Anne Hollander

Anne Hollander
Anne Hollander at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1999
Born	Anne Helen Loesser October 16, 1930 Cleveland, Ohio
Died	July 6, 2014(2014-07-06) (aged 83) Manhattan, New York City
Known for	History of fashion, costume and art

Anne Helen Loesser Hollander (October 16, 1930 – July 6, 2014) was a pioneering American historian whose original work provided new insights into the history of fashion and costume and their relation to the history of art.

Hollander was born Anne Helen Loesser in Cleveland, Ohio. She was the only child of pianist and music historian Arthur Loesser and his wife Jean Bassett, a sculptor. Hollander's mother taught her to sew and make her own clothes. Hollander received a degree in art history from Barnard College, New York, graduating in 1952.

Hollander moved in academic circles but never joined a college or university faculty. She became an independent scholar, researching and writing on the history of fashion and costume. Her work was both erudite and original, providing new perspectives on areas that previously had not been considered or had been regarded as unimportant. Her first book was Seeing through clothes (1978; reprinted 1993) where she insisted on talking about cloth and drapery before talking about clothes.

Hollander describes the relationship between dress and art as follows: "In a picture-making civilization, the ongoing pictorial conventions demonstrate what is natural in human looks; and it is only in measuring up to them that the inner eye feels satisfaction and the clothed self achieves comfort and beauty". And she extends the point to the conception of the naked body: "It can be shown that the rendering of the nude in art usually derives from the current form in which the clothed figure is conceived. This correlation in turn demonstrates that both the perception and the self-perception of nudity are dependent on a sense of clothing – and of clothing understood through the medium of a visual convention". "Thus all nudes in art since modern fashion began are wearing the ghosts of absent clothes – sometimes highly visible ghosts".

In her second book, Moving pictures (1991), Hollander divided post-1500 paintings from Europe and the United States into the cinematic and non-cinematic. In Sex and suits (1994), she analysed the male suit and its function. In 2002, Hollander helped organise the exhibition "Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting" at the National Gallery in London, for which she wrote the catalogue. Her interest, as with other works where she considered painting, was not in the techniques used by artists to depict clothing, but in what those depictions revealed about the changing idea of the human body underneath. Hollander's thesis was always that clothes reveal more than they conceal. She held to this view even when considering the burqa worn by Muslim women, which she saw as revealing many details if one looked closely.