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Category: fashion

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Fashions in frames

Your frame can’t be all things to everyone, but it’s helpful to know where it stands in the currents of fickle fashion.
Me, with the usual assortment of plein air event frames.

I keep an inventory of frames in my garage in the common sizes in which I paint en plein air, ranging from 6X8 up to 18X24. This takes up considerable space and represents an even more considerable investment. Inevitably, despite careful management, there are some losses—damaged frames, sizes I no longer work in, or—the worst—frames that have gone out of style.

Some go back twenty years. These are black and gold with corner medallions and carving, and I only use them in a pinch. Still, I keep them. The moment I get rid of them, they’ll be back in style.
Picture frames aren’t usually considered a fashion item, but like everything else in the home, they are tied to dĂ©cor trends. There were elaborate Baroque frames, simple mid-century frames, and modern, minimalist frames—and many subtle shifts within each of these periods.
Apple blossom swing, by Carol L. Douglas. Courtesy Camden Falls Gallery. This is a favorite frame style, but it must be built in two sections.
The current plein airframe is usually a gold, silver or dark wood slab frame with minimal ornamentation. It’s widely available and easy to use. But does it actually reflect modern tastes in decorating? Well, yes and no. Look through Elle DĂ©cor’s pages at the frames and artwork. While metal finishes are making something of a comeback, farmhouse chic (which means barnwood) is still pretty popular. There are more ‘frameless’ and all-white frames than there are metallics.
The question isn’t what we like, but what our buyers want. My age cohort still loves gold frames, but we’re a shrinking market. Millennials say they want minimalism, low-maintenance and modern, with wood and stone surfaces. Mid-century modern and rustic may be fading overall, but they remain strong influences in this group.
Breaking dawn, by Carol L. Douglas. This is a frame syle popular in the Canadian Maritimes.
There are regional differences. My Canadian friend Poppy Balser and I navigate the shoals of cross-border framing every year. Nova Scotians prefer a simpler style with a plain white liner and thin fillet. To our American eyes it looks cheap (it’s not). Our heavy gold plein air frames look tacky to them. I’ve come to love the Canadian frame, but it’s hard to get here.
There are limits to how trendy one can be at plein air events. Oil and acrylic painters generally work on boards, so mass-produced floater frames don’t fit. Even if we were to switch back to canvas, they must be carefully positioned and then screwed down. That’s too hard to do on the back deck of a hatchback. Metallic paint is fine because it can be patched, but gilt and fine wood surfaces are too fragile to move around in a car over bad roads. In most shows, frameless isn’t an option.
Drying sails, by Carol L. Douglas. This frame was an old standby for many years. It clashes with nothing, but clients sometimes complain that it’s too dark.
I’ve been coveting Taos by King of Frames for over a year now, ever since I saw it at Jane Chapin’s house. It’s simple, elegant, and too pricey for a plein air event frame. For the second year in a row, I’ve reluctantly passed on it.
Frames are as subjective as the paintings they contain, but they send strong signals to buyers. You can’t be all things to everyone, but it’s helpful to know where you stand in the bigger currents of fashion.
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Color deceives

Next time you look at that ‘great deal’ of a shirt, realize that while it may look fashionably blue, it might run red.
Plate from Interaction of Color by Josef Albers (Yale University Press)

 In order to use color effectively, it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually. (Josef Albers)

Josef Alberswas a ground-breaking art educator, and he meant this in its most literal sense. He returned to the idea over and over, saying things like, “The concern of the artist is with the discrepancy between physical fact and psychological effect,” or “Every perception of colour is an illusion.”
Albers’ exercises from Interaction of Color still have much to offer. For its 50th anniversary, Yale University Press offered an app of the exercises from the book. Buy the book and use paint chips instead. Our retinal sensitivity runs into millions of different colors. Monitors aren’t nearly as sensitive, and they work on a different principle of color than printing or paints (additive rather than subtractive).
Plate from Interaction of Color by Josef Albers (Yale University Press)
Albers’ quote can be applied almost anywhere. Consider applying it to race relations. I’m not ‘white,’ any more than my friend Helen is ‘black.’ But we live in a world where color names are shorthand for our social stations, often wrong.
I found myself thinking about Alber’s dictum after reading excerptsfrom the Anti-Fashion Manifesto of trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort.
“How can a product that needs to be sown, grown, harvested, combed, spun, knitted, cut and stitched, finished, printed, labelled, packaged and transported cost a couple of Euros? On the hunt for cheaper deals, volume companies, but also some luxury brands, have trusted the making of their wages to underpaid workers living in dire conditions. What’s more, these prices imply the clothes are to be thrown away, discarded like a condom before being loved and savoured, teaching young consumers that fashion has no value.”
Plate from Interaction of Color by Josef Albers (Yale University Press)
We keep slaves like our 19th century ancestors did. We’ve just moved them to the other side of the world. Ironically and sadly, many of those slaves still work in the cotton fields.
“Children, especially girls, are employed by farmers in order to cut costs, as they are paid well below the minimum wage and the wages paid to adult workers,” reported the International Labor Rights Forum of India.
“The child workers are often in a state of debt bondage since their employers pay an advance to the children’s parents and then they must work to meet the amount paid. The children generally work at least nine hours a day, but during the winter, they often work up to 12 hours a day.”
Homage to the Square, 1965, Josef Albers
According to the Australian Walk Free Foundation, in 2016 there were 46 million people enslaved worldwide. Two-thirds are in Southeast Asia, which is where much of our cheap clothing is made.
The garment industry has a history of labor abuses, going back to the Napoleonic Wars. That doesn’t excuse our involvement.
We can’t avoid foreign-made goods. It’s difficult to determine what’s made by slave labor, since it infiltrates the high-end market as well as discount stores. Why not “buy a few remarkable things and wear the heck out of them,” as designer Jane Bartlettsuggested?
Next time you look at that ‘great deal’ of a shirt, realize that while it may look fashionably blue, it might run blood-red. As Josef Albers told us half a century ago, color deceives.
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Wondering what tomorrow will bring?

Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, 1822, Sir Thomas Lawrence. Shortly after this was painted, the female form would be locked back down in corsets for another century.
Strapless gowns continue to be a popular silhouette for young American women on their wedding days. Their mothers preferred something with lots of fabric, either in the style of Princess Diana’s gown or hippie-like Gunne Sax. That change continues a long pattern. For more than a hundred years, fashion has trended toward less coverage, more stretch and less tailoring. We seem to be at the logical end of this trend, when even celebrity nudity ceases to shock.
A satirical cartoon from the July 11th 1857 issue of Harper’s Weekly.
What comes next? More coverage seems unlikely, since we Moderns have no experience living through a conservative reversal. Yet there is one precedent, in the 19th century shift from the Mode Ă  la Grecque to Victorian sensibility.
Parisian Ladies in their Full Winter Dress for 1800, 1799 caricature print by Isaac Cruikshank.
Mode Ă  la Grecque itself was a radical departure from what came before. During the 1790s, women’s fashion underwent a dramatic transformation from periwigs, powder and panniers to natural hair and light, unrestricted clothing. This was a smart move during the Age of Revolution. The absurd and expensive clothing of the Ancien-Regimewas not just out of style, it was dangerously reactionary.
The new neo-classical style was both more democratic and more revealing. “The girdle of the dress was no longer bound to the hips, but under the breast; the powder was gradually abolished, the chopsticks were laid down, the whole clothing approached more to nature, and actually to the Greek taste, in which sense one went further and further in the following years, to scarcity in clothing, which scarcely left a fold, so that the most accurate description of the body shape underneath it seemed to be the actual purpose and fame of this fashion,” wrote contemporary Austrian novelist Caroline Pichler.
Madame Moitessier, 1856, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. She may be showing dĂ©colletage, but she is carefully laced into a steel-stayed corset. 
That freedom from stricture was, sadly, short-lived. By 1830, when waistlines had dropped back to the natural waist, corsets returned with a vengeance, culminating in the diabolical swan-bill corset of the early twentieth century. These 19th century corsets were actually tighter and more restrictive than what had come before the Mode Ă  la Grecque, thanks to modern steel stays. The steel-stay corset did not disappear from general use until World War I.
Why did women ever let themselves be caught back up in the restrictive clothing that was the hallmark of the Victorian era? There were women who lamented the return to stays and a few outliers like Amelia Bloomer who pushed for healthier, more rational clothing. Most, however, just acquiesced. 
Mrs. Cecil Wade, 1886, John Singer Sargent, is already showing the effects of the fashionable S-curve of the swan-bill corset. She can’t sit normally.
We live in tumultuous times. What seems inconceivable today may be reality in just a few short years. Heck, girls might even start wearing sleeves again at their weddings.
Fashion is just a reflection of history, after all, and history never runs in a straight line.