#paintings portraits sculptures etc that the Petit Cenacle were working on and responding to

[aflamethatneverdies]

The most striking thing about the ostentatious garments of the Petit Cénacle, then, is that they were aggressively not in fashion. In telling his “legend of the red waistcoat”, Gautier recounts his tailor’s dismayed reaction to his description of the garment he wanted made: “On a dit que nous savions beaucoup de mots, mais nous n’en connaissons pas, il faut l’avouer, qui puissent exprimer suffisamment l’air ahuri de notre tailleur lorsque nous lui exposâmes ce plan de gilet. […] Il nous crut fou, mais […] il se contenta d’objecter d’une voix timide: ‘Mais, monsieur, ce n’est pas la mode’” (2011, 131) (“I have been told that I possess a very full vocabulary, but I cannot find words to express the amazed look of my tailor when I described the kind of waistcoat I wanted. […] He thought me crazy, but […] he merely objected in a timid voice: – ‘But that is not the fashion, sir,’” [1902, 132]).

The tailor’s reaction anticipates that of the audience at the premiere of Hernani, who were appalled and irritated by the poor taste (that is, the failure to conform to fashion) of Petit Cénacle dress. It was not only the conservative dressers, the staid gentlemen, who objected to the young Romantics’ clothing; the dandies, too, showed their disdain for the Petit Cénacle dress that distinguished itself not through Brumellian subtlety and restraint but through a wild rejection of the dominant fashion.

Petit Cénacle dress did function as a kind of anti-fashion, demonstrating its mastery of the contemporary idiom by countering male fashion point by point and rejecting the specific social meanings it used dress to transmit. But Petit Cénacle dress was also over-determined, invoking a multiform Romanticism in order to counter the broader bourgeois marginalization of aesthetics. Extending the Romantic project to include sartorial form meant questioning the very set of values that called for the creation of an autonomous aesthetic sphere to begin with, challenging the opposition between art and reality that bourgeois culture attempted to enforce, even in its sartorial codes. -Fashioning Romanticism: the Petit Cénacle and the art of dress, Catherine Talley

#help I found an article about Petit Cenacle and fashion and now I am going down a research rabbit hole #pilferingapples #Pilf I think you might like this article #she likes the Petit Cenacle gang #and I really like the way she talks about dress as being another part of literature #paintings portraits sculptures etc that the Petit Cenacle were working on and responding to #Catherine Talley #Fashioning Romanticism #Theophile Gautier #four people and a shoelace