From Bohéme to Boho chic: The Fashion Evolution of Bohemian counter-culture

By Elena Baltzoglou

By the eighteenth century, being part of the ‘beaux-arts’ was often a matter of class and classification. French artists tended to come from the middle class, sharing the aspirations of upward social mobility, typical of the bourgeoisie at the time. Eager to please and the desire to succeed, these artists were disciplined by the long-standing academic training under the auspices of the state of France and evaluated based on their response to patronage and prizes. Yet the new conditions of economic and social change following the French Revolution placed artists and intellectuals into poverty, forcing them to adopt a nomadic, minimalist lifestyle in the lower-rent neighborhoods of Paris, similar to that of the immigrant gypsies (or else Romani,) coming from the so-called ‘Bohemia,’ a region in Czech Republic.

In their most prevalent public perceptions, artists and gypsies shared a vagabond life in merry poverty. Renouncing wealth and social status for the pursuit of music, color, and relationships, they had different priorities than the dominant culture, provoking the disdain and envy of the French society. Based on the writer Arthur Bartlett Maurice, “Bohemia is less a region of definite situation and boundaries than a state of mind, a memory of youth and of the glamour of youth.”¹ In consequence, the term “bohemian” became indicative of a lifestyle rather than a nationality, and defined a person who lived in an artistic, anarchistic way, often in the company of like-minded people, placing freedom and self-expression above all other desires, including the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie.

Associated with unorthodox political and social viewpoints, their lives were carefree events filled with the arcane enlightenment, sexual freedom, and poor personal hygiene. Having moved from the Quartier Latin (Latin Quarter), an area on the Left Bank of the Seine, into shabby houses of Montmartre and Montparnasse, the strolling flâneurs and the infamous maquis took joy in good conversations with friends, “attached to their habits of strolls, billiard rooms, and endless smokes in taverns, or walks in noisy groups in the Luxembourg Gardens.”² It was in these communal regions of Paris where the bohemian movement was convened and thus the general look of dishevelment in fashion and arts was perceived as modes of expression and a cultural practice. Loose, flowing hair; colorful scarves worn at the neck, on the head, or instead of a belt; peasant style clothing including tunics, loose trousers, boots, and sandals; and a general performative disregard for tidiness and uniformity both in dress and art, were brought within the province of the bohemian lifestyle.

Mary Gluck traces how the bohemians in their alternate roles–that of the ‘melodramatic hero,’ the ‘urban flâneur,’ the ‘female hysteric,’ the ‘tribal primitive’– expressed their opposition to the increasingly repressive and conformist bourgeois norms in close alliance with the commercial popular culture of the 1830s. “It was in the mass circulation newspapers just coming into their own after 1830, in chatty prefaces attached to popular novels, in hastily written salons about art exhibitions, in colloquial essays about everyday life, and in collections of caricatures and humor magazines that the tangled questions of artistic modernity and the artist’s life were first formulated and fought out.”³ Meaning that, contrary to the conventional views of a private self-retreating, the bohemian artist was represented as a public persona parodying the stereotypes of commercial mass culture.

Being portrayed as vagabonds, philosophers, and narcissists, the lifestyle, and outlook of the Bohemians were associated with idleness and carelessness, becoming eccentric attractions to the dominant outsiders, who were horrified and fascinated at the same time. This fluctuation between fear and enchantment of the dominant society was reinforced by portraits, books of poetry, novels, and plays in the opera released in the mid-nineteenth century. While the French authors George Sand and Honore de Balzac used the word ‘bohemian’ to describe someone who lived an unregimented life without assured resources and any worries about tomorrow, the public opinion seems to be solidified after the launch of the best-selling novels: Les Miserables, Scenes de la Vie de Boheme, and Trilby.

As Hebdige has underlined, it is the “ideological effect” of the incorporation process, where the cultural productions compose a specific image through the elaboration of the values and the ‘anti-social’ acts of the subordinates and position the respective subcultures as more or less exotic towards other groups and classes. As a result, the marginal culture is redefined, appropriated and normalized to co-exist with the dominants achieving hegemony in the society and retaining the sustainability of the dominant class. The Romantic ideal, the image of the starving artist in his empty garret who sacrificed everything he had for his art was now being appreciated. Therefore, bohemians were gradually switched from ‘misfits and drunks’ to ‘artistic geniuses’ and became part of everyday life and of hegemonic normality.

Granted that “the cycle leading from opposition to defusion, from resistance to incorporation encloses each successive subcultures,”⁴ it is a matter of time subcultures are co-opted by consumerism and disarmed by discourse, losing their authentic resistance and certain powers of speech, and eventually be a matter of lifestyle. Consequently, becoming ‘hip’ and ‘mainstream’ leads to loss of originality in a society concentrated around commercial media and consumer identities. Now fashion houses, such as that of Isabel Marant, Alberta Ferretti, and Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini, embrace bohemian aesthetics to their contemporary designs and jewelry, and fast fashion brands produce boho-feel products in mass scale, like flowing maxi skirts and lightweight fabrics, making it accessible to everyone. New music genres like indie would hardly exist today without the influential energy and attitude of hippie-bohemian countercultures. Curatorial music and art festivals like Coachella, still appropriate the visual and symbolic swoon-worthy silhouettes of bohemians, and recuperate that imaginary authenticity and free spirituality, contributing to media’s news feed, only to become the most anticipated and most profitable productions of today’s popular industry.

REFERENCES

¹ Arthur Bartlett Maurice, The Paris of the Novelists, (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1919), 107.

² George Sand, and Zack Rogow, Horace, (San Francisco, CA: Mercury House, 1995), 51.

³ Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-century Paris, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1.

⁴ Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, (London: Methuen & Co., 1979), 100.

BIO
Elena Baltzoglou is a Conceptual Innovator providing consulting services to emerging brands and fashion tech startups. Having worked for a global fashion retailer as well as a NY-based retail innovation accelerator, Elena has 5+ years of experience in marketing strategy, brand awareness, and storytelling practices. Her expertise involves different aspects of strategic communications that help conceptualize promotional content in a manner that hits all the right chords with the brands. She holds a BS of Management Science and Technology from Athens University of Economics and Business, and an MA in Fashion Studies with a focus on second-hand clothing markets and buy-sell-trade retail schemes. Her research encompasses many aspects of Fashion, Memory and Time throughout her academic years, such as Marking Time in Contemporary Fashion and Martin Margiela’s practice in defense of Slow Fashion among other papers.