Faux Nudes: Body Stockings and Photography at the fin de siècle

Abstract

The visual culture of the female nude in Western art, after decades of attention, possesses a considerable genealogy of critical scholarship. The photographic imagery of women’s bodies occupies a significant place in this legacy, yet there are areas of inquiry that have to date remained little examined. In this article I consider a small and eccentric group of images, made by commercial photographers for popular consumption, posed by the American socialite Clara Ward around the turn of the twentieth century, as a case study of faux nudes – studio photographs in which models were encased in semitransparent body stockings, thus generalising, protecting and idealising the female body in its representation. If nudity is – ideally – an absolute state, it is nevertheless culturally complex in its various guises. The faux nudity constructed in these glamorous photographs was an invention of modern technology made possible by advances in commercial textile production as well as photography, as the stockinet body stocking provided a fiction of marmoreal whiteness further enhanced by being rendered in monochrome, and then widely distributed through cabinet prints and postcards. Around 1900 such artefacts further mystified the woman’s body in visual culture, producing a fantasy woman for modern times.