I recently visited an exhibition considering the importance of clothes and costume in the portraits of John Singer Sargent. (‘Sargent and Fashion’ is at the Tate Britain, London until 7 July.)

The show is a celebration of sensuous silks and satins; of long buttoned bodices and pleated organza skirts; of Chesterfield coats, velvet jackets and crimson dressing gowns. Sargent captures the play of light and shadow across garments, their undulating creases and folds. He revels in the detail of a black tulle dress, a scarlet cape and a mauve sash; the elegance of a Chantilly fan, an antique lace collar and a Kashmiri shawl.

The exhibition prompts us to reflect on the coded language of fashion, the semiotics of style.

Sargent was born to American parents in Florence in 1856. As a child he lived in several European countries, before training and establishing his artistic reputation in Paris.

In 1882 Sargent was so taken with fellow American-in-Paris, the beautiful Virginie Gautreau, that he convinced her to pose for a life-size portrait without a commission. He presented her in a long black evening gown with a plunging neckline, her arms and neck bare, her face turned to one side in a classical pose – and with one of the jewelled dress straps slipping from her shoulder.

French society was scandalised by the ‘indecency,’ and both Sargent and his sitter were stung by the criticism. The artist repainted the strap in an upright position and left Paris soon afterwards. He kept the painting, subsequently called ‘Madame X’, until after Gautreau’s death.

‘I suppose it is the best thing I have done.’

John Singer Sargent - Madame X (with a vintage photo of the original portrait)

In 1886 Sargent settled in London, joining a social circle of actors, artists, composers and writers. His studio on Tite Street in Chelsea had previously been home to the painter James McNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde lived opposite.

Although Sargent painted a number of British aristocrats, for the most part his clientele was international new money. Their wealth derived from finance, commerce and industry, and they were set on securing social status – by buying grand houses and estates; by keeping the right company, hosting magnificent parties and making appropriate marriages. The clothes they wore and the portraits they commissioned all contributed to the process of assimilation. A striking portrait would attract large crowds at exhibition. It would be much discussed and broadly reproduced. And a full-length Sargent could cost around $120,000 in today’s money. The exhibition curators term this phenomenon the ‘economy of images’.

Almost half of Sargent’s female sitters wore black gowns. While black retained its association with mourning, in the late 19th century it became fashionable for women of all ages, not least because new synthetic aniline dyes enabled an intense pure depth of colour. When, on a visit to his friend Claude Monet, Sargent discovered that there was no black paint to be found, he declared that he simply couldn’t work.

This period also saw the rise of haute couture. Name brands like Paquin or Doucet provided their clients with what novelist Edith Wharton described as ‘social armour.’ Many of Sargent’s sitters wore outfits from Charles Worth, an English designer who dominated Parisian fashion, and catered particularly to British and American customers. A Worth gown would cost between $10,000 and $30,000 today.

‘I have Delacroix’s sense of colour and I compose. A toilette [a complete ensemble, from the French word toile, cloth] is as good as a painting.'
Charles Worth

In the exhibition, Sargent’s work is displayed alongside examples of period fashion, including several original garments featured in his paintings. Although the artist claimed that ‘I only paint what I see,’ throughout the gallery we can observe where he has adjusted a strap here, removed a bow there. He clearly styled his sitters, pinning, draping, tucking and folding their gowns to create new shapes and textures. For his portrait of Lady Sassoon, he pinned her black silk taffeta opera cloak, so that the bright lining was more visible, creating a dramatic river of pink.

Foreshadowing today’s Instagram culture, one French critic noted, ‘there is now a class who dress after pictures, and when they buy a gown ask ‘will it paint?’’

Sargent was just as interested in painting fashionable men as women.

The surgeon Samuel Pozzi stands proud in a red dressing gown and Turkish slippers, one hand on heart and the other toying with the cord of his robe.

The debonair Lord Ribblesdale looks rather superior in a long dark velvet-collared coat, buff breeches and polished black boots. Sporting grey kid gloves and a hunting whip, the elegant outfit is completed with a top hat and flamboyant silk muffler tied to one side. It was said of Ribblesdale that ‘he never stepped out of his picture frame.’

Sargent painted the young illustrator and designer W Graham Robertson holding a jade-topped walking stick and wearing a long, black wool Chesterfield overcoat. Robertson recalled that, during the sittings, the artist would ‘pull and drag the unfortunate coat more and more closely around me until it might have been draping a lamp-post.’ Sargent subsequently declared:

‘The coat is the picture.’

John Singer Sargent - W Graham Robertson

All in all, it’s a splendid exhibition, full of glamour, performance and personality.

Whilst marvelling at the flamboyance of the fashions featured in Sargent’s portraits, we may imagine that the sartorial codes and social values of late 19th century high society are a million miles away from our own. Surely we live in a more liberated, egalitarian world of informal attitudes and casualised style.

But clothes continue to signal something about our individual identity and sense of belonging.
In the first half of my career, I dressed casually for work. Until my clients donned trainers, chinos and Ralph Lauren Polo shirts. I promptly switched to city suits, keen to create some distance and differentiation. I was amused to learn that Sargent played a similar game. While painting his clientele in their elegant finery, he himself tended to wear a sober business suit.

On encountering the artist in 1899, the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt described him as ‘a rather good-looking fellow in a pot hat, whom at my first sight I took to be a superior mechanic.’

Whether we like it or not, we are constantly judging and being judged.

'When you wear your high-heeled boots with your hip-hugger suit,
It's all right, you're outta sight.
And you wear that cute mini-skirt with your brother's sloppy shirt,
I admit it, girl, that I can dig it.

When you wear your bell bottom pants,
I just stand there in a trance.
I can't move, you're in the groove.
Would you believe, little girl, that I am crazy about you?

When you wear those big earrings, long hair and things,
You got style, girl, that sure is wild.
And you wear that cute trench coat and you're standing and posing,
You got soul, you got too much soul.’

Brenton Wood, 'The Oogum Boogum Song’ (A Smith)

No. 474