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Directoire style

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Directoire style
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Style of dress, furniture, and ornament popular in France during the Directory, 1795 – 99. Dress for men mixed the ancient and contemporary: high boots, vests, open coats, top hats. Women's fashions featured dresses with long sleeves and V necklines, worn with ruffled caps. Directoire furniture and ornamentation were based on ancient Roman objects recently excavated at Pompeii.

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Art Encyclopedia: Directoire Style
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Style fashionable in France, especially in Paris, named after the short-lived Directoire period (Oct 1795-Nov 1799). It was marked at first by the collapse of the French economy and then by the rapidly growing wealth of financial speculators, although Ride Felice wrote: 'Many styles are misnamed, none more so than this one; even if it exists ...was ever a style established in such a short time?' (Felice, n.d.). The style itself displayed elements of the classicism that had prevailed in the later part of the 18th century and had been known in the ARABESQUE STYLE, GROTESQUE and ETRUSCAN STYLE. A new austerity was introduced after the Revolution, and reflecting the taste of the new class of military officials, politicans and financial speculators, it became rapidly more opulent. Under the influence of Charles Percier and Pierre Fran?ois Leonard Fontaine it was developed into the flourishing EMPIRE STYLE.

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Architecture: Directoire style
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A transitional classicist style preceding the Empire style, named after the Directoire rule in France (1795–1799).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Directoire style
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Directoire style (dērĕktwär'), in French interior decoration and costume, the manner prevailing about the time of the Directory (1795-99), from which the name is derived. A style transitional between Louis XVI and Empire, it is characterized by a departure from the sumptuousness of the aristocratic regime. Furniture became more angular and severe; marquetry was replaced by large surfaces of painted and waxed wood. These new forms and the continued taste for Greco-Roman design, which forecast the Empire style, were established by the architects Percier and Fontaine and the artist J. L. David. The chemise gown with low neckline and high waistline, inspired by antiquity, pervaded women's fashion. The incroyables, dandies of the period, favored tight breeches and coats with wide lapels.

 
 

 

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Art Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Architecture. McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction. Copyright © 2003 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more