The Bohemian style, often termed "Boho chic", is a fashion and lifestyle choice characterized by its unconventional and free-spirited essence. While its precise origins are debated, Bohemian style is believed to have been influenced by the nomadic lifestyle of the Romani people during the late 19th century to the early 20th century. The term "Bohemian" itself derives from the French Bohémien, originally associated with the Roma community due to a historical misconception that they originated from Bohemia, a region in the Czech Republic.
Contemporary Bohemian fashion includes flowing fabrics, vibrant colors, and natural, woven materials instead of knits. This style draws inspiration from various sources, including the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, reminiscent of the attire worn by attendees of the inaugural Woodstock music festival.
The Bohemian style has achieved global popularity, appealing to people seeking an individualistic approach to fashion and lifestyle. It encourages a sense of freedom and self-expression and attracts those who prefer to live unconventionally, sometimes in a nomadic manner, and who may reside in colonies or communes.
Early 19th century and the role of women The Bohemian subculture has been closely affiliated with predominantly male artists and intellectuals. The female counterparts have been closely connected with the Grisettes, young women who combined part-time prostitution with various other occupations. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the term "grisette" also referred to independent young women. They often worked as seamstresses or milliner's assistants and frequented Bohemian artistic and cultural venues in Paris. Many grisettes worked as artist models, often providing sexual favors to the artists in addition to posing for them. During the time of King Louis-Philippe, they came to dominate the Bohemian modeling scene.
Due to the role and influence they had on 19th century French art, the grisette became a frequent character in French fiction. However, the grisettes have been mentioned as early as in 1730 by Jonathan Swift. The term "grisette" in poetry signified qualities of both flirtatiousness and intellectual aspiration. George du Maurier based large parts of Trilby on his experiences as a student in Parisian Bohemia during the 1850s. Poe's 1842 story was based on the unsolved murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers near New York City, subtitled "A Sequel to 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue. It was the first fictional detective story to attempt to provide a real solution to a real crime. The most enduring grisette is Mimi in Henri Murger's novel (and subsequent play) Scènes de la vie de Bohème, the source for Puccini's famous opera La bohème.
Pre-Raphaelites
In 1848 William Makepeace Thackeray used the word Bohemianism in his novel Vanity Fair. In 1862, the Westminster Review described a Bohemian as "simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and in art". During the 1860s the term was associated in particular with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the group of artists and aesthetes of which Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the most prominent:The original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been formed in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, Rossetti and John Everett Millais, who aspired to a style of painting that they felt had been lost since the time of Raphael (1483–1520).
As the 1860s progressed, Rossetti would become the grand prince of Bohemianism as his deviations from normal standards became more audacious. He then became this epitome of the unconventional, his egocentric demands necessarily required his close friends to remodel their own lives around him. His Bohemianism was like a web in which others became trapped – none more so than William and Jane Morris.Franny Moyle (2009) Desperate Romantics
Jane Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and Pre-Raphaelite traits Jane Morris, who was to become Rossetti's muse, epitomized, probably more than any of the women associated with the pre-Raphaelites, an unrestricted, flowing style of dress that, while unconventional at the time, would be highly influential at certain periods during the 20th century.See, for example, Virginia Nicholson (2002) Among The Bohemians She and others, including the much less outlandish Georgiana Burne-Jones (wife of Edward Burne-Jones,Though more conventional in many ways than Jane Morris, Georgie Burne-Jones was becoming "a bit of a bohemian" even in the early days of her marriage; for example, she would ask her maid to model for sketches in mid-morning, whereas a typical bourgeois wife would have given priority to the housework: Fiona MacCarthy (2011) The Last Pre-Raphaelite. one of the later pre-Raphaelites), eschewed the corsets and crinolines of the mid-to-late Victorian era,Judith Flanders (2001) A Circle of Sisters a feature that impressed the American writer Henry James when he wrote to his sister in 1869 of the bohemian atmosphere of the Morrises' house in the Bloomsbury district of London and, in particular, the "dark silent medieval" presence of its chatelaine:
It's hard to say whether she's a grand synthesis of all the pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made … whether she's an original or a copy. In either case, she's a wonder. Imagine a tall, lean woman in a long dress of some dead purple stuff, guiltless of hoops (or of anything else I should say) with a mass of crisp black hair heaped into great wavy projections on each of her temples … a long neck, without any collar, and in lieu thereof some dozen strings of outlandish beads.Henry James, letter to Alice James, 10 March 1869
In his play Pygmalion (1912) Bernard Shaw unmistakably based the part of Mrs. Higgins on the then elderly Jane Morris. He described Mrs. Higgins' drawing room, he referred to a portrait of her "when she defied the fashion of her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular estheticism [sic] in the eighteen-seventies".Pygmalion, introduction to Act III
A biographer of Edward Burne-Jones, writing a century after Shaw (Fiona MacCarthy, 2011), has noted that, in 1964, when the influential Biba store was opened in London by Barbara Hulanicki, the "long drooping structureless clothes", though sexier than the dresses portrayed in such Burne-Jones paintings as The Golden Stairs or The Sirens, nevertheless resembled them.Fiona MacCarthy (2011) The Last Pre-Raphaelite The interior of Biba has been described by the biographer of British 20th century designer Laura Ashley as having an atmosphere that "reeked of sex … [It] was designed to look like a bordello with its scarlet, black and gold plush fitments, but, interestingly, it implied an old-fashioned, Edwardian style of forbidden sex with feathered boas, potted palms, bentwood coat racks and dark lighting"Anne Sebba (1990) Laura Ashley: a Life By Design MacCarthy observed also that "the androgynous appearance of Burne-Jones's male figures reflected the sexually ambivalent feeling" of the late 1960s.MacCarthy, op. cit.
Early flower power: Effie Millais Effie Gray, whose marriage to John Ruskin was annulled in 1854 before her marrying the pre-Raphaelite painter John Millais, is known to have used flowers as an adornment and probably also as an assertive "statement". While in Scotland with Ruskin (still her husband) and Millais, she gathered foxgloves to place in her hair. She wore them at breakfast, despite being asked by her husband not to do so, a gesture of defiance, at a time of growing crisis in their relationship, that came to the critical notice of Florence NightingaleSuzanne Fagence Cooper (2010) The Model Wife: The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, Ruskin and Millais. Florence Nightingale's observations regarding the foxgloves are noted in correspondence of her friend, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose acquaintance with Effie Ruskin dated back to their schooldays. However, it is unclear when Nightingale herself met Effie: Cooper, op.cit, footnote 85. (Gaskell was especially well connected. In 1861, for example, she was part of a house party at Fryston Hall, Yorkshire given by Richard Monckton Milnes – a persistent suitor of Florence Nightingale – that included also the MP William Forster, Austen Layard, who excavated the biblical city of Ninevah, and the American (Union) Minister in London, Charles Francis Adams. Gaskell was among a group visiting nearby Pomfret Castle when Adam received news of the Trent incident that, in the early stages of the American Civil War almost brought Britain and the Union to war: see Amanda Foreman (2010) A World on Fire.) (who tended to regard others of her sex with "scarcely concealed scorn" and was generally unsympathetic towards "women's rights"David Cannadine (1998) History in Our Time). A few weeks earlier, on Midsummer Day, Effie (possibly inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream) was said by her hostess, Pauline Trevelyan, to have "looked lovely" with stephanotis in her hair at an evening party in Northumberland,Diary of Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, 24 June 1853, quoted in Robert Brownwell (2013) Marriage of Inconvenience while, the previous year, a male friend had brought a vase of flowers for her hair from Venice.Brownwell, op.cit. Ruskin's father was evidently shocked to learn that, when Effie herself was in Venice, she had removed her bonnet in public, ostensibly because of the heat.
In 1853 Millais painted Effie with Foxgloves in Her Hair which depicts her wearing the flowers while doing needlework. Other paintings of the mid-to-late 19th century, such as Frederick Sandys' Love's Shadow (1867) of a girl with a rose in her hair, sucking a sprig of blossom, which was described in 1970 as "a first rate PR job for the Flower People",Robert Melville in New Statesman, 20 November 1970 and Burne-Jones' The Heart of the Rose (1889),See MacCarthy, op.cit.; have been cited as foreshadowing the "flower power" of the mid-to-late 1960s.
Early 20th century and inter-war years
Rational dress and the women's movement
By the turn of the 20th century, an increasing number of professional women, notably in the United States, were attempting to live outside the traditional parameters of society. Between 1870 and 1910, the marriage rate among educated women in the United States fell to 60% (30% lower than the national average). By 1893, in the state of Massachusetts alone, some 300,000 women were earning their own living in nearly 300 occupations. The invention of the typewriter in 1867 was a particular spur. For example, by the turn of the 20th century, 80% of stenographers were women.Eleanor Mills in Sunday Times Culture, 19 July 2015 (reviewing Kate Bolick, Spinster)
By this time, such movements as the Rational Dress Society (1881), with which the Morrises and Georgiana Burne-Jones were involved, were beginning to exercise some influence on women's dress, although the pre-Raphaelite look was still considered "advanced" in the late years of the 19th century.Virginia Nicholson (2002) Among The Bohemians Queen Victoria's precocious daughter Princess Louise, an accomplished painter and artist who mixed in bohemian circles, was sympathetic to rational dress and to the developing women's movement generally (although her rumoured pregnancy at the age of 18 was said to have been disguised by tight corsetry).John Sutherland in The Times, 21 December 2013, reviewing Lucinda Hawksley, Princess Louise: Queen Victoria's Rebellious Daughter