16th May 1823 saw the death in France of Grace Elliott, the renowned Scottish society beauty and courtesan who witnessed at first hand the French Revolution.
Born in Edinburgh in 1754, Grace Dalrymple Elliott became one of the most sought after women in Europe.
Educated in a French convent, her barrister father Hew Dalrymple later introduced her to Edinburgh society where she received numerous marriage proposals. Grace, however, fearless, beautiful and wild, was to reject tradition.
Unhappily married and then divorced, she went on to have affairs with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Orleans, later known as Philippe Egalité.
She lived a scandalous and remarkable life, maintaining dangerous alliances and surviving treachery and betrayal.
Her memoir, an eyewitness account of the Revolution, recounts a time of turbulent politics, dark days and lethal enemies during an infamous time in history, which she witnessed while living in Paris.
Entertaining her relationship with the Duke of Orleans, Grace had unprecedented access to the highest ranks of court life, which she vividly recounts. After her arrival in Paris she was forced to escape violent Revolutionists and the Mob to stay in Meudon, where she was at the mercy of domestic spies and harboured a wanted man.
Unable to fleehome, she was then imprisoned and became gravely ill.
Although many of her friends met their deaths, including Madame du Barry, Grace only narrowly escaped the guillotine herself. She narrowly avoided death and was released after the Reign of Terror came to an end, not before she had been confined in a total to four different prisons by the Republican government. In later years, there were rumours that she had an attachment with Napoleon Bonaparte, but had rejected his offer of marriage. She died a wealthy woman at Ville d'Avray, in present-day Hauts-de-Seine, in May 1823, while a lodger with the commune’s mayor. Her memoirs were published in 1859.
“This exhibition will present the kimono as a dynamic and constantly evolving icon of fashion, revealing the sartorial, aesthetic and social significance of the garment from the 1660s to the present day, both in Japan and the rest of the world.”
Earlier this year I completed a project for this exhibition, making eleven “wigs” for the fibreglass mannequin heads in hairstyles to represent different periods in Japanese history.
(Image credit: Rachael Lee, Textile Conservation Display Specialist in the Textile Conservation Department at the V&A)
The wigs for this exhibition were intended to be abstract and an impression of the silhouette, rather than incredibly detailed, so as not to distract too much from the costume displayed on the mannequins. When wigs are requested for mannequins, they are often made in house at the museum by the Textiles Conservation and Mounting Department, but due to restrictions on time they were outsourced on this occasion. I was involved in a similar project for another V&A exhibition back in 2018, “Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up”, which involved making three headdresses constructed from paper flowers. One of my previous blog posts details the making of these.
The wigs for the Kimonos exhibition were to be made from milliners crinoline, or “crin” for short, which in its nature is really springy and easy to make into voluminous shapes. Crin is an extremely versatile fabric that can be used for millinery, craft and haberdashery as well as fashion and dressmaking. The intention was to form shapes by manipulating it and stitching it together, then attaching these pieces to a Rigiline frame which would sit on the head of the mannequins. Rigilene is a type of boning made of woven nylon rods and can be stitched directly to fabric, without a casing.
“One of the challenges we regularly encounter when displaying head wear is how to achieve a good fit with proper support when headdresses are designed to be worn upon elaborate hair styles. The solution to this quandary would appear easy enough; give heads hair. This seemingly straight forward answer was not as easy to apply as one might think largely due to exhibition designers and curators desire to display objects on non-realistic, abstract mannequin forms. This current trend is considered least distracting to the audience’s appreciation of the costume itself.”
My contact at the museum was Rachael Lee, a Textile Conservation Display Specialist in the Textile Conservation Department, who had been working for many months displaying numerous kimonos for the exhibition. She and some of her colleagues had already worked on a couple of protoypes of the wigs that were sent to me to get an idea of the forms they wanted. I was however told that I was to have creative control over the wigs and to have fun with them!
For the eleven wigs that they wanted I was supplied with reference images to work from.
The wigs were to be built on to Rigilene frames. I first measured the circumference of the fibreglass head at approximately the point where I wanted the hairline of the wigs to sit. I left a bit of slack knowing that the frame would get packed out a bit when the crinoline layers were attached. I cut a strip of Rigilene that was overlong so that it could be overlapped and joined together to form a circle, I drilled a series of small holes through the overlapped pieces and then stitched through them to hold the loop together. A second piece of Rigilene was then cut to span the top of the head, and it was joined to the first ring, slightly off centre, in same way using thread. Finally, a shorter piece was cut to tether the outer ring and the central bar together at the back.
As the Rigilene was quite springy, initially I temporarily joined the overlapped pieces using a dab of superglue and held them in place with a bulldog clip whilst it set. This then helped as the two pieces of Rigilene were set in place and held together for me to drill the holes using my Dremel. This process was reproduced a number of times to give me enough frames to experiment with and work from.
As I was working remotely from home, I sent many images of the wigs at various points in their construction to Rachael Lee, who in turn showed them to the curators who gave me feedback during the making process. I had never worked with either Rigilene or crin before so it was a learning curve, manipulating the crin into different shapes and forms to make the 2D images I had into three dimensional forms was a fun challenge!
Further blog posts are to follow in the coming days about the steps I took to create these flamboyant wigs, from the subdued “Gibson Girl” through to the elaborate “Courtesan” with some more modern “Memoirs of a Geisha” characters thrown in I feel I have learnt a lot about Japanese hairstyles along the way!
“When we too are armed and trained, we can convince men that we have hands, feet, and a heart like yours; and although we may be delicate and soft, some men who are delicate are also strong; and others, coarse and harsh, are cowards. Women have not yet realized this, for if they should decide to do so, they would be able to fight you until death; and to prove that I speak the truth, amongst so many women, I will be the first to act, setting an example for them to follow.”
After driving pirates from the Stepstones in the late first century, the Triarchy became gradually greedier with their tolls for passage, with the Lyseni captains even taking women, girls, and comely boys to turn into bedslaves. When fifteen years old, Johanna Swann was thus enslaved, and her parsimonious uncle Lord Swann refused to pay the ransom. Johanna became a celebrated courtesan known as the Black Swan, and was eventually ruler of Lys in all but name (x).
“Infatuated with herself, always classically draped, her magnificent hair her only coiffure, she was strange in her personality and her ways. She would appear at gatherings like a goddess descending from the clouds. At her request, her husband would lead her to a quiet corner of the room where she would allow people to admire her as if she were a shrine; absent amid the crowd, she would meet with glacial calm the indiscreet stares of her admirers (…)”
General Fleury on Virginia Oldoini, Countess di Castiglione
‘Snow scene of a courtesan holding an umbrella being ferried across the Sumida River by a porter’. Printmaker (after): Utagawa Kunisada (Japanese, 1786-1864)
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