Page 170 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 170/206
Fairlie Harmer, Viscountess Harberton: Rational Dress Movement 1891
The pressing need for a reform of women’s fashion grew during the middle of the 19th century, due to the frankly silly extremes of vast hooped crinolines, tiny compressed waists forced by extremely tight corsets (these caused the widespread phenomena of women fainting at any exertion at all - they couldn’t breathe properly), and also to the gradually changing role of women over the long Victorian period (1828 - 1901) - during the second half and especially the last quartile of the century, women were more active, and needed new garments for activities like bicycle-riding, horse-riding, tennis and hiking - and relaxing at home). This demand was not just about practicality and ease - it was in response to a fashion shift in culture too - especially in the examples set by the women who were the inspirations and companions of the influential Pre-Raphaelite movement (especially perhaps Jane Burden Morris, Marie Spartali, Lizzie Siddall, Georgie Burne-Jones, and Fanny Cornforth). These women set new styles of loose dresses and wearing their hair long and untressed - projecting this new bohemian style through the popular paintings of Dante Gabriel Rosetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Edward Burne Jones.- and through the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina, Lady Hawarden. In the last decade (1890-), this new style was being projected through the innovative dance- styles of Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, and through actresses like Ellen Terry - and later through the poster designs of Alphonse Mucha, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, the serial photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, the ‘Gibson girl’ illustrations of Charles Dana Gibson, and the emergence of the new ‘film stars’.