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34 ORNAMENT 36.2.2012 NANA by Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883); 150 x 116 centimeters, 1877. Collection: Hamburger Kunsthalle. which the other half is the eternal and the immutable." The Impressionists embraced contemporary fashion in all its transience. Many paintings and portraits of the period depict women lightly touching their gloves, ribbons and other ornaments, thus drawing attention to these ephemeral accessories. While an exhibition on this scale is unprecedented, fashion as portrayed by the Impressionists has been the subject of several scholarly studies, notably by Ruth Iskin, Marie Simon and Anne Hollander. (The exhibition and its handsome catalog owe a debt to all three authors.) The Frick Collection's 2003 show "Whistler, Women, and Fashion" tackled the same period in a similar manner, comparing portraits with surviving garments and ephemera. But "Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity" attempts to further our knowledge of artistic practice as well as stylistic evolution. "Like everything, it started from asking a question and not being able to answer it," says Groom. "I was looking at a Monet painting, and I was interested in how an artist like Monet could afford to dress his girlfriend and model in a gown that was absolutely à la mode at a time when they were very poor. Historians know what was in fashion at any given time, but the artist's access to fashion, his relationship to fashion, is something that not everyone knows about or has even thought about." Rather than portraits, for which sitters generally chose their best clothes, Groom was interested in how artists fashioned their own models. Many used studio props, or rented garments far beyond what the sitter (or artist) could afford to purchase. (Although secondhand shops existed, Impressionists preferred to paint up-tothe-minute fashions). Alternatively, models wore their own clothes. Most of the iconic images on display in the exhibition are not portraits but scenes of modern life that were actually staged in artists' studios, using anonymous models. Manet's Young Lady in 1866, for example, is an allegory of the five senses depicting an intimate garment incongruously worn in an obvious studio setting. Freed from the need to flatter their subjects or stick to a scale appropriate to the sitter's social status, the Impressionists could create intimate psychological portraits. Their models' clothes defy easy categorization, "subverting traditional codes of legibility," in Groom's phrase. Against these plain, anonymous, oversized backgrounds, costume is the only clue to the sitter's identity and status, and it often raises more questions than it answers. Indeed, women had to be extremely careful about the messages their clothes communicated, on and off canvas. In the exhibition catalog, art historian Justine De Young argues that "while dress has been linked to character and social status in popular discourse since the Renaissance," the idea that fashion reflected—and affected—one's morality "was pervasive in the 1860s." Art critics, fashion magazines and etiquette manuals alike reinforced this. If the bourgeois woman, in particular, was perceived as being preoccupied with fashion, it may have been because "not merely her appearance but also her reputation was at stake." Unfashionable dress "risked charges of intellectualism," while dressing too fashionably could brand one as a demimondaine. Of course, the demimonde is well represented here, too. In her catalog essay, Valerie Steele—author of The Corset: A Cultural History—tackles the most famous corset in art, the blue satin number worn by Manet's Nana. Actress Henriette Hauser modeled for the painting of Zola's literary anti-heroine, an ambitious courtesan. The shock of colored, luxurious underwear, worn by a famous (if fictional) demimondaine was too much for the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts; the painting, submitted to the 1877 Salon, was rejected and deemed an "outrage to morality." "The satin corset may be the nude of our era," Manet suggested. By the Gay Nineties, colored, embellished underwear would be the norm; in 1877, however, it was still considered risqué. "The proper and virtuous woman wears a white satin corset, never a colored