The final lecture by Professor Nead covers the quintessential traits of a fashionable young woman in the 19th Century: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/fashion-and-visual-culture-in-the-19th-century-the-girl-of-the-period

By the second half of the nineteenth century it was believed that respectable young women of the middle classes were imitating the styles and manners of the demi-monde and were thus blurring the necessary visual distinctions between the pure and the fallen. Respectable women had been seduced by the discourse around fashion and had lost their subtle purity and become brash and vulgar. In France, James Tissot painted a series of pictures entitled The Women of Paris, depicting fashionable women in a number of different locations and settings and in England the worrying habits of 'The Girl of the Period' became one of the most pressing issues for social columnists and correspondence in the press.

This lecture will examine the representation of these new types of fashionable women and the social implications of the visual confusion of respectable and non-respectable women in the public spaces of Paris and London.

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/fashion-and-visual-culture-in-the-19th-century-the-girl-of-the-period

Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 1,500 lectures free to access or download from the website.
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