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Dance and Fashion
Dress and adornment have long played an important role in the visual allure of dance, and fashion designers have often been inspired by the way dancers look. The tutus and pointe shoes of the Romantic ballerina, for example, have influenced designers from Christian Dior to Christian Louboutin. Cristóbal Balenciaga was inspired by the drama of flamenco, Yves Saint Laurent by the Orientalism of the Ballet Russes, and Rick Owens by the dynamism of African-American steppers. Fashion designers are also increasingly collaborating with choreographers to create stylish new dance costumes—from the “bump” dresses by Comme des Garçons for Merce Cunningham to Valentino’s “Bal de Couture” designs for New York City Ballet.
Lavishly illustrated with both contemporary and historical images, the book features essays by ten fashion experts, who explore various aspects of the reciprocal relationship between dance and fashion, from the liberating effects of the tango to the influence of ballet on Japanese girl culture. Designers featured include Leon Bakst, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Comme des Garçons, Christian Dior, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Halston, Barbara Karinka, Isaac Mizrahi, Rodarte, Yves Saint Laurent, Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy, Valentino, and Iris Van Herpen.
This beautiful book explores for the first time the synergy between dance and fashion, and is an original and inspired contribution to the study of both art forms.
Lavishly illustrated with both contemporary and historical images, the book features essays by ten fashion experts, who explore various aspects of the reciprocal relationship between dance and fashion, from the liberating effects of the tango to the influence of ballet on Japanese girl culture. Designers featured include Leon Bakst, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Comme des Garçons, Christian Dior, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Halston, Barbara Karinka, Isaac Mizrahi, Rodarte, Yves Saint Laurent, Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy, Valentino, and Iris Van Herpen.
This beautiful book explores for the first time the synergy between dance and fashion, and is an original and inspired contribution to the study of both art forms.
- GenresFashionNonfiction
368 pages, Hardcover
First published November 28, 2014
2 people are currently reading
109 people want to read
About the author
Valerie Steele
144 books151 followersValerie Steele is director and chief curator and Melissa Marra is associate curator of education and public programs, both at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 21, 2022
I thought this would be a pretty coffee table history book with pictures of ballerinas in beautiful costumes but it is actually a collection of articles. It was very jstor “in this essay I will” academic articles about the body as a phallus and liminal femininity and whatnot. I haven’t used this side of my brain in so long. I had so much fun and learned lots of history and had much to think about.
I wanted to read this because the outfits have been my main motivation to do ballet all my life (yes I love rigidity and systems and variation and discipline but it’s all secondary to feeling so cute in my little outfit). Literally when I was a toddler I would be like I will do anything that involves a leotard whether that’s ballet gymnastics tightrope walker, I need to be doing anything that lets me wear THAT.
The title is misleading because so many of the essays focus primarily on Ballet. It should’ve been called Ballet and Fashion with occasional mentions of other styles. There was one piece on the tango, and one piece on black dance/performance history (which still featured ballet prominently). If it were really about dance and fashion there would be much more diversity. Some might write off the whole book for this fact but lucky for them I love ballet and was learning a ton about ballet history. I'm sure a dance major already knows all this stuff and it's too eurocentric etc etc. I think they should’ve changed the title given it feeds into the harmful idea that Ballet is the basis of all dance, but as for the content I had a great time.
Even though I know the names, ie Balanchine Merce Cunningham Martha Graham Anna Pavlova Margot Fonteyn, I really do not know much about dance history. For someone who grew up dancing my academic dance education is dismal! I don’t know anything about performance theory. I already knew a fair amount about Josephine Baker bc she’s an icon. I loved reading about Dora Dean. I wish I could see all these people perform irl. Another one of those books where it takes double the length to read because you have to go down several wikipedia holes and watch a ton of YouTube videos.
These essays taught me about Russia, France, Japan, and the United State’s history with ballet, and therefore the way these country’s histories impacted ballet, but almost nothing on Italy. I don’t know anything about the history of ballet in Italy, but I figure it must be pretty dang important bc it originated there & the Cecchetti method is so famous.
I always wondered why ballet dancers are so nonsexual when they’re bussing it open every two seconds yet the whole thing seems sexless to me. This is probably because I see etheriality and purity as higher or beyond sex, I hmm should think on that some more. Turns out everything to do with ballet is about sex anyway and always has been! But it’s also about Purity. Which is also about sex I suppose.
“The ballerina on pointe becomes, in effect, the phallus, as she stabs the ground with the toe of her stiff pink shoe, extends her smooth pink muscular legs, and raises her entire body, quivering with responsiveness, ever erect” (99, the passage is quoting another essay “the Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe” by Susan Leigh Foster).
There was an entire essay on the relationship between fetish wear and ballet. It makes so much sense! Discipline, restraint, pain in exchange for the high of being beautiful… omg…. I don’t do pointe anymore but I used to clean my room in pointe shoes and look at myself in the mirror and now I wear my pleasers and immediately feel transformed. This essay also brought up Lady GaGa’s latex ballerina outfit in Marry the Night, one of my favorite music videos ever!!!
This could’ve also been a history of the valorization of thinness for fashion and ballet, or at least how it’s gotten to this extreme. It’s wild that Anna Pavlova was considered too thin and gangly when today she wouldn’t make it in the corps on body type alone! It’s also only been the last 100 years or so. I couldn’t believe how the photos of all the dancers never showed muscles or bones, whereas now the ideal ballerina looks like an anatomy drawing with a bit of skin stretched over it. When did the Z shaped legs become so important? The average 12 year old at the vaganova school has backwards legs and banana feet and weighs 60 pounds and is 5’7. How did things get so extreme? It’s almost like selective breeding or something. I was discussing this with my friend who does irish dance, and she showed me how in the standard position your legs used to be crossed similar to ballet’s 5th position, and now the standard is way way overcrossed. None of this can be safe for your bones! Regardless I’m always sad my knees aren’t backwards so I’ll never have the perfect line no matter how hard I work because I simply wasn’t born with that skeleton.
“Volynsky believed that when “clothed in tights… the smoothed out leg assembles itself into a compact, artistically working unit.” More bluntly, he stated that “roughness disappears; the flabby parts are stretched and are distributed harmoniously; individual isolated defects, such as redness and even-horror of horrors – the body's hairiness – vanish” he concluded that in silk tights, “the leg acquires its fullest possible perfection. The magnificent works of Greek sculpture always represented the human form free of all blemishes, defects and peculiarities”. (115). This quote blew me, I had to take a pic of it and send it to my gf and think about it all day. We are all obsessed with bodies and looking at them, but we’re also repulsed and disgusted by them. With ballet tights, filters, greek statues, you can have the glorification of the body smoothed and perfect without any nasty stuff to remind you that you’re mortal! Obviously this smoothness and perfection goes hand in hand with femininity.
Maybe this is just because I pay more attention to ballet than contemporary dance, but when I looked up youtube clips during the course of reading this I was struck by how far ballet has come while contemporary dance all looks the same to me. It's counterintuitive because modern or contemporary dance theoretically has no limit for creativity and innovation while ballet is so rigid and traditional. But idk, I watched a clip of Hexentanz performed by Mary Wigman in the 1920s and this dance from 100 years ago looked just like the things I would see at dance shows at Oberlin lol. Sorry this is probably offensive to contemporary dancers. I have an untrained eye because I’m not as interested in that kind of dance so take that with a grain of salt. Anyway, ballet today has out of control precision and physical standards that show little resemblance to photos from the 1920s. 1920s legs don’t even look straight to my 2022 eyes! When they technically are straight, but I'm used to seeing Xavier Renegade Angel legs as the ideal.
My sister works for an asian theater company. We were asking her what that entails when they choose the shows they will put on– does that mean the playwright has to be asian? That the stories depicted focus primarily on asian characters/issues? She said mostly yes, but they also will take older shows and re-do them. My gf asked how that works, if they don’t change the music or script as it is originally written, do they just hire an asian cast and call it a day? She told us about a recent production of a famous musical and how they used the costumes and set to completely recontextualize the show and the mythology and magic depicted, even with all the lyrics and words remaining the same. I thought about this when reading about Dance Theater of Harlem’s production of Giselle, the most white (literally the color white) ballet. Costumes have so much power to completely change the way the story is interpreted, even if the script music and/or choreography are traditional.
I was losing steam by the time I got to the final essay, on the relationship between Japanese fashion and ballet. The essay mentioned Princess TuTu. I wished it mentioned Perfect Blue, because that movie has ballet inspired aesthetics and was the inspiration for Black Swan which is mentioned a few times in earlier essays. I also wish Yuri on Ice had existed when this essay was written. I wish they had brought up Yumiko leotard’s influence on dancer style. I never considered the similarities between ballet and anime girl ideals of femininity. The earlier essays had a ton of information on the orientalism of early ballet, which was of course tied to the sexualization of the exotic. I’m sure someone could write another essay on orientalism and anime and ballet, given the way anime shares many visuals and feminine ideals with ballet.
Fragmentary thoughts:
So much dance is lost to history. Any visual art like a painting or sculpture can simply exist for 5oo years. Music can be notated in such a way that an orchestra can recreate it later (though of course the vast majority of melodies that ever existed are lost to time). But it’s so sad that performance and movement had no way to be captured! A photograph isn’t gonna cut it. I guess so many singing voices were never recorded either.
I always look at old workout books at work and they are all dressed in ballet clothes even though they are doing kickboxing or yoga or aerobics. I’m so glad ballet clothes are still ballet clothes and continually evolving. I would be so sad if people always wore normal workout attire to ballet.
What is the history of the Glitterfication of cheer and gymnastics? Old photos of gymnasts are not quite as human disco ball as they are today. I need an essay on the hyperfemininity on display in those sports. My theory that I just came up with on the spot is that because those sports give you such a muscular physique typically associated with masculine strength, glitter and sparkle become extremely important as an affirmation of femininity.
The white dresses in Revelations by Allvin Ailey and Daughters of the Dust, white dresses in Giselle and Les Sylphide, so much on the color white.
I’ve always enjoyed character class and wondered are these stemming from traditional folk dances or is it an idealized cultural heritage that never really existed? Same goes for the simple villager clothes that accompany character work. This book didn’t mention character dance in ballet at all and it’s a shame bc I’m very curious about that!
What does “Japan is a non-freudian country” mean??
I wanted to read this because the outfits have been my main motivation to do ballet all my life (yes I love rigidity and systems and variation and discipline but it’s all secondary to feeling so cute in my little outfit). Literally when I was a toddler I would be like I will do anything that involves a leotard whether that’s ballet gymnastics tightrope walker, I need to be doing anything that lets me wear THAT.
The title is misleading because so many of the essays focus primarily on Ballet. It should’ve been called Ballet and Fashion with occasional mentions of other styles. There was one piece on the tango, and one piece on black dance/performance history (which still featured ballet prominently). If it were really about dance and fashion there would be much more diversity. Some might write off the whole book for this fact but lucky for them I love ballet and was learning a ton about ballet history. I'm sure a dance major already knows all this stuff and it's too eurocentric etc etc. I think they should’ve changed the title given it feeds into the harmful idea that Ballet is the basis of all dance, but as for the content I had a great time.
Even though I know the names, ie Balanchine Merce Cunningham Martha Graham Anna Pavlova Margot Fonteyn, I really do not know much about dance history. For someone who grew up dancing my academic dance education is dismal! I don’t know anything about performance theory. I already knew a fair amount about Josephine Baker bc she’s an icon. I loved reading about Dora Dean. I wish I could see all these people perform irl. Another one of those books where it takes double the length to read because you have to go down several wikipedia holes and watch a ton of YouTube videos.
These essays taught me about Russia, France, Japan, and the United State’s history with ballet, and therefore the way these country’s histories impacted ballet, but almost nothing on Italy. I don’t know anything about the history of ballet in Italy, but I figure it must be pretty dang important bc it originated there & the Cecchetti method is so famous.
I always wondered why ballet dancers are so nonsexual when they’re bussing it open every two seconds yet the whole thing seems sexless to me. This is probably because I see etheriality and purity as higher or beyond sex, I hmm should think on that some more. Turns out everything to do with ballet is about sex anyway and always has been! But it’s also about Purity. Which is also about sex I suppose.
“The ballerina on pointe becomes, in effect, the phallus, as she stabs the ground with the toe of her stiff pink shoe, extends her smooth pink muscular legs, and raises her entire body, quivering with responsiveness, ever erect” (99, the passage is quoting another essay “the Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe” by Susan Leigh Foster).
There was an entire essay on the relationship between fetish wear and ballet. It makes so much sense! Discipline, restraint, pain in exchange for the high of being beautiful… omg…. I don’t do pointe anymore but I used to clean my room in pointe shoes and look at myself in the mirror and now I wear my pleasers and immediately feel transformed. This essay also brought up Lady GaGa’s latex ballerina outfit in Marry the Night, one of my favorite music videos ever!!!
This could’ve also been a history of the valorization of thinness for fashion and ballet, or at least how it’s gotten to this extreme. It’s wild that Anna Pavlova was considered too thin and gangly when today she wouldn’t make it in the corps on body type alone! It’s also only been the last 100 years or so. I couldn’t believe how the photos of all the dancers never showed muscles or bones, whereas now the ideal ballerina looks like an anatomy drawing with a bit of skin stretched over it. When did the Z shaped legs become so important? The average 12 year old at the vaganova school has backwards legs and banana feet and weighs 60 pounds and is 5’7. How did things get so extreme? It’s almost like selective breeding or something. I was discussing this with my friend who does irish dance, and she showed me how in the standard position your legs used to be crossed similar to ballet’s 5th position, and now the standard is way way overcrossed. None of this can be safe for your bones! Regardless I’m always sad my knees aren’t backwards so I’ll never have the perfect line no matter how hard I work because I simply wasn’t born with that skeleton.
“Volynsky believed that when “clothed in tights… the smoothed out leg assembles itself into a compact, artistically working unit.” More bluntly, he stated that “roughness disappears; the flabby parts are stretched and are distributed harmoniously; individual isolated defects, such as redness and even-horror of horrors – the body's hairiness – vanish” he concluded that in silk tights, “the leg acquires its fullest possible perfection. The magnificent works of Greek sculpture always represented the human form free of all blemishes, defects and peculiarities”. (115). This quote blew me, I had to take a pic of it and send it to my gf and think about it all day. We are all obsessed with bodies and looking at them, but we’re also repulsed and disgusted by them. With ballet tights, filters, greek statues, you can have the glorification of the body smoothed and perfect without any nasty stuff to remind you that you’re mortal! Obviously this smoothness and perfection goes hand in hand with femininity.
Maybe this is just because I pay more attention to ballet than contemporary dance, but when I looked up youtube clips during the course of reading this I was struck by how far ballet has come while contemporary dance all looks the same to me. It's counterintuitive because modern or contemporary dance theoretically has no limit for creativity and innovation while ballet is so rigid and traditional. But idk, I watched a clip of Hexentanz performed by Mary Wigman in the 1920s and this dance from 100 years ago looked just like the things I would see at dance shows at Oberlin lol. Sorry this is probably offensive to contemporary dancers. I have an untrained eye because I’m not as interested in that kind of dance so take that with a grain of salt. Anyway, ballet today has out of control precision and physical standards that show little resemblance to photos from the 1920s. 1920s legs don’t even look straight to my 2022 eyes! When they technically are straight, but I'm used to seeing Xavier Renegade Angel legs as the ideal.
My sister works for an asian theater company. We were asking her what that entails when they choose the shows they will put on– does that mean the playwright has to be asian? That the stories depicted focus primarily on asian characters/issues? She said mostly yes, but they also will take older shows and re-do them. My gf asked how that works, if they don’t change the music or script as it is originally written, do they just hire an asian cast and call it a day? She told us about a recent production of a famous musical and how they used the costumes and set to completely recontextualize the show and the mythology and magic depicted, even with all the lyrics and words remaining the same. I thought about this when reading about Dance Theater of Harlem’s production of Giselle, the most white (literally the color white) ballet. Costumes have so much power to completely change the way the story is interpreted, even if the script music and/or choreography are traditional.
I was losing steam by the time I got to the final essay, on the relationship between Japanese fashion and ballet. The essay mentioned Princess TuTu. I wished it mentioned Perfect Blue, because that movie has ballet inspired aesthetics and was the inspiration for Black Swan which is mentioned a few times in earlier essays. I also wish Yuri on Ice had existed when this essay was written. I wish they had brought up Yumiko leotard’s influence on dancer style. I never considered the similarities between ballet and anime girl ideals of femininity. The earlier essays had a ton of information on the orientalism of early ballet, which was of course tied to the sexualization of the exotic. I’m sure someone could write another essay on orientalism and anime and ballet, given the way anime shares many visuals and feminine ideals with ballet.
Fragmentary thoughts:
So much dance is lost to history. Any visual art like a painting or sculpture can simply exist for 5oo years. Music can be notated in such a way that an orchestra can recreate it later (though of course the vast majority of melodies that ever existed are lost to time). But it’s so sad that performance and movement had no way to be captured! A photograph isn’t gonna cut it. I guess so many singing voices were never recorded either.
I always look at old workout books at work and they are all dressed in ballet clothes even though they are doing kickboxing or yoga or aerobics. I’m so glad ballet clothes are still ballet clothes and continually evolving. I would be so sad if people always wore normal workout attire to ballet.
What is the history of the Glitterfication of cheer and gymnastics? Old photos of gymnasts are not quite as human disco ball as they are today. I need an essay on the hyperfemininity on display in those sports. My theory that I just came up with on the spot is that because those sports give you such a muscular physique typically associated with masculine strength, glitter and sparkle become extremely important as an affirmation of femininity.
The white dresses in Revelations by Allvin Ailey and Daughters of the Dust, white dresses in Giselle and Les Sylphide, so much on the color white.
I’ve always enjoyed character class and wondered are these stemming from traditional folk dances or is it an idealized cultural heritage that never really existed? Same goes for the simple villager clothes that accompany character work. This book didn’t mention character dance in ballet at all and it’s a shame bc I’m very curious about that!
What does “Japan is a non-freudian country” mean??
September 30, 2019
This is a collection of essays on the relationships between dance and fashion. There are some interesting ideas and the collaborative spirit really impressed me. It is part history and theory. Not a bad read
September 6, 2015
This is one I discovered thanks to a friend on Facebook. It's not my usual sort of book, because it focuses on the relationship between capital-D Dance and capital-F Fashion. I didn't realize that when I saw the cover image, though upon reflection it's kind of obvious. The library was kind enough to get me this one via inter-library loan. It's a heavy volume, and not just in terms of subject matter. The photos are gorgeous, but the text was a little deep for me.
January 28, 2021
The book is really well researched and dives really deep. However it’s totally focused on everything which has to do with ballet. I mean, I have nothing haunts ballet, but if you call the book lavishly “Dance and Fashion”, one would expect how those two relate to each other in all other aspects and genres and geographic origins, not having this solely focused on ballet.
Great book, but doesn’t deliver in the premise.
Great book, but doesn’t deliver in the premise.
October 4, 2018
I did not like this book at all. I thought that this book was going to be full of awesome dance costumes and I didn't understand this at all. Some of the book had runway fashion. It all just seemed like a hot mess. I was expecting and wanting something different.
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May 8, 2015793.3 D174 2014
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews