Artistic Dress was the Victorian sartorial practice through which individuals communicated their identification with artistic circles, life, and philosophies that challenged the boundaries of mainstream ideals. While it is a category that is acknowledged in current fashion histories, Artistic Dress has had limited and at times conflicting treatment, often conflated with other terms like Aesthetic Dress and Dress Reform without clarity or differentiation between them. The term Pre-Raphaelite Dress has also been used to describe this style, especially in relation to the idea that those associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Circle often went about publicly in unconventional clothing that expressed their Bohemian lifestyle. This paper will offer an in-depth discussion of so-called ‘Pre-Raphaelite Dress’ to scrutinise how and when Pre-Raphaelite women flouted sartorial convention – if they did at all. Focusing on comparative object analysis between images to extant garments, it presents an analysis that re-evaluates key examples – particularly Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, and Jane Morris – and offers new cases, to conclude that Artistic Dress was rooted in the practice of artists and models styling themselves and their clothes to express artistic fantasies for both creative production and everyday life – rather than the wholesale wearing of alternative garments, as previous scholars (such as Stella Mary Newton) have suggested.

• Organisation