In Tissot's 1877 picture, fashionable girls on the deck of the Calcutta are dressed in high fashion with bustles that stress their bottoms. In the 1881 picture by Frith of the private view at the RA the women on the right are dressed in quite a different way.
They are dressed in Aesthetic costume, and they look on admiringly at Oscar Wilde who discourses on the paintings. The Frith demonstrates the extent to which Aesthetic dress had become accepted, if eccentric, in polite society as members of the Establishment, poets, writers and politicians mix with the new brand of Aesthete. One of the leaders of this movement was Wilde's wife, Constance.
This had not always been so, and during the previous twenty years women had been constructed, shaped and changed in a number of different ways. The principal agent of female shape had been the corset aided by the crinoline.
The corset pinched in the waist and pushed up the breasts.
whereas the crinoline opened up widely from waist to floor exaggerating the narrowness of the waist.
From the early 1850s there had been a great deal of controversy about the nature of tight lacing, and many men and women insisted that it was dangerous to the health.
This was often parodied as a form of slavery to high fashion.
But the fashion plates in magazines continued to promote both the crinoline and tight-lacing.
In the 1840s and 1850s the ideal of female beauty was exemplified by the small mouth, large brow, simpering expression, rounded arms, breasts pushed up, and waist pulled in.
The reaction to this style came from the Aesthetes, and was pioneered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti who helped design and choose the material for some of the clothing of Jane Morris. A series of photographs of Jane taken in Rossetti's garden in 1865 exemplify this new style.
The contrast with high fashion is clear. The stress in Aesthetic costume is on freedom of movement. There is no crinoline and the body can move easily. There is no corset and the dress is tied round the waist. The wide sleeves allow freedom of movement to the arms.
In the early 1860s Whistler dressed his mistress Jo Hiffenran in similar clothing, which again contrasts with fashionable dress in this female group by Monet.
The origins of Aesthetic design can be found in the 1850s, and in the clothing adopted by the Pre-Raphaelites for females in Gothic designs and compositions.
The clothing in Rossetti's Blue Closet derives from a number of illustrated histories of dress that were available to him and to the Brotherhood at this time.
Similarly this picture of Jane Morris as Guenevere by William Morris suggests a similar influence:
But there was another influence:
Barbara Leigh-Smith, reformer, early feminist wrote early in her career on the evils of tight lacing. As students she and her close friends (much to the horror of their parents) refused to wear corsets, and on a walking holiday in Germany she drew herself and those friends in the new un-corsetted outfits.
Barbara Leigh-Smith took up the young Elizabeth Siddal around 1853 when Lizzie was ill and convalescing in Hastings. Lizzie also adopted this easy, informal manner of dress which was ideal for a female painter who needed to move around the studio. The drawing is by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
From quite a different quarter came another influence on the development of Aesthetic dress. The Pattle sisters, were rich beautiful, French educated and born in India. One of them, Sarah Princep, created an artistic salon in Little Holland House, London in the mid-1850s. All the sisters dressed in an eccentric and extravagant way with flowing dresses, no corsets and no crinolines.
Sara not only invited the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin, Browning and other members of the literary and artistic world to Little Holland House, she also had parties, and adopted Jane Morris in 1859 just as she was about to become William Morris's.
Edward Burne-Jones who also visited the Princeps painted Green Summer at the Red House, home of the Morris's, where the women are all wearing unconventional Aesthetic clothing.
By the end of the 1860s Jane Morris had become identified with this outlandish way of dressing and startled Henry James when he was introduced to her and to Morris in their London home.
The crinoline vanished and was replaced by the bustle, but the contrast between that style and Aesthetic dress is now clear. But more than this, high fashion was seen as conformist, Aesthetic dress as non-conformist, bohemian and even immoral. Loose clothing suggested loose morals.
In this poster for the music for an Aesthetic parody, The Colonel, the woman is clearly displaying her body in her loose clothing in a provocative and inappropriate manner.
By the 1890s, however, the middle-classes had adopted the style as a mark a particular kind of elegance, and through the agency of firms like Liberty, Aesthetic dress became not a mark of bohemianism but a sign of sophisticated taste.