sargent-and-fashion

How did the mixed reaction to Tate Britain’s

Sargent and Fashion exhibition reflect the wider tensions between art and fashion studies?

INTRODUCTION

This is not another ‘cry’ against that article written by Johnathan Jones (2024), in which he declared that the curators of Sargent and Fashion reduced the “gloriously rich and subtle paintings” of John Singer Sargent to “dreary facts about hats, dresses and opera gowns”. Replies have ready been made by the likes of Cally Blackman (2024), who called for Jones to “throw off the cloak of snobbery and treat fashion as a serious art form”, and Amy de la Haye (2024), whofelt that fashion should not have to be explicitly seen as an art form in order to be taken seriously: “And, in 2024, I refuse to argue its merits”. However, this “media furore” (de la Haye, 2024) was enticing, and I argue that to understand the mixed reaction it is important to examine the long-standing tension between art and fashion studies in more depth. Accordingly, this essay proposes a critical analysis of the curators’ decision to combine both disciplines, framing it within the contemporary field of fashion curation; fashion’s recognition as a serious site of academic and museum studies, and the increasing popularity of fashion-based exhibitions. Exploring Sargent’s awareness of the power of dress (Finch and Hirshler, 2023), this essay further assesses the interconnection of art and fashion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It contextualises his work through an analysis of the Couture industry—based on Worth’s exclusive business model which helped establish the relationship between art and elite fashion (Troy, 2003)—as well as the gendered associations of art as a ‘greater’ form of creative communication, and fashion as frivolous, valueless, ephemeral, and feminised, which formed during this period (Clark and Vänskä, 2017; Green and Reddy-Best, 2022). This will be further explored through an in-depth case study of Sargent’s infamous portrait Madame X, which depicted the American-born Parisian socialite Virginie Gautreau. Her form-fitting black dress and contrasting pale skin first caused a ‘commotion’ when she was revealed at the Salon of 1884, but also became a point of contention when displayed at Sargent and Fashion 140 years on, raising discussions around historical and contemporary attitudes towards gender and race. Assessing these points together, this essay seeks to understand why this particular exhibition elicited such a passionate response, and how it is situated within fashion and art studies today.

Figure 1. Lady Sassoon and the Opera Cloak, first room of Sargent and Fashion. (2024) Jai Monaghan.

EXHIBITING SARGENT AND FASHION

Exhibited at Tate Britain in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2023-2024), the curators Erica E. Hirshler, James Finch, and Chiedza Mhondoro employed a fashion-based interpretation of Sargent’s world and work. Fashion has become an increasingly popular exhibition focus, with some museums being accused of accepting commercial sponsorship and attracting visitors ‘en masse’ through the superficial glamour and spectacle of fashion—evoking the “high versus low culture/education versus entertainment” debate between art and fashion (Peirson-Smith and Peirson-Smith, 2021, p. 292). Whilst, as Steele has explained, some organisations have been criticised for favouring “splendor” over education, the “interpretation of [fashion] objects (also known as material culture methodology) can provide a powerful tool to address the problems that frequently beset fashion museum exhibitions” (1998, p. 334). Although Tate Britain is not a fashion-specific museum, Steele’s argument still stands, and de la Haye (2024) applies this perspective to Sargent and Fashion, encouraging us to evaluate whether these fashion-based interventions enhance or impede our overall learning and exhibition experience. Reflecting upon this, it is evident that the curators effectively paired many of Sargent’s paintings with fashion objects, presenting visitors with an enriched understanding of fashion’s significance within Western-European and American societies. Exemplifying this, Figure 1 depicts the first exhibition room, which held both a silk taffeta and satin opera cloak (1895), attributed to the House of Worth, and a portrait of Lady Sassoon wearing the cloak, styled with pink roses, “a string of pearls, bangles on both wrists, and a spectacular hat of black ostrich feathers” (Tate, 2025). When displayed together both the portrait and the cloak reveal new details about each other, the cloak’s materiality, the sheen of its black fabric, and the intricacy of its lacework coming to life in the exhibition space, but its pink lining, barely noticeable in reality, becoming a centre point in the painting, Lady Sassoon holding the cloak open and framing the pink sleeve lining with her hands.

Furthermore, whilst Jones (2024) speculates that the inclusion of fashion-objects distracts from the Sargent’s accompaniment and skill as a portraitist, he also argues that the difference between a work of art and an “ancient frock” is that “the painting is as old as the rest, but in it a person lives”. Acknowledging this, de la Haye (2024) more subtly asks us to question whether these static; glass-encased garments can communicate life as “eloquently as full-length framed portraits created for a wall”, continuing that the Tate’s use of invisible mannequins negates gesture, giving the garments a ghost-like quality (de la Haye, 2024). This evokes Steele’s comparison of museums and archives to cemeteries for ‘dead’ clothes, not only signifying their designation as a final resting place for worn clothes and outmoded fashions, but also their inability to fully recapture fashion as a contemporary and constantly changing “living phenomenon” (1998, p. 334). I argue that whilst fashion objects can maintain traces of life through signs of wear, the portrait of Lady Sassoon allows us to visualise her, or at least her public-facing image, more clearly within a restrictive gallery setting. It is through her gesture of revealing the pink coat lining—comparable to the previous fashion for slashed sleeves which symbolised the wearer’s material wealth—that Sassoon flaunts her social status and affluence, Worth designs incorporating expensive materials such as silk, brocade, and homemade lace only affordable to the most wealthy clients (Troy, 2003). Despite this, Sargent was also known to restyle his sitters, pinning, draping, tucking and folding their garments to create new shapes and textures (Tate, 2025). Therefore the display of both his paintings and the fashion-objects can demonstrate how Sargent’s own vision and artistic skill equally mirrored and manipulated reality.

Figure 2. Display at ‘Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity’, Art Institute of Chicago.

‘In the Conservatory’, 1881, by Albert Bartholomé, and Summer dress. (2025) Tyranny of Style

Sargent and Fashion has not been the only exhibition to pair art and fashion together. Another example is the Impressionism and Fashion exhibition, also known as Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity, first held at the Musée d’Orsay in 2012, and then at the MET and the Art Institute of Chicago throughout 2012 and 2013. This exhibition followed the Impressionist movement and its artist’s keenness to consider portraiture “as a snapshot of a person in his/her familiar setting”, documenting both their fashions and attitudes (Musée d’Orsay, 2024). Figure 2 shows the display of a purple and white cotton summer dress belonging to Prospérie de Fleury, and a portrait of her wearing the dress painted by her husband Albert Bartholomé, titled In the Conservatory (1881). Like Lady Sassoon and the opera cloak, the display of de Fleury’s dress reveals more detail than the portrait alone, with one online reviewer writing that it was a revelation to see that what they had thought was a solid purple skirt in the painting was in fact pleated to reveal white underneath (Tyranny of Style, n.d.). On the other hand, it can also be contended that the fashion object—in both instances—is perceived as secondary, displayed for the sole purpose of promoting the integrity of the artwork. Many art exhibitions have included fashion objects in order to showcase the artists’ skill or attention to detail, demonstrating the “centrality of fashion as a subject within art, rather than an art in and of itself” (Petrov, 2019, p. 98). This suggests that fashion is merely a method through which an art movement or artist can be better understood—which is also the case for Sargent and Fashion, as we look to understand Sargent’s work through its link to fashion.

The secondary position of fashion studies has long been the prevalent narrative, and whilst Baudelaire declared fashion the central marker of ‘modernity’, writing that the aim of the modern artist should be to “extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope” (1863, p. 6), fashion was soon displaced from its central position, and dismissed as “superficial, fleeting and feminized” (Troy, 2003, p. 2; Chadwick, 2004). This ‘feminisation’ of fashion to downplay its credibility has been, and still is, ingrained in our understanding, traced back to nineteenth century Europe, where art became classified into ‘greater and lesser’, and ‘high and low’ art forms: dress becoming identified as a ‘lesser’ decorative art (Fukai, 2010 and Peirson-Smith and Peirson-Smith, 2020). Even Jones (2024), when referring to the curators’ fashion-based interpretation, complains that they disregard the paintings’ history, “other than fashion history”, showing that for some his nineteenth century viewpoint still stands. Certainly, the curators have applied a “narrow clothes-based interpretation” (Jones, 2024) to an exhibition precisely called Sargent and Fashion, however, I would argue that whilst they have chosen what to display, and from which angle to narrate these paintings, the exhibition does not limit the ways through which Sargent’s work can be understood.

THE INTERPRETATIONS OF MADAME X

Like the tailor in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Re-tailored, 1836), Sargent was ‘not only a Man, but something of a Creator of Divinity’. The painter confessed that he ‘immensely’ admired Carlyle’s novel, in which a fictional philosopher proposes that it was through clothing that an entire person was built.

(Finch and Hirshler, 2023, p. 9)

As discussed previously, Sargent and Fashion reignited debates around the importance of fashion, and yet its place within both Sargent’s life and work is indisputable. As Finch and Hirshler (2023) explain above, Sargent was fully aware of fashion’s social currency, both he and his sitters carefully choosing what clothes he would paint them in and the messages that they would convey accordingly. As one French critic observed: “there is now a class who dress after pictures, and when they buy a gown ask, ‘will it paint?’” (Tate, 2025). Many of his sitters bought gowns in Paris, which, coinciding with Sargent’s own rising career, was fast becoming known as the fashion capital. Elevating fashion’s status to that of high cultural value, couture was considered more as an art form than an industry, distancing itself from the low cultural status of commercial fashion—or confection—(Kurkdjian, 2019), thus gaining the integrity and respectability often reserved for art (Petrov, 2019). It was Worth’s business model, however, which “set the tone for high fashion” in the West, his control over the design, production, and distribution of his gowns—crafted from rich materials, and labour-intensive embroidery and sewing techniques—enabling him to charge higher prices (Troy, 2003, p. 21), with some of his gowns costing up to “£25,000 in today’s money” (Tate, 2025). This acclaim was reflected in Sargent’s portraits, many of his sitters, such as Lady Sassoon, being dressed in designs by respected couture houses.

Figure 3. The original Madame X, 1884, by John Singer Sargent. (2018) Justine De Young

Figure 4. ‘Le Salon Comique’ Caricature, by Albert Robida 1884 (2018) Justine De Young

Arguably the most infamous of Sargent’s portraits, Madame X signified a departure from this commissioned work. Depicting the American born Parisian socialite Virginie Gautreau, this portrait was a result of his own admiration for her “artificially pale skin and her form”, which he emphasised through the contrasting dark colour and close fit of her gown (Herdrich, 2023, p.36). Madame X—as the portrait was later named to protect Gautreau’s identity—caused a stir when she was revealed in the 1884 Salon at the Palais des Champs-Élysées, in Paris. Recorded in the The Art Amateur journal, under the title Eccentricities of French Art, the portrait was viewed as “simply offensive in its insolent ugliness and defiance of every rule of art” (1884, p. 52). The writer then went on to describe Gautreaus’ dress as: “Having no sleeves, not even a band to imitate them, and being kept from falling off by silver chains over the shoulders! As if this were not sufficient exposure of the thin ungracious form, the bodice is cut away in a V to the very waist, leaving the naked flesh bluntly exposed without a single protection of even lace or tulle!” (The Art Amateur, 1884, p. 52). The exclamation points alone, whilst sensationalist, indicate the writer’s clear indignation. This ridicule of both Sargent and Gautreau also extended into caricature, the cartoon ‘Le Salon Comique’ by Albert Robida in 1884 (Figure 4), depicting Gautreau with emphasised curves and both shoulder straps slipping, the caption reading: ‘Une robe qui ne gêne pas aux entournures. Mode tres séduisante’ translating to ‘A dress that does not bother the surrounds. Very seductive fashion’. Sargent defended the portrait from this mockery, claiming that he had painted Gautreau ‘exactly how she was dressed’, however in doing so he also deflected the criticism onto Gautreau for her questionable taste (Herdrich, 2023). Compared to many of Sargent’s sitters, who he painted in a way representative of their wealth and social position, Gautreau’s image confronted these notions, representing a challenge to the social, moral, and sartorial codes, and the perceived ‘subservience’ of the nineteenth century woman.

Jones (2024) agrees that Gautreau’s portrait presented a challenge to these nineteenth century ideals, however he argues that it was not her dress which shocked the Salon, but her ‘sex’, stating that Gautreau and Sargent worked together to create a “fictional fantasy”. It may have in fact been her ‘sex’ which caused a sensation, but this is inextricably linked to her dress, The Art Amateur suggesting that her image was all the more immodest because of this: “in the whole great exhibition, where nude and semi-nude figures so abound, there is not a more indelicate canvas. […] The figure would have better been left completely uncovered, for modesty’s sake as well as for art’s” (1884, p. 51-52). For this critic, Gautreau’s body would have been less provocative if she were painted without the dress, than wearing it. This relates to the nineteenth century idea that a society woman should embody the wealth, status, and ideals of her husband, as whilst many of the paintings in the catalogue of 1884 also featured women with similarly low cut necklines, “what was considered acceptable for an actress or performer was deemed unsuitable for a woman of society” (Hendrich, 2023, p. 36). Judith Butler refers to the “gendered interest between cultural discourse, and everyday habitus as performativity” (Kaiser, 2013, p. 222), and Barthes has equally highlighted the role of dress in defining our perception of the gendered body, dress acting as a ‘poetic object’ to be exchanged between wearer and observer in the negotiation of identities (Jones, 1995, p. 18). Similarly, Hegel has observed that the unclothed body alone cannot signify meaning (Jones, 1995, p. 18), but whilst I agree to an extent, it can also be contended that for The Art Amateur journalist, and indeed a nineteenth century reader, both the presence and absence of dress on the female body holds significant meaning. What Jones forgets in his effort to criticise Sargent and Fashion, and even the Tate does not explicitly explore in the exhibition, is the inseparable nature of fashion, gender, and identity, perhaps getting distracted by the sensationalism surrounding Madame X.

Figure 5. Yaa Asantewaa Inspecting the Dispositions at Ejisu (2012) Kimathi Donkor

Figure 6. Yaa Asantewaa Inspecting the Dispositions at Ejisu (2014) Kimathi Donkor

Whilst lacking in some areas, the exhibition has generated many conversations around curatorial subjectivity, and the obscured narratives embedded within Sargent’s paintings. Sargent and Fashion: Audio, an online webpage associated with the exhibition, has not only provided an alternative and accessible form of visitor engagement with the exhibition and Sargent’s work, but has also created a space to explore more personal and in-depth responses to some of the works displayed. Speaking of Madame X, the artist and academic Kimathi Donkor (2025) argues that the portrait holds deeper meaning, stating that whether intentionally or not, Sargent and Gautreau were both complicit and engaged with “an ideology of whiteness which holds racial purity, the colour of Gautreau’s dress significantly contrasting and accentuating the paleness of her skin”. Gautreau in particular came from a prominent slave-holding and plantation-owning family in Louisiana, and so her wealth and social position were largely accumulated through her family’s “exploitation and oppression of enslaved African people in the deep south of the United States” (Donkor, 2025). Figures 5 and 6 show Donkor’s response to Madame X: two ‘twin’ paintings titled Yaa Asantewaa Inspecting the Disposition at Ejisu (produced in 2012 and 2014 respectively), depicting the Ejisu Queen Mother and Ashanti commander-in-chief Yaa Asantewaa. These stemmed from a body of work beginning in 2009, called Queens of the Undead—and have also featured in his doctoral thesis Africana Unmasked: fugitive signs of Africa in Tate’s British collection (2015). For this he followed a three-part artistic methodology, detailing that his new works must represent historic female African and Diaspora military leaders; represent contemporary African women posing as these leaders, and “appropriate recognisable motifs from canonical, western artworks which were made by artists who were, themselves, contemporaries to the female African commanders” (Donkor, 2016, p. 2). His ‘unmasking Africana’ methodology similarly “requires the artist to appropriate motifs from British artworks which embody African identities not through any overt visual imagery, but through their non-visual iconography” (2016, p. 3). He likens this to Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘oppositional decoding’ (1973), which argues that the ‘decoders’ understand, but reject the presiding narratives placed onto objects by the ‘encoders’ or elite. As Hall continues the degre of ‘understanding’ and ‘misunderstanding’ is reliant on the similarities and differences between the so-called ‘encoder-producer’ and ‘decoder-receiver’, ‘misunderstandings’ arising “precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange” (1973, p. 4). Donkor’s depiction of Yaa Asantewaa is representative of these methodologies, her poseSargent and Gautreau were both complicit and engaged with “an ideology of whiteness which holds racial purity, the colour of Gautreau’s dress significantly contrasting and accentuating the paleness of her skin”. Gautreau in particular came from a prominent slave-holding and plantation-owning family in Louisiana, and so her wealth and social position were largely accumulated through her family’s “exploitation and oppression of enslaved African people in the deep south of the United States” (Donkor, 2025). Figures 5 and 6 show Donkor’s response to Madame X: two ‘twin’ paintings titled Yaa Asantewaa Inspecting the Disposition at Ejisu (produced in 2012 and 2014 respectively), depicting the Ejisu Queen Mother and Ashanti commander-in-chief Yaa Asantewaa. These stemmed from a body of work beginning in 2009, called Queens of the Undead—and have also featured in his doctoral thesis Africana Unmasked: fugitive signs of Africa in Tate’s British collection (2015). For this he followed a three-part artistic methodology, detailing that his new works must represent historic female African and Diaspora military leaders; represent contemporary African women posing as these leaders, and “appropriate recognisable motifs from canonical, western artworks which were made by artists who were, themselves, contemporaries to the female African commanders” (Donkor, 2016, p. 2).

His ‘unmasking Africana’ methodology similarly “requires the artist to appropriate motifs from British artworks which embody African identities not through any overt visual imagery, but through their non-visual iconography” (2016, p. 3). He likens this to Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘oppositional decoding’ (1973), which argues that the ‘decoders’ understand, but reject the presiding narratives placed onto objects by the ‘encoders’ or elite. As Hall continues the degree of ‘understanding’ and ‘misunderstanding’ is reliant on the similarities and differences between the so-called ‘encoder-producer’ and ‘decoder-receiver’, ‘misunderstandings’ arising “precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange” (1973, p. 4). Donkor depiction of Yaa Asantewaa is representative of these methodologies, her pose distinctly symbolic of Gautreau’s, but otherwise illustrative of her Ashanti/Ghanaian identity, Donkor employing specific motifs such as her “Ashanti toga, rich skin complexion, [and] her close shaven hairstyle”, as well as her “symbolic attributes as a military commander—in that she carries a firearm” (Donkor, 2016, p. 2). As he discusses: “There is a direct comparison between the royal lineage of Yaa Asantewaa in my painting and the sort of confederate aristocracy of which Virginie Gautreau was a part. I suppose that was a way of, if you like, somehow trying to answer back, to speak to this art history of the West from the position of being an artist of now and of African heritage. You could call it a form of critique, but also a form [and] celebration of Black agency and sort of Black selfhood” (Donkor, 2025). This case study of Madame X has worked to question the hierarchy between the ‘producer’ and ‘receiver’, and disrupt the broad historical narratives which are often applied by museums: “using objects to exemplify rather than challenge existing historical interpretations” (Bide, 2017, p. 468). The Tate’s fashion-based interpretation, and Donkor’s exploration of Madame X in relation to African and Diaspora history, ultimately negates the self-importance of Jones’ art-historical view of Sargent’s artistic genius.

CONCLUSION

A successful exhibition should be thought-provoking, and whilst Tate Britain’s Sargent and Fashion was not as wide-reaching as it could have been, it did spark a lot of conversation. This was in part achieved through the layout of the exhibition space, which saw the thoughtful sourcing and pairing of fashion objects with Sargent’s paintings—the two working together to enhance our understanding of the intricate craftwork that went into the dress; Sargent’s artistic skill in representing this, and also the historical meanings they implied. As de la Haye (2024) commented, this was a “stunning and intelligent” exhibition which explored Sargent’s paintings in a “fascinating new context”, emphasising and targeting these details towards an audience interested in a specific fashion-based interpretation of his work. This was also due to the tension between art and fashion studies that has reemerged as a result, situated around the historical perception of fashion’s secondary position to art, running contrary to the rising field of fashion studies which has been advancing since the twentieth century. As explored in ‘Interpreting Madame X’, this highlights the issue of whose authority matters, for example, who gets to give or imbue meaning onto artworks, and which areas of emphasis matter. For Jones the art alone matters, and his article represents a viewpoint built on out-dated elitism and misogyny. Alternatively, Donkor brings in his own perspective, relating Sargent’s work to his own Ghanaian heritage, allowing us to question the stability of history as having one dominant (or more loudly pronounced) narrative. The fashion framing of art practice, in this case the Sargent and Fashion exhibition, is not intended to totalise audience reactions to the work, neither is this a possibility even if it were, but it is rather about engaging an audience and activating a particular mode of interpretation. The mixed reaction to Sargent and Fashion, whilst reflecting some tension between art and fashion studies, has ultimately opened up the possibilities when narrating an object’s history.

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