Medium: Black silk velvet

Date: c. 1895

Country: France

Credit: Museum purchase

This two-piecedress is a magnificent example of the haute couture in fin-de-siècle France. The New Eve envisioned by certain Decadents might have worn a dress like this, with its pattern of apples in black cut velvet. The iconography of forbidden fruit project suggests that Woman is a sinfully expensive and desirable object, and projects an image of the fashionable woman as externalized surface without organic interiority. Like the dandy, the fashionable woman was a creature outside nature and beyond gender.

Object Number: 2005.9.1