to locate the female form in a particular moment, removing it from the realm of the ideal and investing it with cultural and historical specificity—with modernity, in fact, which Tissot embraced.”

Baudelaire places such an emphasis on fashion because he associates it with the essence of humanity itself. The artist must represent contemporary fashion because fashion is an essential part of humanity, and it is through fashion that this can be seen. He particularly focuses on women, writing:

“Everything that adorns woman, everything that serves to show off her beauty, is part of herself; and those artists who have made a particular study of this enigmatic being dote no less on all the details of the mandus muliebris than on Woman herself… What poet, in sitting down to paint the pleasure caused by the sight of a beautiful woman, would venture to separate her from her costume?”

Baudelaire's arguments have since become one of the key theories in the field of fashion history, but I believe that is a topic for another post.

Another month, another series of posts to give an in depth look at a particular fashion idea. This time, I'll be using Baudelaireian theory to analyze three paintings by James Tissot from the early 1870s. I hope you enjoy it!



In his seminal essay on painting and modernity, Charles Baudelaire wrote of the modern painter: “The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd.” James Tissot embodied this sense of modernity. His paintings of contemporary life read as snapshots into the lives of the upper classes in the late nineteenth century. In particular, three works, Too Early, The Ball on Shipboard, and Hush!, painted in the early 1870s while Tissot was living in London, give a particularly fertile glance into society. These snippets of bourgeois society demonstrate, as Baudelaire wrote, the “fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life, the distinguishing character of that quality… we have colled ‘modernity.’” In his essay, Baudelaire emphasizes fashion as a crucial component to modernity. Contemporary fashion is intimately connected to contemporary life, thus giving a living humanity to a painting. Most importantly, fashion is connected with women. Baudelaire writes that contemporary fashion is a part of a womans being, an element which cannot be separated. In his three paintings from the early 1870s, Tissot explores these ideas of modernity and the identity of fashion.

James Tissot painted by Edgar Degas c. 1867-68. In the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Jacques-Joseph Tissot was born on October 15, 1836 in Nantes, France. His father, Marcel-Theodore, was a linen draper and his mother, Marie Durand, was a milliner, exposing Tissot to the world of fashion from his earliest years. He attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he befriended men such as James Whistler and Edgar Degas. However, the man who would have the most influence on his early career was Baron Hendryk Leys, who painted detailed scenes set in Northern Europe in the sixteenth century. Tissot admired the high degree of finish and real human interactions portrayed in Leys’ work. Tissot’s work was first exhibited in 1859, and to keep in line with a recent trend of anglophilia, Anglicized his first name to James. Through the early 1860s, Tissot displayed several ‘costume pieces’, set in previous centuries. In the mid 1860s Tissot broke from his historic style, keeping the focus on human emotions and interactions and a sumptuous materialism, but setting his pieces in the present day. With this work, Tissot finally began to achieve critical success.

In 1871, after the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, Tissot moved to London. He achieved great success, becoming a well-known public figure. In addition to full size paintings, he contributed several caricatures to newly launched Vanity Fair, a publication run by Tissot’s friend Thomas Gibson Bowles. In these sketches Tissot makes gentle mockery of public figures of the day, a theme repeated in his London paintings, which can be seen as a caricature of modern society. In 1876, Tissot met Kathleen Newton, a young divorcee. The two fell in love and began an affair. While many artists of the day had mistresses, few actually lived with them and non painted them with the frequency with which Tissot painted Newton. They lived together until 1882, when Newton died. Emotionally devastated, Tissot left London and returned to Paris. Increasingly interested in spiritualism and religion, Tissot’s art took a religious turn in the mid 1880s. His works on religious subjects were highly admired, once again earning Tissot fame and fortune. In the final years of his life, Tissot became increasingly recluse. He died on August 8, 1902 at Buillon, a private estate inherited from his father.