In my continuing quest to find…
…a way to make us all forget our drab and wretched post-recession lives, I hereby offer some fashion resonances.
People have been stunned by this puzzling look sported by Beyonce:
Parisian designer Thierry Mugler has managed to do to Beyonce what most women would kill him for: make her hips look a lot bigger. Thanks, Thierry, for nothing.
The padded hips are said to be an homage to styles popular in the Elizabethan era:
I beg to differ. The Elizabethan style has an enormously full skirt that, although padded and puffed in the general area of the hips, has no relation whatsoever to the real lower body underneath. The upper torso, on the other hand, is corseted to resemble a smooth and breastless cylinder.
This was the favored body shape. And since it virtually never existed in nature, the 16th-century equivalent of Thierry Mugler had to invent it. There were no curves whatsoever on top, unlike the outfit Beyonce is sporting.
Beyonce’s dress is actually a throwback to a different—and much more recent—era. Feast your eyes on Isabella Stewart Gardner of New York and then Boston, as painted by John Singer Sargent in 1888:
This painting was considered rather risque in the staid old Beantown of the times:
When the painting was shown at the St. Botolph Club, Boston, it caused a bit of a stir. The décolletage and the flattering curves of her dress made her husband request that the painting never be exhibited in public again during his lifetime. Mrs. Jack honored his wishes and even refused repeated requests by Sargent to show it in other exhibitions until after her own death, but she clearly loved the painting.
Let us all note, with bowed heads, the stunning difference between what was considered daring then and now.
And speaking of daring—and of Sargent—we have another somewhat-Beyoncelike dress in his portrait of Madame X, a painting considered even more scandalous in the Paris of its 1884 day than Mrs. Gardner’s image was in Boston:
The big deal was this:
[I]t became instantly a salacious painting and a scandal in French society as a result of its sexual suggestiveness of her pose and the pale pasty color of her skin.
Once again, we can only sigh at how much the times they have a-changed.
But lest you think the French of the 1880’s utterly and unredeemably Puritanical (not likely), let me add that the original painting as shown was somewhat different and more suggestive than the one you see above. There was a little teaser in the first version that was later painted over for propriety’s sake. Here’s the original:
No doubt Janet Jackson took note back in 2004:
It’s the “Baby Gets Back” look. Or the “Baby Gets Back Back” look. It’s the Michelle Obama effect. Look for it soon at Sears.
Sleeveless now but look for upper arms to be “corseted to resemble a smooth …. cylinder.”
Love the John Singer Sargents! As for Mugler, no thanks.
Like a Christian saint or the Buddha, Mrs. Gardner also sports a halo or mandorla. Surely this is not just coincidence, or just a snappy background meaning nothing favored by the artist or Mrs. Gardner. I wonder what is up with that?
“Thierry Mugler has managed to do to Beyonce what most women would kill him for”
There it is! Blame poor Thierry. Perhaps Beyonce did what most women would never do, wear a dress that made them look like they’d slipped into a loving cup. The dress might have just barely passed had it been black, but the silver fish scale look cum see through is a… oh what the hell – like I know what I’m talking about!
Beyonce succumbed to the “I can wear those spandex pants syndrome” It might not be too bad if she had more shoulders
Madam X = yum. I’ll be in my bunk.
Strapless : John Singer Sargeant and the fall of Madame X by Debora Davis tells the fascinating story about the scandal that ensued as a result of The Painting, and its aftermath.
Wolla Dalbo: I guess the painting is an early example of Art Noveau.
Neo, there is NOTHING wrong with hips. Here’s to ’em.
She looks like a sweet lady, but I think Isabella has some kinda neurological disorder: left side of her face is drooping and her eye wanders off to the left.
Also, the haircut: what she thinking?
“Oh, hey, this will make me look like an urchin—or possibly a waif—from Dorchester.”
Still, she had an okay house, but moist.
What a riot: uncovering the hitherto unobserved parallel between Sargent’s Madame X and the Janet Jackson “oopsy” debacle. Would that we could somehow take the palette and brush to real life and, Sargent-like, revise forever that cheap display of halftime sensationalism.
Beyonce looks marvelous in the dress but the dress also looks marvelous on her because she has the body to create the look. It is the constriction of the waist creates the illusion of padded hips, as it has emphasized her hips and thighs. You can see through the dress that her thighs come straight down off the hips. Thanks for these photos, which I really appreciate since having an obsession for the last fifteen years and devotee of images of the corset which I use in my art work. I have also always loved Madame X by Sargent which is one of the most stunning portraits ever made.