This substantial volume represents a significant contribution to the history of dress and textiles during the last thirty years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and promises to become a standard reference and source for much future scholarship. In it, Rebecca Houze combines important original archival research, ranging across objects in museum collections, journals and periodicals, photographs, prints and paintings, with an informed understanding of the complexities of Austro-Hungarian history. Originating in the author's initial interest in the dress worn by the women in Gustav Klimt's famous portraits, the study returns to these paintings toward its conclusion, but from a broadened, complex, and fascinating vantage point.

The book opens with an introductory consideration of the field of Austro-Hungarian cultural history, and more specifically dress and fashion, especially the role of women as both producers of much handcraft textiles and wearers of “cloth.” The latter term is not used in a straightforward or functional sense, but rather is investigated for all its complexity. In the author's words, the aim is to present clothing as “an organizing principle of considerable power for the aesthetic as well as the political and cultural imagination in Austria-Hungary at the turn of the twentieth century” (37).

The book is arranged in two parts. Part I provides a detailed examination of the theories of the most prominent commentators on textiles, Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl, and Jacob von Falke, as well as their lesser-known contemporaries, who interpreted textiles as important, not just for necessary “cover” or “cladding,” but as the materials that build elements of artistic form. Houze moves from the founding ideas of the Bekleidungsprinzip (principles of clothing) to consider how these informed the formation of collections of textiles and dress in the Arts and Crafts museums, newly founded on the South Kensington model in the 1860s, as well as displays at the expositions of Paris and Vienna. Chapter 4, “Exhibiting Cloth and Culture,” then moves on to explore the links between theories of textiles and ethnography, and within this, the framing of Hungarian embroidery in a new intellectual context as an alternative to modern, urban, and “Western” dress.

A constant challenge for those working on the Dual Monarchy of the late Habsburg Empire is to establish a balance between Austria and Hungary, even if the historical actors under consideration did not share this concern for parity of recognition. Houze reveals her awareness of this in the various historical tensions manifest in the theorization as well as in the making of textiles as worn garments, through which contrasting national identities for Germanic and Magyar Habsburgs were fashioned. One of the significant points of originality of the study is the detailed understanding of embroidery. It sheds new light on the teaching of the subject in Arts and Crafts schools and the vital role of previously overlooked figures, such as Emilie Bach and Therese Mirani, as educators, commentators, designers, and makers.

Part II of the volume explores the implications and ramifications of these earlier debates as they played out in the various artistic circles of Jugendstil, Vienna Secession, and the Gödöllö art colony (near Budapest) after 1900. While this territory may have been thoroughly interrogated in other fields, Houze's contribution is to focus on the ambivalence that surrounded the principle of dress in the chapter “Embroidery and Anxiety.” In “Fashion and Its Discontents” she presents architect Adolf Loos's notorious disquiet in the face of women's fashion, most famously expressed in the lecture and essay “Ornament and Crime” (1908). Loos's position was countered by a strongly reactive dress reform movement, among whose advocates, Henry Van de Velde and Gustav Klimt, Anna Muthesius, and Emilie Flöge adopted artistic dress as a means to embody a new way of living. This new “Mode” allowed dress to signify transformation of the self through eroticism, nature symbolism, and an interest in the new psychosexual theories. The conflation of women's crafts and skill in the continuation of folk art, already discussed within modern artistic circles, is the topic of Houze's final chapter, “Imperial Masquerade.” This section conjures the moment when the court and large sections of the population took to the streets wearing regional and folk costume in parades and festivals during the final years of empire.

With it central focus on embroidery, fashion, textiles, and dress, this study fills a critical gap in the literature on fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth-century culture of the Habsburg monarchy. It partners parallel studies of interior design and the decorative arts, establishing welcome territory for much future scholarship.