Boho – Fashion History and Bohemian Style

200 Years of Boho

Bohemian style has, for over 200 years, been an exotic alternative to the accepted fashions of a given period. Generally associated with artists, writers, and intellectuals, bohemian culture incorporates various ethic clothing styles, as well as historical costume.

The bohemian style consists of loose, colorful clothing and has been known as boho chic, hippie style, and Aesthetic dress. With their long flowing hair and rich, though threadbare fabrics, bohemians stand out in a crowd representing a colorful counterculture based on creativity, poverty, and an indifference to social structures and traditions.

Origin of the Bohemians

The Bohemians, as a counterculture, appeared in France after the French Revolution. Deprived of the former system of patronage, where wealthy clients supported the arts, artists were plunged into poverty. Many took up a nomadic lifestyle, lived cheaply, and wore worn out and unfashionable or used clothing.

Formerly, an artist was seen as a skilled and talented craftsperson. But the Romantic Movement of the late 18th century rejected the confines of bourgeois life and the former importance placed on reason, to embrace the imagination.

A new cult of personality emerged with the artist as hero and individual style expressed in the way one dressed. An artist became a special type of person, not merely a craftsperson, but a kind of eccentric genius whose creativity was displayed in the way they lived and looked. The artist himself (or herself) was a piece of art.

People compared the new artistic types to wandering Gypsies and believed that Gypsies originated in Bohemia, an area of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. So, they came to refer to artists and intellectuals as Bohemians. Gypsy was a European term for the Romani people, an ethnic group with Indian origins who had migrated north. The word Gypsy, derived from the word Egyptian, which many thought the actual home of the nomadic people who were often social outcasts that lived outside the mainstream. Today, the word “Gypsy” is seen as derisive and offensive to the Romani people.

Bohemian Life Becomes Its Own Kind of Establishment

By the 1830s, the French Bohemian art crowd and the Romantics embraced medieval and oriental clothing styles. With their colorful fabrics, long flowing hair, and wide-brimmed hats, the artistic culture did come to resemble the classic view of the Romani people.

The novelist Henri Murger wrote tales about the people that he called Bohemians, centering on a group of artists and intellectuals in threadbare coats, old shoes, and a general look of dishevelment. The stories inspired Puccini’s famous opera, La Boheme.

The bohemian style evolved into a cult of the individual, a person whose very appearance became a work of art with carefully planned outfits and accessories. The word bohemian suggested a sense of arcane enlightenment, sexual freedom, and poor personal hygiene.

Bohemian life rejects materialism, private property, and centers on creativity and communal living. Often associated with the use of drugs and alcohol, bohemians ignore social convention, centering their lives on art.

Bohemians in the 19th Century – The Aesthetic Movement

In the 19th century, the Aesthetic Movement became a type of bohemian lifestyle. The Aesthetics rebelled against the rigid social constraints of the Victorian era and embraced a style based on the clothing of the past, particularly medieval dress and oriental designs.

Believing that the mass production of the Industrial Revolution was dehumanizing, the Aesthetics strove to encourage the old techniques of the Middle Ages with individually crafted goods. Clothing was loose and soft, using fabrics colored with organic dyes and decorated with hand embroidery. The Pre-Raphaelite artists of the day rejected corsets, crinolines, and the stiff bodices and restrictive clothing of Victorian fashion.

Elements of Bohemian Style

Bohemian style, now referred to as boho chic, has come down through history, reappearing as beatnik style and in the hippie culture of the 1960s. For 200 years, bohemian style has consisted of several fashion elements.

Loose, flowing clothing made of natural fabrics

Less restrictive garments worn without corsets, bras or other restrictive elements

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

Used or worn clothing

Oriental elements including robes, kimonos, and the ethnic designs of Persia, India, Turkey, and China

Mixing historical elements of medieval clothing with ethnic styles

Layering

Matching of garments in a non-traditional manner, such as mixing prints, or unusual color combinations

Multi strands of beads, several bangle bracelets, and the wearing of unusual, handcrafted, or unmatched jewelry

Large dangle or large hoop earrings

Broad-brimmed hats

Patched clothing

Paisley, flowered fabrics, ruffles, lace-edged sleeves

A general disregard for tidiness and uniformity of dress

A look of contrived dishevelment

Bohemian Icons

The Rainbow Gathering is an annual meeting of like-minded individuals with a Bohemian bent that reject capitalism and materialism and embrace utopian ideals, the creative life, environmentalism, and diversity.

The Hippie Movement of the late 1960s incorporated Bohemian ideals. Centered on creativity of life and dress, hippie style included elements of historic costume, ethnic dress, and a rejection of mainstream life. In the clip from the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967, Country Joe and the Fish perform to a crowd dressed in classic hippie style.

Greenwich Village, New York or The Village was a gathering place for impoverished artists and writers in the 20th century, a haven for the creative community as a distinctive minority group.

The Left Bank In the early 20th century, the Montparnasse area of Paris France was a hub of creativity that attracted artists, writers, and intellectuals. Here, people like Marc Chagall, Ernest Hemingway, Henri Matisse, and others were able to live cheaply, meeting in bistros and restaurants to share ideas.

La Boheme and the Musical Rent – The musical Rent is based on Puccini’s opera La Boheme. The story revolves around a group of artists living the Bohemian life and their struggles with poverty and disease.

Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle’s first short story featuring Sherlock Holmes included Doctor Watson’s description of the famous fictional detective’s “Bohemian soul.”

Paul Poiret – The early 20th-century fashion designer reworked a variety of ethnic designs for Western fashion. His use of elements of Russian peasant costume, Middle Eastern, oriental, and historic dress introduced Bohemian concepts int high fashion that eventually bled into mainstream fashion.

William and Jane Morris – William Morris was a designer who created alternative textiles for clothing and interior design, known for his involvement in liberal socialism, historic preservation and known as an early environmentalist. He also designed clothes for his wife, Jane Morris, a model who became an icon of the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements in her loose, medieval style dresses and abundant long hair.

Dorelia McNeill was a model for the artists Gwen and Augustus John in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Augustus and Dorelia lived a nomadic life in a caravan while he painted her in long, loose skirts and scarves as they lived in a personal Bohemian utopia.

20th Century Bohemian Style

Basically unchanged for many years, the bohemian style came to be associated with young people hoping to distance themselves from the materialistic culture of past generations. The bohemian style gave birth to more modern counter-culture styles. Beatniks, with their black turtle necks and striped shirts, took on a more austere tone of the dress. A hippie style introduced a note of childhood into the mix by incorporating cowboy and Indian styles as well as short, girlish skirts.

But as mass media embraced bohemianism, one wonders if the term is still viable. When a counter culture goes mainstream, the style can no longer be viewed as an alternative.

When discount stores sell peasant skirts, and fashion magazines offer expensive designer made bohemian style garments, the nature of the bohemian life has become a cultural norm, and no longer unique and specific to a particular group.

Though fashion often embraces boho chic, the life itself – the yearning for individual freedom, the rejection of modern materialistic concepts, the dream of utopian ideals, and the production of handcrafted goods remains a powerful alternative to mainstream culture.

200 Years of Boho

Bohemian style has, for over 200 years, been an exotic alternative to the accepted fashions of a given period. Generally associated with artists, writers, and intellectuals, bohemian culture incorporates various ethic clothing styles, as well as historical costume.

Origin of the Bohemians

Formerly, an artist was seen as a skilled and talented craftsperson. But the Romantic Movement of the late 18th century rejected the confines of bourgeois life and the former importance placed on reason, to embrace the imagination.

Bohemian Life Becomes Its Own Kind of Establishment

By the 1830s, the French Bohemian art crowd and the Romantics embraced medieval and oriental clothing styles. With their colorful fabrics, long flowing hair, and wide-brimmed hats, the artistic culture did come to resemble the classic view of the Romani people.

The novelist Henri Murger wrote tales about the people that he called Bohemians, centering on a group of artists and intellectuals in threadbare coats, old shoes, and a general look of dishevelment. The stories inspired Puccini’s famous opera, La Boheme.

The bohemian style evolved into a cult of the individual, a person whose very appearance became a work of art with carefully planned outfits and accessories. The word bohemian suggested a sense of arcane enlightenment, sexual freedom, and poor personal hygiene.

Bohemian life rejects materialism, private property, and centers on creativity and communal living. Often associated with the use of drugs and alcohol, bohemians ignore social convention, centering their lives on art.

Bohemians in the 19th Century – The Aesthetic Movement

In the 19th century, the Aesthetic Movement became a type of bohemian lifestyle. The Aesthetics rebelled against the rigid social constraints of the Victorian era and embraced a style based on the clothing of the past, particularly medieval dress and oriental designs.

Elements of Bohemian Style

Bohemian style, now referred to as boho chic, has come down through history, reappearing as beatnik style and in the hippie culture of the 1960s. For 200 years, bohemian style has consisted of several fashion elements.

Loose, flowing clothing made of natural fabrics

Less restrictive garments worn without corsets, bras or other restrictive elements

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

Used or worn clothing

Oriental elements including robes, kimonos, and the ethnic designs of Persia, India, Turkey, and China

Mixing historical elements of medieval clothing with ethnic styles

Layering

Matching of garments in a non-traditional manner, such as mixing prints, or unusual color combinations

Multi strands of beads, several bangle bracelets, and the wearing of unusual, handcrafted, or unmatched jewelry

Large dangle or large hoop earrings

Broad-brimmed hats

Patched clothing

Paisley, flowered fabrics, ruffles, lace-edged sleeves

A general disregard for tidiness and uniformity of dress

A look of contrived dishevelment

Bohemian Icons

The Rainbow Gathering is an annual meeting of like-minded individuals with a Bohemian bent that reject capitalism and materialism and embrace utopian ideals, the creative life, environmentalism, and diversity.

Greenwich Village, New York or The Village was a gathering place for impoverished artists and writers in the 20th century, a haven for the creative community as a distinctive minority group.

La Boheme and the Musical Rent – The musical Rent is based on Puccini’s opera La Boheme. The story revolves around a group of artists living the Bohemian life and their struggles with poverty and disease.

Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle’s first short story featuring Sherlock Holmes included Doctor Watson’s description of the famous fictional detective’s “Bohemian soul.”

Paul Poiret – The early 20th-century fashion designer reworked a variety of ethnic designs for Western fashion. His use of elements of Russian peasant costume, Middle Eastern, oriental, and historic dress introduced Bohemian concepts int high fashion that eventually bled into mainstream fashion.

Dorelia McNeill was a model for the artists Gwen and Augustus John in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Augustus and Dorelia lived a nomadic life in a caravan while he painted her in long, loose skirts and scarves as they lived in a personal Bohemian utopia.

20th Century Bohemian Style

But as mass media embraced bohemianism, one wonders if the term is still viable. When a counter culture goes mainstream, the style can no longer be viewed as an alternative.

When discount stores sell peasant skirts, and fashion magazines offer expensive designer made bohemian style garments, the nature of the bohemian life has become a cultural norm, and no longer unique and specific to a particular group.

Though fashion often embraces boho chic, the life itself – the yearning for individual freedom, the rejection of modern materialistic concepts, the dream of utopian ideals, and the production of handcrafted goods remains a powerful alternative to mainstream culture.

By Dolores Monet Contact Author

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