Death Becomes Her, the Costume Institute’s first fall exhibition in eight years, examines American and English bereavement rituals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Period fashions and accessories, including hats, shawls, parasols, and jewelry, along with fashion plates, satirical illustrations, and mourning pictures reveal the formal rituals of bereavement, mostly observed by women. A woman’s selection of mourning clothing demonstrated her status, taste, and level of propriety. Quotes from period publications flashed along the walls of the exhibit’s main gallery demonstrate the range of attitudes by and towards women and their observation of mourning, which includes the social activist Julia Ward Howe’s frustration at the inconvenience of spending money on black clothes, to etiquette manual author Robert de Valcourt’s description of veiled widows as alluring and seductive.
The thirty ensembles are organized chronologically and show the progression of appropriate fabrics from mourning crape to corded silks, and the later introduction of color with shades of gray and mauve. Royalty established the elaborate standards of sartorial mourning attire, which then filtered across class lines via fashion magazines and etiquette manuals. When Prince Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria went into mourning and wore shades of mourning until her death forty years later. Displayed in the exhibition is an 1894 black silk taffeta, silk crape, and silk lace evening dress worn by the Queen. Her extended period of mourning did not, however, initiate a desire among her middle class subjects to embrace her formal standards of mourning attire. Three years later a women writing about Queen Victoria’s life felt that “her majesty was behind the spirit of the times in regard to regulations for mourning.”
During World War I, British and American women relaxed the strict codes of etiquette through their joining of the workforce and their contributing to the war effort; thus periods of seclusion tied to traditional forms of mourning dress lost their relevance. When the War ended in 1918, fashion coverage of mourning attire declined, which yielded to increased freedom of whether or how to display personal grief.
One feature of the exhibit is Charles Dana Gibson’s twenty-four satirical illustrations titled “A Widow and Her Friends”, which were published from 1900 to 1901 in Life magazine. This series reflects how an attractive widow could be imagined in society and popular culture-as vulnerable and worth of sympathy or as a sexually alluring and knowing figure who is potentially disruptive of the prevailing social order.
Though fascination with death and its accoutrements as symbolized by the Goths wearing of black clothes can be considered a fashion statement today, the exhibition’s curator Harold Koda believes that until you have experienced the death of a loved one you really do not understand mourning; so for the young people who embrace Goth clothing, “there is a kind of ability to fantasize about what death means.” This exhibition is worth a visit so that we can understand the importance of the social rituals of mourning as experienced by nineteenth-century men and women-and to see how far we have come.
Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire, Metropolitan Museum of Art, through February 1, 2015. metmuseum.org
