“Most women view with regret the evidently numbered days of the large sleeve,” the New York Times reported in February 1896. “In its most exaggerated form it has been an admitted target for the pencil and pen of the caricaturist, and its voluminous climax has not been sanctioned by the best taste at any time.” Called up from the past courtesy the Gray Lady’s TimesMachine, this unbylined obituary makes the heart I wear on my obsolescing dirigible of a sleeve sink with dread. With Bella Baxter–gauge brachia ballooning everywhere of late, from the Oscars to ASOS, it’s only a matter of time before fashion’s pendulum swings from pensile and protuberant mannerism to a deflationary functionalism of caps, straps, and tubes. Indeed, the curatorial attention recently lavished upon the so-called statement sleeve at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology suggests its present incarnation may soon pass into history.
But fellow partisans of the pouf needn’t despair. As the recursive abundance on view at FIT also attested, everything old is new again. In the 1830s, when (to paraphrase the great costume historian James Laver) romanticism softened into sentimentality, gossamer oversleeves coyly emerged, seen in the gallery on a buttercream satin and tulle sweetmeat from the beginning of that decade. Soon they opacified into hearty legs o’ mutton, their Biedermeier haunches bolstered by discreet, down-filled cushions. The saucy shanks were reheated at the dawn of the Gay Nineties, encroaching in their intumescence, as one observer put it, “upon arrogant claims of the decollete.” The haughty specimens on display from this period, upholstered in olive ciselé velvet and vermillion-shot silk faille, would soon become oldfangled once more, as evidenced by the headline of that 1896 Times item: “FALL OF THE BIG SLEEVE: Long Reigning Gigot gracefully Shrinks and Resigns.”
The periodically maligned mutton was served again, in the otherwise lean and mean tailoring of interwar Schiaparelli, and yet again in the sculptural disco futurism of Thierry Mugler. In addition to the improvident gigot, organizer Colleen Hill identified seven fundamental sleeve types—the Angel Wing, the Bell, the Bishop, the Dolman, the Raglan, the Kimono, the Lantern—spiraling through the decades according to fashion’s fickle dialectics. The wizardly swag of a cerise velvet dressing gown (ca. 1935) reaches swooning hyperbole in a midnight blue silk tissue taffeta houppelande (ca. 1980) from Madame Grès, the anointed “dowager queen” of le pli. Regency mamelukes, before going prime time in the ridiculed form of Jerry Seinfeld’s “puffy shirt,” entered the Swinging Sixties courtesy of Christian Dior and André Courrèges, who gallooned them with rhinestone ribbons and sweet little bows, respectively. The Juliet sleeves atop Yves Saint Laurent’s velvet lace-up bodice (1970) recalled the Shakespearean origin of an idiom first recorded in Iago’s act 1 confession in Othello: “But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.” Yes, we wear our hearts on our sleeve, but we can always hide some tricks up there too.