Ethnic MinimalismIt is perhaps appropriate that in London Liberty is Shirin’s major retail
outlet: the store has consistently championed and supported original British
clothing and fashion talents. Established as an emporium selling Japanese,
Persian, Chinese and Indian textiles and household artefacts, Liberty was
opened in Regent Street in 1875. From the outset the store attracted a
progressive, literary and artistic clientele. Serving their unconventional
predilections in dress it offered – alongside ultra-fashionable ‘Gowns of the
New Season’ – ‘Gowns Never Out of Style’ – generally in the uncorseted,
flowing medieval and classical styles favoured by the Aesthetes and Pre-
Raphaelites. Whilst Shirin Guild also deviates from high-fashion trends,
extolling comfort, the use of natural fibres and hand-crafted techniques, the
cut of her work has more in common with the unconventional styles of dress
reform.
The dress reform movement has been traced back to the late eighteenth
century when it was associated with the political ideals of the French
Revolution.^2 From this period through to the early twentieth century,
organized debate focused upon trousered dress for women. Advocated on
utilitarian grounds and for minimizing gender and class differences, bifurcated
garments were appropriated by various communities of utopian socialists in
Britain and America during the early nineteenth century.
By the 1850s the ideals of dress reform attracted public attention through
the activities of Mrs Dexter C. Bloomer of New York. An active campaigner
for women’s emancipation, she devised and wore a style of dress that was to
assume her name, “the bloomer”. Rejecting fashionable full-skirted gowns,
supported by cumbersome layers of heavy petticoats, she wore a loose knee-
length tunic over baggy trousers that were gathered at the ankles. As Stella
Mary Newton pointed out in her standard work Health Art & Reason, Mrs
Bloomer was undoubtedly inspired by the engravings depicting seductive
Turkish beauties, that were in vogue following the cult of Byron and the
French conquest of Algeria.^3 More than a century later, Shirin Guild extols
the functionality and aesthetic appeal of similarly cut ‘Kurdish’ style pants.
Although short lived (Amelia Bloomer abandoned the style following the
introduction of the lightweight cage-frame crinoline) and very rarely worn,
trousered dress for women prompted much debate about the unhygienic,
irrational and ephemeral nature of women’s high fashion, issues that were
also to arouse concern within the medical profession. Under the umbrella of
the International Health Exhibition, held in London in 1884, the ideals of
- Wilson, Elizabeth and Taylor, Lou, Through the Looking Glass, London: BBC Books,
1989, p. 28. - Newton, Stella Mary, Health, Art and Reason, London: John Murray, 1974, p.117.