‘The Artistic Aspect of Dress’: The Story of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union

Abstract

This article presents a short biography of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, a dress reform society formed in 1890 with the aim of ‘teaching both men and women how to discriminate by choosing and rejecting, and so gradually moulding the exigencies of our climate and situation, the claims of artistic arrangement of drapery, and harmony of colour’. It presents a new account of the group that goes beyond previous discussions, which have been solely gleaned from the group's journal Aglaia. A brief history of the organization under the leadership of artists such as Henry Holiday, Walter Crane and G. F. Watts will precede an examination of their 1896 Exhibition of Living Pictures, and a discussion of their educational journal Aglaia and its later iteration The Dress Review, illustrating the creative production and philosophy of Artistic Dress from this later period in its history.