Ingres in Fashion

Representations in Dress and Appearance in Ingres’s Images of Women

by Aileen Ribeiro

Yale University Press, 224 pp., $55

“Fashion in portraiture has been both a blessing and a curse,” Ribeiro writes in this engaging, thorough, and beautifully constructed book. With sentences like “what Madame Place wears over her gown is a large shoulder mantle called a pelerine, which had wide ends falling down the front, and which gives her a slightly ecclesiastical appearance,” Ingres in Fashion may only tempt readers interested in the history of dress or Ingres, but Ribeiro’s study, though rooted in specifics, speaks to broader themes. That much is evident by the first chapter, in which she quotes Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine’s Notes on Paris (1867): “A perfect toilette is equal to a poem. There is a taste, a choice in the placing and the shade of each satin ribbon, in the pink silks, in the soft silvered satin. … This is the only poetry left to us.”

This article appears in March 17 • 2000.

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