Talk:Empire silhouette

message: These quotes, in the article as I found it, blithely skip over decades:
:Josephine Bonaparte was the traditional figurehead for the Empire waistline.  When English women saw her dressed in elaborate, skilfully decorated Empire line dresses they rapidly raised the waistline of the long, cylindrical silhouette of the late Renaissance eras. The sixties saw a revival of the Empire silhouette was the sexual revolution encouraged women to rebel away from the constricting corsetry of the early 1900’s.
How would Englishwomen have "seen" Josephine before the Peace of Amiens, when women's clothing styles in England had already changed quite a bit?  What do the constricting clothing styles of the 1770's have to do with the "Renaissance"?  And the last sentence makes it seem as if the Gibson Girls directly segued into the era of the miniskirt with no transition...  Churchh 04:16, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Historical telescoping

message: I don't want to disparage her, but most testimonies are that the neo-Greek fashions spread from Paris. Churchh (talk) 00:42, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Emma, Lady Hamilton

message: http://www.misfile.com/?page=1070
http://www.misfile.com/?page=1071
Are these links suitable as a reference? 84.56.115.20 (talk) 19:05, 4 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: As a reference for what?  That some people subjectively think that Empire-waist dresses make women look pregnant?  Anyway, it's the variations on the Empire silhouette (such as what she's wearing in the Arnolfini Wedding) which can sometimes have that effect, much more than the straight-up classical "Grecian" styles; neither of the women in the two images on the "Empire silhouette" article page look very pregnant to me. Churchh (talk) 21:54, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

text: By the way, in the years around the first decade of the nineteenth century, dressmakers often tried their best to make the front of the dress be flat and smooth (perhaps even a little clinging), while bunching up folds at the center back of the high waistline of the dress to still allow full freedom of movement (avoiding any "hobbleskirt" or "mermaid" effect).  So it seems that they were trying to eliminate any pregnant look as best they could within the overall Empire silhouette style.  For an example of the bunched folds at the back, see image http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/1810drss.jpg linked from http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/ppbrokil.html .  I've kind of been keeping an eye out for a suitable free replacement for this image (see Talk:1795-1820 in fashion), but haven't found one so far. Churchh (talk) 01:18, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: About ten years ago, when the wave of Jane Austen movies came out, some people not knowledgeable about fashion history and terminology called them "cokebottle dresses". Churchh (talk) 16:31, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: References

message: I have never seen or heard the word empire pronounced om-peer, the only reference to this is a 1999 article, I have been unable to substantiate this elsewhere on the net. Removal??
(Marc 14/10/09 @ 13:26)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.63.26.124 (talk) 12:26, 14 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I've now greatly reduced the prominence of this assertion.  By the way, a "Spencer" was a particular kind of short jacket which went well with the empire silhouette, but was not a term for neo-classical clothing styles in general, according to what I've seen.  Churchh (talk) 14:25, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  om-peer 

message: I don't know how much of a revival of the empire silhouette there was in the 1930s, but if there was one, it needs to be discussed separately. Churchh (talk) 17:34, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: 1930s

message: By the way, I came across the second revised edition (1976) of On Human Finery by Quentin Bell.  His position is difficult to sum up in a few sentences, but he broadly supports what I said above, in that in his opinion there were only two historical political/military events which had significantly perturbative effects on the Western fashion cycle -- the aftermath of the French revolution ("Napoleonic wars"), and World War I -- but that fashion fluctuations during those periods were not necessarily closely correlated with short-term political events.  He flatly denies that the general trend towards neo-classicizing style in women's clothing was "tied to political ideology". Churchh (talk) 18:14, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title: Quentin Bell