Record 42086 (2020)

This record provides information on white women combining creole culture and dress of the enslaved in ways that suppressed the enslaved Afro-Caribbean women's experiences.

The white women who wore neoclassical dress in the 1790s were thus attempting to yoke together diverse discourses. On one level, they fashioned themselves as statues in order to claim the inheritance of classicism and embody a truly aesthetic life in which they had creative agency and subjective freedom. Yet by layering over these ideas the elements of slave fashion and Creole culture, women were both evoking the dangerous, sexualised glamour of the West Indies, and insisting on their own whiteness and freedom by contrast with the abjection of slavery.

Source: Amelia Faye Rauser, The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2020., p.152