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The Guardian view on The Vampire’s Wife: fashion that captured the zeitgeist | Editorial
Editorial: The luxury label that created a Vogue dress of the decade may have collapsed, but its frocks will live on in wardrobes and art history
That royal picture, by Jamie Coreth, has inserted The Vampire’s Wife into art history just as John Singer Sargent’s society portraits, currently at Tate Britain, did with the Parisian House of Worth. Yet none of the Worth extravagances on display at the Tate say as much as a portrait Sargent made of wealthy New York newlyweds in 1897, which features the wife in practical walking garb, confidently posed, with hand on her hip. In showing how the new woman might comport herself in the coming century, it was a precursor to the clothes of 20th-century designers such as Coco Chanel, Mary Quant, and perhaps the more mass market Biba’s Barbara Hulanicki, which defined and facilitated a new physical female freedom.
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