Fashioned from Nature

When I heard about the V&A Museum's exhibition, "Fashioned from Nature," I immediately wanted to go, and last week I did.  The show looks at how Western fashion has been involved with the natural world over the last four hundred years, and it takes in a huge variety of garments, from labourers' fustian smocks to  gowns decorated with beetles - as well as quite the most awful earrings I have ever seen in my life.

I won't try to tell you about everything, but it was good to see that many of the beautiful items on display were simply celebrating the beauties of nature.  The embroidery on this evening dress from 1810 shows swirling vegetation and tree ferns, and is thought to have been inspired by exotic St. Helena tree ferns that had just been given to Kew Gardens at the time.

And this 18th century fine French waistcoat is also a celebration of nature, with African plants and Colobus monkeys (shown at the bottom) which would have seemed very unfamiliar to Westerners.

At least the Colobus monkeys weren't being made into fur coats. Along with the admiration for nature there has always been a seeming determination to plunder it, as we know, and any show on this subject will inevitably include quite a bit about fur, skins, pelts and feathers.  I found it rather depressing to admire the wonderful breast plumage of the huge albatross, only to see, (as the vintage label at the bottom said ) that this specimen had been "dressed and prepared for use in Ladies' Muffs, etc."

I'll spare you a picture of those nastiest earrings I've ever seen - in fact, thinking about it, they are too nasty even to describe. So if you want to see them you must go to the exhibition and look at all the earrings and see if you can guess.   There was something distasteful too about common birds which were "altered" to make them look into more interesting, expensive and imposing hat ornaments, although I know that DIY taxidermy appeals to some people. 

So I will move on to embroidery with beetle wing cases, as shown in the dress below. This was a type of white muslin dress that was often made in India for fashionable Westerners. It is stitched with iridescent dark-green beetle-wing cases of the jewel-beetle Buprestidae.  This particular dress is relatively restrained: there's far more elaborate beetle embroidery on Pinterest.  I believe the beetles discard the wing cases naturally, but these days you can get equally iridescent effects with certain types of sequins, although to be fair they don't look as if they are crawling all over you.   

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The show has examples of all kinds of unexpected natural fibres which have been used in fashion.  Forget about wool, linen and water-wasting cotton; I was more interested in more unexpected fabrics like glass and pineapple fibre.  Pineapple cloth is now made on a small scale as a leather substitute under the brand name Pinatex, but there was a much more elegant and time consuming use of  this tough substance in a wedding gown of 1820, in which pineapple fibres and silk were woven together. You might be able to see that the warp and weft of the silk was removed in part of the pattern, and only the see-through pineapple fibre remained.

(Or you might not be able to see that. I am sorry about the low resolution of the photos. I forgot both my camera and my phone,  and T kindly lent me his phone. But its camera doesn't appreciate low light levels. )

Another thing that caught my eye was this riding coat, not for its materials but for its shape.  I think it's for a young woman or even a girl, since is cut with space for wide skirts, but apart from that, it doesn't appear to be made for a human being at all. It is very tiny, and flat chested, with a waist that cannot be more than eighteen inches, and massive shoulders that must measure twice that. It is tightly buttoned and form-fitting so I suspect the unfortunate wearer would have been laced into a very weird shaped corset and stuffed inside before they climbed onto their pony and galloped off (side-saddle, of course.)    

Environmental issues and exhibits are a significant part of the show.  In the 21st century the major concern is the wasteful use of natural resources. There is so much throwaway fashion, and some of it, like cotton denim, takes incredible amounts of water to produce, so it is good to see that some major fashion companies are waking up to the idea of sustainability.  Here is a link to H&M's "Conscious" range (click the little square beneath the description of each garment to read exactly how it is sustainable). At present, though, the idea of eco-fashion still seems like a bit of a fad, so it would good to see it become more mainstream.  

All so different from the second world war, isn't it?  Then, just getting materials at all, of any kind, was a problem.  If you were a skilled craftsperson, though, you could create beautiful garments from used parachute silk, like this, fashioned by a clever London dressmaker in the 1940s. This might have been one of my favourite pieces in the show. 

Of course fashion comes up with all kinds of extraordinary ideas, and recent ones are just as impractical and probably just as uncomfortable to wear as that riding jacket. The shoes below are from the "Bird Witched" collection of Japanese designer Masaya Kushino.  I found them very hard to photograph, so I've manipulated the image so you can get an idea of how they looked.

In real life, the shoes were black and grey, with black plumage feathers at the back, and sculpted metal bird claws which are the part you actually walk on.  Since they stand several inches off the ground, anyone using them would need a wonderful sense of balance! 

 

Jean-Paul Gaultier, as ever, contributed one of the most amazing garments. This dress, from his "Russia Collection" is called "Cat Woman," but in fact it depicts a leopard.  It is not made from real leopard skin but is created with many thousands of beads, and the label said that it took over 1,000 hours to make. You will see that the "leopard" face forms the entire bodice of the dress, and to me it looked as if it was holding the model in a close embrace.

A bit creepy, as so much of this fashion is - but for me that's one of the things that makes it so fascinating. 

After seeing the show, we emerged, blinking, to soak up some rays in the Madjeski Garden, in the museum's central courtyard.  In the beginning, I suspect this garden with its calm lawns and shallow pool was originally intended as an oasis of serenity.  Well, it's anything but that, now, and all the better for it.  The museum seems to have decided that it should be a child friendly zone and added water jets to add to the fun, which I'm sure weren't there originally.   There's now even an  an icecream stand in the sunniest corner, where you can sit and watch the kids play and notice everything that is going on in the square.

On the way home, we stopped off by the Paddington Canal to see what was new.  More children, more water jets.   This little person below spent a while figuring how to catch water from the jets shooting upwards all around her. She was very persistent, and in the end she realised that her mug had to be right way up, catching the water as it fell.  It may seem obvious to us, but I thought that was a real feat of reasoning for a little tot. 

I know that the weather in some countries is pretty bad right now, so I hope you're getting some pleasant summer days where you are.  And, if you want to go to the "Fashioned From Nature" exhibition - which doesn't finish until next January - I do recommend it, and the details are here.