Colouring in Fashion History With Cally Blackman

Nothing gets under fashion historian Cally Blackman’s skin more than when the importance and cultural significance of dress is overlooked.

Who remembers Tate Britain’s exhibition Sargent and Fashion last year? You know, the one that saw The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones fight it out with the rest of the fashion industry in a boxing ring for titling his one-star review: Tragicomic travesty is a frock horror? I’m sure you don’t need us to tell you Jones’ own display of ignorance - and criticism of the exhibition - didn’t end there. Which meant when the art critic was met with a metaphorical slap in the face by Blackman who penned a piece - also for The Guardian - asking the disgraced critic to ‘Throw off the cloak of snobbery and treat fashion as a serious art form’ three days later, the rest of her industry - designers, writers, lecturers, and the like - rallied closely behind.

Few were as irked by Jones’ heinous comments that saw him suggest the ‘macabre crinkled silks belong in an attic with a rocking horse that moves of its own accord’ than Blackman. ‘When I read or hear the word “frock”, my heart sinks and my hackles rise’, her public response began. ‘As the most powerful form of non-verbal communication, clothes tell us a lot about people – from their occupation, to religion, to their Indigenous heritage’. Living up to her beliefs one year on, Blackman’s new book titled The Colour of Clothes takes this idea to new heights, providing a snapshot into lives lived and clothes worn in turn of the century Paris when the Lumière brothers changed the course of fashion history with one mightily small yet miraculous invention: the autochrome process.

‘This was the first time in the history of photography that colour could be recorded reliably in a single take, with a plate camera’, Blackman told me over email. But it wasn’t without its complications. ‘The Lumiere brothers' innovative technology took place internally: a mosaic screen dusted with miniscule granules of potato starch dyed red, blue and green, filtered light onto the glass plate, and a reversal process resulted in a fixed colour positive image, like a Polaroid. While the autochrome's ability to record intense colour was at first an exciting revelation within the photographic community, its intrinsic permanence ultimately frustrated 'art' photographers who soon abandoned it because it couldn't be edited or tweaked in the darkroom, and it was very difficult to reproduce in print.’ Yet, despite falling out of favour in 1930s Paris, autochrome pictures that survive today are especially beautiful for their rarity and fragility.

Blackman’s retelling of this invention forms the backbone of The Colour of Clothes as chronicled in the publication’s introductory chapter: The Art of the Autochrome. But, as she says, it’s not the only footnote in the story of colour, proven in the book’s ensuing chapters titled Colour and Change, Fashion and Fantasy and Modernity, all of which pay equal attention to the places and faces that made up the modernist vanguard at the time as well as the variety, pattern and texture of the clothes they wore. From Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen’s Pictorialism ‘Pictoralist photographers had previously attempted to achieve aesthetic effects that equalled those of painters’ Blackman’s introduction reads, to Gustav Klimt’s indigo-dyed embroidered linen smock which ‘symbolised the current preoccupations of several avant-garde artistic movements in the early 20th century’ and Poiret’s orientalist desires - communicated via Steichen’s impressively stunning 1911 series of images that make up Poiret’s L’Art de la Robe - it’s all there.

Speaking of that singular transformative period between 1907-1919, Blackman notes of how ‘colour revolutionised everything at this time, from art movements to consumer products and of course fashion: Poiret's whole aesthetic relied on colour 'punch', his extravagant Orientalist fantasies were perfectly adapted to costume and fancy dress.’ As for where Stieglitz comes into it, like Steichen, he was as quick to drop working with colour as he was to pick it up, but this isn’t to say he overlooked its importance. ‘Stieglitz didn’t work with autochromes for long, for reasons I explain above’ Blackman tells me, ‘but he did feature three of Steichen's in an issue of Camera Work in 1908 and exhibited them at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York, between 1907 and 1909. He was certainly a powerful force in American photography who championed the acceptance of photography as an art, equal to painting’, Blackman informs.

Blackman’s book is impressive for many reasons, not least because of its extensive research tracing the history of 20th century fashion right up until 1930, but also because it’s the first of its kind to do so. ‘No one in my field had used autochromes before as visual evidence of fashion and the colour of clothes in the early twentieth century’, Blackman notes. ‘This was because until the advent of digital technology, most autochromes languished undiscovered and unseen in museums and archives because they were extremely fragile, and they were only regarded as objects belonging to the history of photography.’

As for why she fell in love with autochromes to begin with, her answer is simple: ‘I wanted to bring them to light and demonstrate their worth in the history of fashion. For me, they conjure up a nostalgic vision of the past that I know of course, did not exist in reality, but is nevertheless beguiling. I love their atmospheric beauty - they are unlike any other colour photographic process in existence - soft, dreamy, shimmering colours, so richly intense. Not only are they entrancing, they are an invaluable visual source to track the narrative of fashion history at a time when colour in printed media and in painting was often arbitrary.’ Fashion has always relied on colour to bring it to life, so should history, too.

The Colour of Clothes by Cally Blackman, published by Thames and Hudson is available to order now from this link.