"The Age of Undress explores the emergence and meaning of neoclassical dress in the 1790s, tracing its evolution from Naples to London and Paris over the course of a single decade. The neoclassical style of clothing - often referred to as robe à la grecque, empire style, or "undress" - is marked by a sheer, white, high-waisted muslin dress worn with minimal undergarments, often accessorized with a cashmere shawl. This style represented a dramatic departure from that of previous decades and was short lived: by the 1820s, corsets, silks, and hoop skirts were back in fashion. Amelia Rauser investigates this sudden transformation and argues that women styled themselves as living statues, artworks come to life, an aesthetic and philosophical choice intertwined with the experiments and innovations of artists working in other media during the same period. Although neoclassicism is often considered a cold, rational, and masculine movement, Rauser's analysis shows that it was actually deeply passionate, with women at its core - as ideals and allegories, as artistic agents, and as important patrons." --Publisher's description

• Introduction: Galateas
• Art without artifice
• The living statue
• Inventing Neoclassical dress
• Time, place, person, form, meaning
• Drape
• Naples: modern bacchantes
• Art and life in Naples
• "Bacchantish attitudes" and sculpture theory
• Dilettantes and apes
• Transparency
• The sensate statue
• Vitalist sensibility
• Psyche disobeys
• Muslin disease
• Dramatizing the animated statue
• High-waistedness
• London: sculptural contour
• The pad fad of 1793
• Twelve statues: Lady Charlotte Campbell and her circle
• Outline, "Statue-ness," and the Corinthian maid
• The Cestus of Venus
• Whiteness
• Muslin's materiality
• Neoclassical bodies and the anxiety of abjection
• Cotton, Creoles, and plantation fashion
• Wax statues and chromatic variety
• Unmasking the living statue
• Lightness
• Paris: savage neoclassicism
• Animating the Festival of Reason in 1793
• Flesh and stone: prison fashion
• Primitivism and the dress a la savage