Costumes in Art - Aesthetics

The one to be directly connected to Aestheticism is D. G. Rossetti. He was, generally speaking, by all rules a bad painter and a bad historian. Still, when Preraphaelites are mentioned, his works are first to be remembered and he indeed has left a rich treasury of beautiful works of art.
His most obvious influence on fashion started after he has met William Morris. In the most obvious way, they dictated the fashion with their interior decorating company that was founded by the two of them along with Edward Burne-Jones. Morris was the man of business while Rossetti and Burne-Jones were those to make designs for wallpapers, furniture and tapestries. Those dark, heavy wallpapers with flower motifs that are such a stereotype of a Victorian interior are product of this dinamic trio.
	And there is a more intriguing part. Namely, Morris had a beautiful wife, Jane born Burden. Even before getting married with Morris, she was a model to all three of the artists. Morris soon found out he sucked as a painter. Burne-Jones was not that impressed by her appearance. But for Rossetti she became and stayed an artistic obsession to the end of his life.
Not too much is known about her, certainly not enough. Art historians are still trying to figure out if there was something more than her outer look that made more than one artist to get impressed by her. Even Henry James wrote praises about her. Something must have been hidden under that black bush of curly hair. At least for one thing she was marked as a self-assured woman.
She was one of the followers of Rational Dress Movement. In 1850's and 60's many women weren't too much in raptures for having to wear corsets and hoops. Some of them finally decided not to wear them. Jane Morris was one of those women. It's not that she was wearing some specially strange clothes. She wore dresses that were much like those dictated by fashion, only that the size of a waistband was adjusted to her natural waist and not the tightlaced one.
Fashionable women were outraged, but men, especially those in artistic circles, seemed to be amused by this.

Rossetti preferred natural body line to the laced one. The images on his mystic, sensual paintings are respectively dressed in flowing, silky dresses that hardly depict any period clothing, but resemble much of Renaissance, medieval and Greek clothing. With exception of some other models, like Alexa Wielding, in his later phase most of his allegorical and fantastic paintings were portraits of Jane Morris.
Surely the most haunting image of her is the one from the painting called Proserpina. The interest for that work was very big and Rossetti made about ten copies of it, making it the most popular of his works during his lifetime. A head lowered to hands joined around a pomegranate fruit, figure slightly bent as a sign of a rather psychical than physical burden, abundant wavy hair, pouted lips and a silk dress falling down the body and revealing the natural shape - instantly that image became a blueprint of appearance for every "self-assured", "artistic" and, of course, eccentric lady.
By that time you could guess an artistic man since his uniform consisted of his grandfather's suit (the more oldfashioned the better), short cloak instead of a coat, soft-brimmed hat and a long hair. But women, even if they were "different" enough for them to want to look so, didn't really have a social blessing for such things.
Somehow, though, from 1870's on, it was fashionable even for women to show their interest and especially intellect for aesthetic matters. Although the first aim of this new fashion was to be completely antifashionable, this style soon turned into uniformity, too, and many women who only wanted to seem as if belonging to this intellectual élite adopted it.
So, basically, aesthetic women wanted to look like Jane Morris on that painting. They would wear a dress that would be a stunning mixture of everything and yet could hardly be depicted in proper words except that it in no way should have had any kind of artifical support or "figure improver" underneath. They curled their hair à la Jane and walked around slightly bent, something you could easily achieve by holding your hands together somewhere underneath your belly and acting as if they were weights.

	Punch, British satyrical magazine, welcomed this strange new lot with a series of caricatures and humouristic cartoons. They mocked with Aesthetics' segregation from the rest of "minor" society, with their appearance, pompous speech and special taste for everything bizzare. Indeed, being unfashionable suddenly turned into a fashion among those who felt self-assured enough to oppose the common mind. And sense.
This "antifashion" lasted somewhere from mid 1870's all the way to the beginning of World War I. Obviously, nobody had much interest in this show during war times. Decadents were still to be found in early 1920's, although their popularity was slowly dying out with the depression of global economy.
Also, Aesthetics and Decadents were tightly connected with movements in art like Art Nouveau that promoted stylised and flowing curves like those of ivy creepers, motifs like peacock feathers and Japanese art. After the World War I the art, especially architecture, turned toward more simple, geometric forms and frivolity of Aestheticism was completely "out".