What They Wore

Before fashion magazines came fashion plates: images of women and men wearing the latest clothing. Before the fashion plates, however, came costume prints—representations of people from around the world and what they wore. It’s as if National Geographic morphed into Cosmopolitan.

As a doctoral candidate in the history of art, Heather Hughes has focused her research on these costume prints, popular between 1600 and 1670. They were the product of the age of exploration and an uptick in travel across Europe. “People were especially fascinated by the customs and cultures being encountered in Africa, Asia, and the ‘New World,’ says Hughes. “But they were also interested in seeing how differently people dressed just one country over.”

The prints were engraved or etched and usually sold in sets of four to 12 sheets. It was a brand new print genre devoted to clothing, but it wasn’t about the cut of a skirt. “These weren’t prescriptive images,” Hughes says. “They have more in common with the ethnographic imagery of atlases and travel accounts from the same period than they do with the fashion plates of the following century. They were really intended to provide information about appearances and customs, not promote a particular style or designer.”

While the images weren’t meant to dictate fashion, Hughes is examining the didactic functions they did carry out, focusing on England, France, and the Northern and Southern Netherlands (roughly equivalent to the Netherlands and Belgium today). One series, by Flemish printmaker Pieter de Jode I, compares costumes from different countries or cities and includes poetic verses in Latin that might reference a historic event, monument, or unique aspect of their culture. “They allowed people to see what others were wearing while also learn a bit about the region they came from.”

Hughes sees these prints as directed toward an educated audience that included professors, gentlemen, and princes. It was an era of collection-building, with the well-off creating art and curiosity cabinets to display items from around the world. “Most collections were only open to other elite members of society,” she says. “The Wunderkammer—or curiosity cabinet—showed that you had the right connections to acquire these objects but also that you were intellectually curious enough to be interested in building such a collection.”

Another set, “Le Jardin de la noblesse Française” (The Garden of the French Nobility) by the French artist Abraham Bosse, depicts not only how the nobility of France dressed but also how they presented themselves: their body language and gestures. “There’s no text in this series, so it’s not immediately clear who the intended viewers were or what they were supposed to take away,” Hughes says. “Were they targeted toward international audiences, to show off how well the French dressed? Many of these prints were actually sold to collectors all throughout Europe. Or Bosse may have been poking fun at the nobility, so maybe these were aimed at a more middle-class viewer.”

In fact, one English engraver took the opportunity to lampoon the French, reproducing the male figures from Bosse’s series for a set of personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins. “These were made during a period when the English were very sensitive to external influences, not only on clothing but also in dance, cuisine, politics, and theater,” Hughes says. “So it’s a very interesting bit of evidence for the anxiety that certain English people had about preserving their national identity.”

Hughes is spending this year at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam as the first Dr. Anton C.R. Dreesmann Fellow, a fund established by Olga Dreesmann, C’91, W’91, and her husband Pieter. The couple created the fellowship to enable a History of Art doctoral candidate from Penn to do object-based dissertation research and contribute to projects at the museum. It was a perfect fit for Hughes, who has helped curator Els Verhaak put together an exhibition of more than 300 fashion plates from the museum’s collection. The show, New for Now: The Origin of Fashion Magazines, focuses on fashion prints and magazines, but Hughes curated a gallery on the costume prints that had preceded them.

“I was initially asked to just write labels for the objects in that section. But over time, I was given more responsibility over the room, until I ended up curating the whole section,” she says. She picked which prints to show, wrote the descriptions, and got involved with areas like exhibit layout, education, and merchandising—a head start on her career. “It’s really important if you’re interested in a curatorial career to have actual experience in a museum. They take that very seriously. I’m very lucky that my experience has been so directly connected to my own research.”

Working with the exhibit has broadened her perspective on her own specialty, as well. “It’s been really useful to see how the costume and fashion print genre develops over time, especially when I think about possible topics for future exhibitions or articles. Looking at works from the 18th or 19th centuries also helps with my current research. They’re like foils that give me new ways of thinking about the older material and asking what it does or doesn’t do.”

The New for Now exhibit will be on display at the Rijksmuseum through September 27, 2015.