"Anglomania" by Matthew Callahan

In the fall season of 2004, the fashion world was hit with the proposition that haute couture was coming towards the end of a losing battle with designers like Emanuel Ungaro and Donatella Versace folding under the pressure and discontinuing their atelier lines. John Galliano’s response to such a rumor was needless to say an extravagant refutation when his royal court haute couture collection at the house of Dior premiered during couture week in Paris. Jeweled crowns paired with cascading meters upon meters of fabric was an extreme statement of the relevance of Elizabethan dress in modern contemporary fashion. Galliano, while always being known for his exaggeration and literal interpretation of past eras, channeled Elizabeth I’s free spirit in the royal court as well as her remarkable agency with acres of rouched, multicolored satin. The broad proportions suggested Elizabeth’s extreme opulence and the notoriously restrictive silhouette that amplified her breasts, all in an effort to assert the power of her own femininity, as Sarah Mower, a contributing editor for United States Vogue noted. The models’ faces were painted with paste as white as the starched farthingales that were bound and structured with golden rope and silk. Exaggerated Elizabethan bumrolls in satin and piled taffeta accentuated the linear proportion of the corseted, stiffened torsos in order to give a very attenuated structure.

It was Galliano’s decadent collision of literal Elizabethan structuring and Austro-Hungarian elegance that suggested the dawn of a new age for haute couture, despite the skeptical views at the time. After the debut of this atelier showing, Galliano received criticism for his unwearable, impractical take on the period. Despite such criticism, the sexuality maneuvered within the collection was a direct Elizabethan denial of chastity, silence, and obedience, a denial that is the heart of the Elizabethan woman. So while the collection may be viewed as entirely irrational and unapproachable, an amazing amount of coherency was imbued in the show’s overall statement of extreme beauty.

As revealed in L’uomo-Vogue’s January, 2006, editorial spread entitled “The Now Baroque,” the Elizabethan mind set could not be more relevant. Frills of lace paired with ruffled frocks along with attenuated, body conscious petticoats were the must have pieces for the spring-summer 2006 season. Jean Paul Gaultier’s clinical palette hints at a nostalgic romanticism withthe use of a very masculine take on the Spanish doublet, hand-stitched and embroidered with gold. The doublets used in the showing reflected the Hever Castle doublet of 1560, all of which had wide, detachable two piece sleeves. While the collection itself walked the line between fantasy and
reality, what remained clear to the audience was the relevance of looking back. Editor Luca Lanzoni agreed that while Gaultier’s nostalgic attitude is timely, the pairing of the Elizabethan with that of space-age exploration remained a risky proposition given today’s tough market. Gaultier’s capacity to incorporate Elizabethan technology with French modernity epitomizes the directional view and strength of the house. The clash of the two only goes to show the strength of the Elizabethan silhouette and its application for the future.

In comparison to Jean Paul Gaultier’s hard-edged take on Elizabethan womanhood, a more authentic interpretation was seen at the house of Balenciaga by Nicolas Ghesquière, the most exquisite expression of the house to date since his appointment to the house of Balenciaga in 1997. Because staying true to the house was his focus, it was Ghesquière’s historical instinct for shapely simplicity and Elizabethan architecture that made his spring-summer 2006 collection a blockbuster hit. Extended farthingales and linear, constricting corsets acted as an appropriate synthesis of Elizabethan old world and Renaissance iconography. Ruffled shoulders of pure white lace and embroidery suggested a delicate, more embryonic take, when compared to the extreme interpretations by Gaultier or John Galliano at Christian Dior. Ghesquière most notably played with the very Elizabethan thought process of tension and release with outfits that remained fitted to the body and then flared out rather unexpectedly. When compared to the haute couture of the late 1950's and early 2000's, the Elizabethan proportion of the collection was more abbreviated and therefore more fluid given its minimal palette of flesh tones. The frills and strict color palette, through the use of the Flemish lace cuff, suggested a naive optimism that not only stays true to the heritage of Balenciaga but pushes the image of the house into a recognizable, iconic medium. It is Ghesquière’s directional power to blend the then and the now, as Inigo Jones once did, to create a perfect fusion of vintage couture and futuristic proportions that remain appropriate and palatable for today’s modern woman.

The relevance of the Elizabethan aesthetic in the modern high fashion industry was notably shown at the 2006 Anglomania Costume Gala in New York this past April. Preceded by a retrospective ten page editorial spread in Vogue Italia by photographer Mario Testino, the Costume Institute exhibit marked the celebration of past English couture infused with a contemporary, punk silhouette. The clash of the two seemed appropriate and right for today given the public’s riskier, more adventurous attitude toward everyday dress. David Bowie’s “Union Jack” coat, a fitted Elizabethan style frock which was designed by English couturier Alexander McQueen, was the prime example of the old and new. More literal representations of the Elizabethan old world were seen in a room populated by farthingaled gowns made of Spitalfield silk by London based designers Boudicca and Vivienne Westwood. Next to that room was a small exhibit of dresses that were made of shaved nylon rosettes, graduated into egg and cone shapes by designer Hussein Chalayan.

These exhibitions were complemented nicely by a room dedicated to Vivienne Westwood’s 1997 Harris Tweed collection, an entire prêt-à-porter line designed after the look of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation attire. In front of a towering portrait of Elizabeth I stood a mannequin adorned in a 1992 Vivienne Westwood creation fit for Elizabeth I’s royal court. The signature British eccentricity of contemporary English designers was epitomized in an exhibit which focused on past Galliano and Alexander McQueen haute couture lines. The intimate setting of the room acted as a foil for the complex, mechanical structuring of the clothes on exhibit. Alexander McQueen’s spring-summer 2005 ballooning farthingales topped by starched, fitted doublets and cropped, hemmed petticoats were the focus. The use of those pieces in particular called to mind the past ready to wear collection itself which was a simulated chess match. While the collection itself depicted a fantastical showing of essentially wearable silhouettes, the performance and theatrics that one comes to associate with a McQueen presentation were quite staggering. The integration of those pieces into the exhibit resonates not only with today’s celebration of the performance art quality of high fashion but with the hold the Elizabethan way of practical dress has on the modern psyche.

John Galliano, the master showman at the house of Dior, took the cake with the exhibit’s nostalgic showing of his spring-summer 1998 haute couture collection entitled Lucretia. The very British technique of English Palladian design is seen in the dress’s composite, architectural presence. Furthermore, the translation of this past collection into both the Vogue Italia editorial spread and the exhibit itself showed the evolution of the Dior vocabulary from a signature Parisian chicness that focused on body-conscious, linear proportions to an Anglophilic celebration of shape and fluidity. It is John’s irreverence to the archives of the house that Dior built, much like Inigo’s directional view, that has catapulted the old English trend of dress into an image that is very much the new, the next, and the now.