Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1999 - 70

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Ties
Victoria and Albert Museum Fashion Accessories
By Avril Hart, New York: Costume & Fashion Press-Quite Specific Media Group, Ltd., 1998. ISB I: 0-89676-229- , 128
pages, illustrations, $19.95 (hardback).

Fans
Victoria and Albert Museum Fashion Accessories
By Avril Hart and Emma Taylor. ew York: Costume & Fashjon
Press-Quite Specific Media Group, Ltd., 1998. ISB : 0-89676230-0,126 pages, illustrations, $19.95 (hardback).
Both Avril Hart and Emma Taylor have had an f,\1ensive relationship witll the collections of costume and related items at London's
Victoria & Albert Museum, Ms. Hart being the former Assistant Curator of the Department of Textiles and Dress, and Ms. Taylor a
former curator in the same department. They have made use of
their knowledge of the V&N.s collections to produce these two
small volumes detailing the history and, to some c,\1ent, the social
significance of a pair of fashion accessories that are often overlooked or slighted in costume histories, namely neckties (and related neckwear) and fans.
Both books can be of practical use to costume designers and
techilldans as well as to historians of the subject. Each features a
large number of illustrations both of exan1ples from various muselUll collections (understandably mostly from the V&A) and of
period publications and artworks depicting the item under discussion. Each book also includes a glossary defining tlle tenus often
encountered in discussions of its subject, such as blade (tlle
pointed end of a long tie, a.k.a. tab) or articulatedfan (a fan
with one or more moving parts).
The te>.1s of tlle two books are organized quite differently
from one another, however. Ms Hart has written Ties as a ltistOlY
of clOtll neckwear from the early seventeenth century to the
present day. On tlle otller hand, she and Ms. Ta~~or did not set up
Fans as a chronologicalltistory, but instead they divided the topic
into separate categories defined by subject matter or by techillque
of manufacture. This organization can make it difficult to get a
clear idea of what sorts of fans would have been used in a particular time period, but it does allow one to see the variety available in
anyone particular type of fan. One should not understand from
this that the authors have made no attempt to develop a historical
context for their subject. In the first chapter, Ms. Hart deals \\~th
the earliest known uses of tlle folding fan in Europe dllling the sixteenth and seventeentll centuries, appending reproductions of
woodcuts from Vecellio's Habiti AnUehi di tutto il Mondo and
photographs of surviving period fans to illustrate her discussion.
The following chapters, although deiling \\~tll illustrative motifs
such as ancient mytllology and pastoral scenes or \vitll tlle plll'
pose of a fan such as being a souvenir item or an adveltisement,
are arranged in roughly cllronological order. Thus, motifs of clas68

Sylvia J. Hillyard Pannell

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sical m~ ths (Chapter II) were largely a phenomenon of the seventeenth and early eighteentll century, while fans commemorating
various political or martial events (Chapter Vll) date mostly from
tlle eighteenth and nineteentll centulies. In Chapter X, Ms Ta~~or
discusses fans of all types from the Belle tpoque (which she defines as ranging from 1885-1915) in England and France, and in a
Postscript to the book, Ms. Taylor briefly traces the fan from 1914
to the present day.
Much of tlle descliption of the fans reads like a te>.1 on art
hiStOlY, but tltis is largely because tlle fans under discussion are as
much works of art as tlleyare fashion accessOlies. Such arusts as
Watteau, Fragonard, and Barbier painted fans, and some of tlleir
work is shown and/or discussed in this volume. The autllOrs suggest that the decline in tlle number of fans that are a work of art
(and perhaps, ultimately, the disappearance of the fan as an accessory for fashionable women) is due to the ability to mass-produce
fans wltich began in tlle middle of the nineteenth century. Today's
plastic and printed paper fans are a far cry from the works of art
of ivory or tortoiseshell \vith handpainted vellum with which this
book is mainly concerned. The beauty of the fans illustrated here
helps to make the book palatable to those other tllan serious art
historians.
Ms Hart's 'TIes, as I've mentioned before, is organized in a
much more chronological fashion. Thus, her Chapter One is titled
Bands, Cravats and the Steinkirk orNeekc/oth 1650-1720s, and
her last chapter, number six, deals \\~th tlle vaJious sorts of ties
(from Hand-painted to Kitsch and Joke) of tlle 1940s to tlle
present day. She also includes in her Introduction a section on
sources for tlle study of ties, a useful feature for tllOse who \\~sh to
consult plimary sources on neckwear from the seventeenth centulY to today.
The chapters dealing \vith the neckwem' of the em'lier peliods are particulaJ'ly good, discussing as clem'ly as possible, 1
tltink, such topics as how various members of society would tie
their neckcloths in any particulaJ' era. The desCliptions of tlle different types of neckwear aJ'e augmented by the use not only of examples from museum collections and depictions in contemporary
artworks, but by illustrations from various period handbooks on
male dress such as Randle Holme's 1688 treatise Academy of
AmOlJI and Blazon and tlle somewhat better-known (to me at
least) 1818 publication Veekc/othitania. Ms. Hart also clarifies
matters with the inclusion of her own line diagrams depicting
such things as tlle exact construction and fastening of different
types of early-eigilteentll-centlllY stocks.
Her discussion of neckwem' of tlle nineteenth and twentietll
centuries is less well done, lell\~ng somewhat unclem' tlle development of the bow tie and what she generally calls tlle long tie, tllat is
the modem necktie. Her pictOlial examples are somewhat
sketchy, too. For exanlple, tlle f01ll1h chapter is subtitled: the rise
ofthe 'Old School Tie, ' but she pictures only one, a silk tie from
1996 in tlle Eton colors, priJlted \\~tll an allover pattern of school-

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1999