The shirt dress as a sign of exclusion of women from the socio-political sphere in the late XVIII - early XIX centuries

Fashion as an ephemeral and feminine sphere arose at the end of the 18th century as a kind of consequence of the gender division of the social roles of men and women. Until the French Revolution, both men and women were distinguished by the desire for luxurious bright fabrics, an abundance of decorations and trimmings, which were the main means of representing their social status. The French revolution embodied the destruction of the ves-timentary system of the Old regime and, as consequence, negated the importance of visual representation of the individual's identity, putting forward instead a bourgeois ideal with its value of private life and inalienable talents and abilities of the individual that do not have vestimentary channels of expression. In this regard, the shirt dress, which arose in the 1780s under the influence of the ideas of Antiquity and the utilitarian tendencies in costume, which came from England, having received its greatest impact in the neoclassical modes of the style of Empire. By emphasizing and exposing bodily outlines, this kind of dress embodied the collapse of the vestimentary system of the old regime, revealing the basis of fashion changes - a private body. Neoclassical fashion with dresses revealing body shapes can be considered the starting point of bourgeois fashion, by such a way manifesting the female body as the main object of transformation in fashion. The reduction of a woman to her corporality and to the private sphere, expressed in such dresses, can also be considered as a consequence of her exclusion from the political sphere as it declared in the Constitution of 1791, which deprived women of any political rights and, as a consequence, of the possibility of a similar with men vestimentary representation of their social identity. Thus, the aim of this article is to examine the historical and cultural context of the exclusion of women from the political sphere, a sign of which was the shirt dress that not only embodied the identification of women with a private sphere, but also, showing more than ever the outlines of the body in a public sphere, expressed the manifestation of the female body as the main object of transformation and manipulation in the bourgeois fashion.

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