Victorian fashionistas in Malta
Fashion, observed the essayist William Hazlitt, is a gentility that escapes vulgarity and fears to be surpassed. This may have been true before the social revolutions of the First World War, when fashion in clothing emphasized class distinctions. Today, it is the other way around – fashion is a vulgarity that escapes from gentleness, certain that taste will have a hard time catching up.
During the Victorian era, women’s clothing on the cover, although never described as baroque, still had some of the essential elements of the baroque – extravagance, opulence, decoration for its own sake.
Like baroque art, the main aim was to amaze, to shock, to amaze. The wearers seemed to have one subconscious message to convey: I know it’s hard to admire me, you won’t admire the least of my clothes (or my car, or my tattoos, or my Petrus, or my diamonds, or my boat) ?
Both men’s and women’s fashion in Malta by the 1950s had become almost entirely cosmopolitan – the models for ape became either Parisian chic or English I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with all this money sunk by the colonies. A minority clinging to the austere native skirt, whose fortunes, however, declined slowly but steadily until its virtual extinction after the Second World War.
Photography documents in an excellent way the fashion of this period in Malta, mainly through the craze for taking pictures. It collects what the bourgeoisie and the moneyed classes wear, not what the working class used to focus on and could afford. Undoubtedly, all the sitters rushed to the studios in their Sunday best and it shows.
Leandro Preziosi, the doyen of Maltese portrait photography, wanted it to be known that his studio was not open to the lower orders of society. And no one raised an eye for the effrontery of this classism of fact.
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