Journal des dames et des modes, editie Frankfurt 6 octobre 1806, Costume Parisien (41): Costume d'une Jeune Dame à la Campagne 1806

Curator: What strikes me is the absolute *flatness* of the figure against that sketchy backdrop. It’s almost as if she's been pasted there, a paper doll lost in a landscape of watercolour dreams. Editor: Indeed! This is "Journal des dames et des modes, edition Frankfurt 6 octobre 1806, Costume Parisien (41): Costume d'une Jeune Dame à la Campagne," created in 1806 by Friedrich Ludwig Neubauer. It’s currently held in the Rijksmuseum. The artwork combines drawing and watercolor. The title does make a big statement on materiality as we see a publication on women's fashion here and its impact on women and how they lived. Curator: Fashion... right, the *opposite* of flat. To be draped like that, to *perform* the drape! She is essentially her dress, a classical column on an outing. Though, given her clunky basket, maybe not an especially enthusiastic one. Editor: I'm thinking about what this basket *is*, its manufacture. The image isn't concerned with what's inside it at all; rather it spotlights the material. The raw goods probably traveled miles across imperial channels before women in a Paris workshop wove it together. And for *what*? The illustration would probably soon wind up tossed away in the refuse or recycled by printers. It underscores such material production happening beyond our view and, subsequently, is not thought about or respected in artistic renderings. Curator: Do you think the fashion here acts like...a visual claim to social elevation, this performance for the "journal"? Is it an act of defiance of rural authenticity even? I wonder if she is acting a caricature of sorts. Editor: Fashion is an explicit labor here; we see that. The model has, certainly, donned a material burden we often overlook as being immaterial to her persona. The colored pencil work further flattens the persona out; it strips detail in a wash of colors. The focus is, arguably, the materials here. Curator: Yes. Exactly. In the end, she becomes something of a silhouette—all those careful artistic details of dress and figure, distilled into a potent signifier of class aspiration, yet lost as if within the very materials of display and discard. The tragedy of fashion. Editor: We certainly can appreciate, here, what has outlived our fashion itself, even for it to inform our dialogue here!