Bohemian style

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Young Bohmienne: Natalie Clifford Barney (1875-1972) at the age of 10 (painting by Carolus-Duran)

Main article: Bohemianism In modern usage, the term "Bohemian" is applied to people who live unconventional, usually artistic, lives. The adherents of the "Bloomsbury Group", which formed around the Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf in the early 20th century, are among the best-known examples. The original "Bohemians" were travelers or refugees from central Europe (hence, the French bohmien, for "gypsy"). Reflecting on the fashion style of "boho-chic" in the early years of the 21st century, the Sunday Times thought it ironic that "fashionable girls wore ruffly floral skirts in the hope of looking bohemian, nomadic, spirited and non-bourgeois", whereas "gypsy girls themselves ... are sexy and delightful precisely because they do not give a hoot for fashion".[1] By contrast, in the late 19th century and first half of the 20th, aspects of Bohemian fashion reflected the lifestyle itself.
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1 Pre-Raphaelites 1.1 Jane Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and preRaphaelite traits 1.2 Early flower power: Effie Millais 2 Early 20th century 2.1 Rational dress 2.2 The "Dorelia" look 2.3 Bobbed hair and cross-gender styles 3 Post-Liberation Paris 3.1 The "New Look" 3.2 Rive Gauche 3.2.1 Juliette Grco 3.3 Saint-Germain in retrospect 4 America: the beat generation and flower power 4.1 Greenwich Village and West Coast 4.2 Hippiedom and the Pre-Raphaelites 5 London in the 1950s 5.1 Continental influences 6 Hamburg and Beatlemania 7 Swinging London 7.1 Victorian imagery 7.2 Woman in the late 1960s and early 1970s 8 Since the 1960s: hippie/boho-chic 9 Notes

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Pre-Raphaelites

Jane Morris painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Proserpine (1874)

In 1848 William Makepeace Thackeray used the word bohemianism in his novel Vanity Fair. In 1862, the Westminster Review described a Bohemian as "simply an artist or littrateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art". During the 1860s the term was associated in particular with the pre-Raphaelite movement, the group of artists and aesthetes of which Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the most prominent:[2] As the 1860s progressed, Rossetti would become the grand prince of bohemianism as his deviations from normal standards became more audacious. And as he became this epitome of the unconventional, his egocentric demands necessarily required his close friends to remodel their own lives around him. His bohemianism was like a web in which others became trapped none more so than William and Jane Morris.[3] [edit]

Jane Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and preRaphaelite traits

Jane Morris, who was to become Rossetti's muse, epitomised, probably more than any of the women associated with the pre-Raphaelites, an unrestricted, flowing style of dress that, while unconventional at the time, would be highly influential at certain periods during the 20th century.[4] She

and others, including the much less outlandish Georgiana Burne-Jones (wife of Edward Burne-Jones,[5] one of the later pre-Raphaelites), eschewed the corsets and crinolines of the mid-to-late Victorian era,[6] a feature that impressed the American writer Henry James when he wrote to his sister in 1869 of the bohemian atmosphere of the Morrises house in the Bloomsbury district of London and, in particular, the dark silent medieval presence of its chateleine: Its hard to say whether shes a grand synthesis of all the pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made whether shes an original or a copy. In either case shes a wonder. Imagine a tall lean woman in a long dress of some dead purple stuff, guiltless of hoops (or of anything else I should say) with a mass of crisp black hair heaped into great wavy projections on each of her temples a long neck, without any collar, and in lieu thereof some dozen strings of outlandish beads.[7] In his play Pygmalion (1912) Bernard Shaw unmistakably based the part of Mrs. Higgins on the then elderly Jane Morris. Describing Mrs. Higgins' drawing room, he referred to a portrait of her "when she defied the fashion of her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular estheticism [sic] in the eighteen-seventies".[8] A biographer of Edward Burne-Jones, writing a century after Shaw (Fiona MacCarthy, 2011), has noted that, in 1964, when the influential Biba store was opened in London by Barbara Hulanicki, the "long drooping structureless clothes", though sexier than the dresses portrayed in such Burne-Jones paintings as The Golden Stairs or The Sirens, nevertheless resembled them.[9] The interior of Biba has been described by the biographer of British 20th century designer Laura Ashley as having an atmosphere that "reeked of sex ... [It] was designed to look like a bordello with its scarlet, black and gold plush fitments, but, interestingly, it implied an old-fashioned, Edwardian style of forbidden sex with its feather boas, potted palms, bentwood coat racks and dark lighting"[10] MacCarthy observed also that "the androgynous appearance of Burne-Jones's male

figures reflected the sexually ambivalent feeling" of the late 1960s.[11] [edit]

Early flower power: Effie Millais

Effie Gray, whose marriage to John Ruskin was annulled in 1854 prior to her marrying the pre-Raphaelite painter John Millais, is known to have used flowers as an adornment and probably also as an assertive "statement". While in Scotland with Ruskin (still her husband) and Millais, she gathered foxgloves to place in her hair. She wore them at breakfast despite being asked by her husband not to do so, a gesture of defiance, at a time of growing crisis in their relationship, that came to the critical notice of Florence Nightingale[12] (who tended to regard others of her sex with "scarcely concealed scorn" and was generally unsympathetic to "women's rights"[13]). In 1853 Millais painted Effie with Foxgloves which depicts her wearing the flowers while doing needlework. Other paintings of the mid-to-late 19th century, such as Frederick Sandys' Love's Shadow (1867) of a girl with a rose in her hair, sucking a sprig of blossom, which was described in 1970 as "a first rate PR job for the Flower People",[14] and Burne-Jones' The Heart of the Rose (1889),[15] have been cited as foreshadowing the "flower power" of the mid-to-late 1960s.