History and folk-culture constituted two parallel influences on design in the 19th century. In the first half of the century, historicism was paramount, drawing on references from the past and in particular on the Middle Ages (meaning, in practice, the 12th-16th centuries). The roots of “troubadour style” in France go back to 1774, when Count d’Angiviller (1730–1789), the Director of State Buildings, commissioned a series of paintings and sculptures for the royal palace depicting “Great Men” from the nation’s past, in order “to inspire virtue and patriotic sentiment”. In the same year, the death of the unpopular King Louis XV coincided with a burgeoning cult of his exemplary counterpart, the Renaissance King Henry IV. Medieval details were incorporated at court: Marie-Antoinette adopted the Medici collar – a raised lace collar – associated with Henry IV’s wife Catharina de Medici. In masquerades, the slashed fabrics that had been popular in the Renaissance were used in feminine and masculine dress; after 1804, this fashion (known as “troubadour style”, in line with a type of history painting in vogue at the time) was revived by Empress Josephine, who incorporated medieval details in the dominant, and mainly classicist, Empire dress style.

The Romantic period, which dominated the decades before 1848, saw a flourish of stylistic historicism, inflected nationally. Women’s dress styles revived elements of historical costume such as neck ruffs, slashed sleeves or Elizabethan leg-of-mutton sleeves (in vogue from 1824, and gaining in volume until 1829). In the late 1830s, dresses from the 1660s were the model to follow. Bodices with an open neckline, a narrow waist and voluminous sleeves starting below the shoulders were combined with increasingly full skirts. Hairstyles also followed 17th-century models: parted in the middle and pulled smoothly to the temples, where it was arranged in hanging curls, and pulled into a bun or chignon at the back.

Two impulses beside historicist fancy govern the European trend towards a specifically national dress style: a desire to unite the country’s entire population, abolishing sartorial distinctions between regions or classes, and to mark the nation as being different and distinct from others. Of these two, the former manifests itself earliest on, especially in the French Republic of 1792. In tandem with the concerted policy to abolish local dialects and to unite the nation into a single standard language, so too it was felt that the abolition of regionally distinct dresses and the adoption of a countrywide standard dress code would contribute to the undivided unity of the sovereign nation. This is essentially an Enlightenment gesture aimed at rationalization, and has persisted most strongly among totalitarian regimes and in the uniforms adopted by national armies. These uniforms in themselves were, however, specific to the armies of different countries and regimes, and tended to follow vernacular sartorial traditions (Hussars, Cossacks, Bersaglieri, Highland regiments). In the course of the 19th century, these obtained a powerfully national symbolism at a time when formal (civil) dress for men became increasingly transnational and nationally indistinct. Indeed, while until the early 18th century the differences between nationalities had been most clearly signalled in their dress codes (“habit” and custom/costume being originally sartorial terms), a convergence of male fashion had occurred around French court standards in the 18th century, the centre of men’s fashion shifting to London after 1815. This transnational convergence for the middle and upper classes meant that the need for standardization in the course of the 19th century became less pronounced than the need for national particularism; national particularity accordingly was increasingly sought in the clothing of the peasantry and provincial population, with an emphasis on women’s clothing. Only in the early-19th-century case of the German national resistance against Napoleonic hegemony does the hope for a nationwide shared dress code involve a strongly male-oriented element (reviving Dürer portraits in hairdo and dress style), while at the same time also reflecting integrationist ambitions: Caroline Pichler expressed a hope, in 1815, that her Old German dress for ladies would be worn both in Berlin and in Vienna.

In the later 19th century the emphasis in national dress was on female rather than male attire. A folkloristic interest in rural manners and customs also led to a renewed appreciation for peasant dresses. In the course of the century, royal court protocol everywhere in Europe adopted the rule that traditional dress was permissible as “court dress”, especially in the new monarchies of post-Ottoman Europe (but also for Highland dress after its official endorsement by George IV on the occasion of his Edinburgh visit). This was intended to symbolize the immediate, organic bond between the post-Metternich monarchies and the nation-at-large. Crowned heads in Europe made a point of donning traditional costume, sometimes by queens wearing regional women’s dress, sometimes in an inflected form as the dress uniform of elite regiments. In Russia, Tolstoj’s use of the peasant outfit of boots and kosovorotka tunic was similarly influential.

Traditional dress, in a codified and stratified display style, remained enshrined in popular pastimes associated with it, such as the suit of lights used by Spanish bullfighters, or the festive dress of Andalucia associated with ferias and, towards the end of the 19th century, with flamenco dancing. This ornamental codification reflects the clothing’s adoption into middle-class leisure culture and is in fact frequently performance-driven. The traditional dresses of the Baltic lands were all retrieved from nigh-obsolete peasant usage by choral associatons for their public concerts and festivals; frequently, also, sentimental-realist genre paintings of peasant girls by plein-air artists furnished urban designers and seamstresses with models for revived “national” dress. The cultivation of traditional dress in late-19th-century Bavaria and Tyrol was part of a general cultivation of rustic traditions and their festive performance by middle-class leisure-time societies. From case to case traditional dress could bespeak a deep cultural nostalgia (as in Bavaria or the Netherlands), a more progressive-emancipatory stance (as with certain Baltic designers) or an uneasily-negotiated mixture of the two (as in Norway and Iceland). In each case, such “national” costumes as emerged were in many cases based on a peasant tradition which had been deeply regionally or locally diverse. In certain countries, a generic hybrid like the Dirndl became a national compromise-dress alongside the more specific regional variants; in other cases, as in the Netherlands, it was in particular the rich regional diversity that was given a national identity-value. But in all these cases, it was invariably women’s colourful, ornamental and picturesque dresses which attracted most attention and which generated reflections among women (designers and users alike) about standards of elegance, simplicity, heritage assertion, national representativeness and adjustment to contemporary needs and opportunities.

In furniture, vernacular historicism (with a particular emphasis on the Gothic) replaced the classicism of the Napoleonic years. Restored monarchies and recently created countries like Belgium recalled a Golden Age even while industrialization was progressing. Industrial products were displayed in four Belgian Exhibitions of National Industry organized and financed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1830, 1835, 1841 and 1847; the industrially manufactured exhibits were largely inspired by styles from the past, a trend also noticeably in the great London Exhibition of 1851. In this area, too, the influence of folk culture (interest in which had germinated from early Romanticism on) would in the second half of the century gain the upper hand over historicism.

From the mid-19th century, folklore studies went beyond literature and began to cover popular domestic objects – furniture, crockery and carpets – as well as rural architecture. These popular arts and crafts were facing more and more competition from industrial production. As a result, new values were attributed to the production of crafts, as the fruit of human skill and individual creation. The World Fairs had initially disseminated industrially manufactured goods alongside internationally standardized modern methods of production and design: Owen Jones, decorator of the Crystal Palace for the exhibition of 1851, produced his benchmark Grammar of ornament in 1856. But following a directive by Napoleon III for the 1867 follow-up, they were also increasingly seen as showcases for national culture (the génie national). Ethnographic displays came to complement industrial products at the exhibitions in Paris in 1867 and 1878, and Vienna in 1873. At the Paris exhibition of 1867, the organisers had invited the 44 participating countries to construct typical edifices outside the exhibition building, in what was known as the Parc étranger. Some chose an iconic building, others folkloric architecture. Austria-Hungary and Russia even created small villages with representations of different regions. The interiors were furnished with folk-crafts and mannequins in folk-dress. The erection of model houses and peasant cottages became a standard feature of later exhibitions, such as those of Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1879. In Vienna, there was a village of nine farmhouses that mainly represented the regions of Austria-Hungary. The houses were manned by real peasants performing everyday activities. While manufacturers presented their industrially made products to the world, alongside them, their nations were represented by vernacular designs.

These displays of peasant life (with illustrated books displaying folk-dress, e.g for Sweden and Turkey) accentuated the distance between rural peasant interiors and urban life. The objects in use represented a lifestyle that contrasted with that of the visitors. What seemed to be ordinary objects thus became “museumized”. In 1878 in Paris, the Dutch contribution was praised by the press. Visitors could enter a fully furnished room inhabited by mannequins in folk-dress, representing a “typical” interior from a Frisian fishing village. The Dutch entry rivalled that of Sweden, which was put together by Artur Hazelius. In the Swedish display, visitors were not allowed to enter the exhibition space, but could only look at it from afar. It was in such exhibitions that the value of craftsmanship as a sign of primeval authenticity and national identity was most evident. Handicrafts acquired a symbolic value beyond the utilitarian, encapsulating the enduring values of national character in a world where mechanization threatened its survival.

Attempts to bridge these two worlds were made by designers who sought to preserve the craftsmanship of folk-craft and adapt it for daily use. These initiatives contained a political message, a critique of modern society and a utopian political agenda. The best-known example is that of the British Arts and Crafts movement, influenced by William Morris. In 1861, Morris established a manufacturing company which, with participation from Pre-Raphaelite artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and the architect Philip Webb, produced furniture, jewellery, stained glass, embroideries, wallpaper, carpets and so forth. Morris’s social vision was to improve both the labour conditions of producers and the life of consumers. The “Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society”, founded in London in 1887, gave its name to a movement that flourished in Britain and internationally between the 1880s and the Great War. British offshoots were the Century Guild (1882-83), and the Art Workers’ Guild (1884); these associations worked as cooperatives, gathering a number of designers who operated as a group, sharing their workshops and presenting their work collectively at exhibitions. Particularly influential were the exhibitions of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society that were regularly covered in the magazine The studio, and led to invitations to exhibit at the World Fairs of Turin (1902), St Louis (1904), Gent (1913) and Paris (1914).

Whereas British Arts and Crafts designs were largely historicist, looking back to a pre-industrial mode of production, the offshoots of the Arts and Crafts movement in continental Europe took peasant and folk-art as their main reference. They drew on ethnography and the collections of the many folk-museums that were opening during this period: the Scandinavian ethnographic collection (Skandinavisk-etnografiska samlingen) in Stockholm (1873, known as Nordic Museum since 1880); the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna (1876); the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris (founded as part of the World Fair of 1878); the Danish Museum of Ethnography (Dansk Folkemuseum) in Copenhagen (1879); the Museum für deutsche Volkstrachten und Erzeugnisse des Hausgewerbes in Berlin (1889); and the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folke Museum) at Bygdøy in Oslo (1894).

Design inspired by folk-art had political undertones, especially in Central European lands like Hungary, Poland and the Czech region. Here, the search for the vernacular formed part of a redefinition of national identity under imperial rule; and while certain areas were rapidly industrializing with expanding urban centres, others remained traditionally agricultural. In such a context, the Art and Crafts movements by and large responded to modernization in a rustic-vernacular mode. The ways in which designers interacted with folk-art were, however, highly diverse from case to case, celebrating them as homely and innocent or else as venerable heirlooms. In many cases, vernacular inspiration was combined with modern styles, blurring the distinction between the vernacular and the contemporary, and highlighting the aesthetic rather than the symbolical or archeological value of folk-artefacts.

New forms of collective living outside the cities emerged, motivated mainly by two factors: first, the need to escape from civilization and practise an alternative lifestyle; and second, to get closer to remote places imbued with a pristine sense of national authenticity. Such places tended to be isolated and therefore unspoiled; their authenticity resided in landscape or historical associations, but most of all in the local community and its pre-modern lifestyle. The local peasantry’s cultural production served as inspiration for designers. In Russia, the Abramtsevo colony near Moscow and its ceramics factory are an example. In Germany, several workshops were created, including the Munich Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk (1897) and the Dresden Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst. The Darmstadt colony was promoted by the ruler of the small Protestant Hessian principality, Grand Duke Ernst Louis, involving the designers Josef Maria Olbrich (1867–1908) and Peter Behrens (1868–1940). The result was a small village, with houses designed in the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk from the buildings to the furniture and utensils. Here, too, interest in the vernacular often had a political undertone, invoking peasant culture as an anti-elite gesture in opposition to centralized or autocratic government. In these cases, designers sought out places that symbolised the historic home of a people and the repository of their familial, and by extension national, memories. In Hungary after 1902, an interest in peasant culture lay at the heart of the Gödöllő workshops. During the same period, the Zakopane style was launched in the Polish Carpathians.

In Scandinavia, the ethnographic and open air museums that opened in the 1870s and 1880s provided inspiration. These museums aimed to study the region’s craft heritage in order to improve contemporary manufacture. At that time there was little industrial production in Norway, but traditional handicrafts were seen as a means of developing an individual style. In this case, the vernacular offered a path towards modernization that was perfectly compatible with nationalistic sentiment (in contrast with the Hungarian and Russian cases). Along with these museums, the Lysaker colony – five miles from the centre of Oslo – continued to develop the interest in wooden architecture that had started in Bygdøy. The situation in industrialized Sweden (which as a sovereign state, unlike Norway and Finland, saw no need to assert its separate individuality) was different also with respect to the impact of industrialization. While in 1840, 80 per cent of domestic textiles were home-woven, by 1900 the same percentage was machine-made. In the 1890s Sweden experienced increased urbanization, with a consequent housing shortage. The textile arts were the first to borrow from peasant crafts. “The Association of Friends of Textile Art” (Föreningen för Handarbetes Vänner) was founded in 1874 to defend peasant techniques from cheap industrial products and to enhance textile art in an “artistic and patriotic manner”. A rustic retreat similar to that of the Lysaker circle developed in the Sundborn (Dalarna region) around Carl and Karin Larsson, and their vision of home life. The couple had met in the artists’ colony of Grez-sur-Loing, near Paris. Their artistic home, Lilla Hyttnäs (1888–1910, largely completed by 1893), was transformed from a small family cottage into a combination of an idyllic past and peaceful present. Colourful rooms inspired by peasant interiors coexisted with lighter areas reflecting an 18th-century Gustavian revival. Together with dress designs like the pinafore smock designed by Karin; all this was popularized in Larsson’s paintings of domestic life and established something close to a Swedish national design style. In Finland, debates around the expression of Finnish national identity emerged in textile crafts, promoted by “The Friends of the Finnish Handicrafts” (Suomen Käsityön Ystävät), founded in 1879. In the 1890s, when Finland experienced large-scale Russification under Tsars Alexander III (r. 1881-94) and Nicholas II (r. 1894-1917), artists made frequent pilgrimages to Karelia, the region which was seen as the repository of the Finnish national essence. Probably the best known of these Karelian-inspired artists and intellectuals was Akseli Gallén-Kallela. Another visitor to Karelia and a friend of Gallén-Kallela, the half-Italian, half-Swedish Count Louis Sparre (1863–1964), founded the Iris Workshops in 1897 in Porvoo.

The rise of applied and decorative arts as part of the artistic renewal of the fin de siècle had started as recoil from industrialized mass production, both socially (in that mass production involved a demeaning alienation from the dignity of traditional craftsmanship) and aesthetically (in that the items thus produced, characterized as they were by elaborate over-ornamentation, were considered ugly and tasteless). To return to small-scale, aesthetically tasteful production of items with use value (chamber screens; chinaware, vases, lampshades and tea sets; books, illustrations and book bindings; billboard posters; etc.) was therefore both a nostalgic rejection of industrial modernity and a progressive revolt against industrial mass-market capitalism. The aesthetic climate in which it flourished was self-consciously innovative and particularly active, not just in centres like Paris or Vienna, but in the outlying and emancipating cities and secondary capitals of Europe’s great empires, from Glasgow and Dublin to Barcelona, Prague, Bucharest and Riga: the various manifestations of decorative Art Nouveau obtained a symbolic value for the cosmopolitan, autonomous ambitions of the local bourgeoisie – including their emerging national consciousness. Although stylistically, these decorative arts were part of a generally European vogue, their thematic application to local lifestyles gave them a nationally specific inflection, similar to the architecture of the new national concert halls and theatres in these cities. Lettering typographies were created for books and signage, reminiscent of the national particularities of older local print or handwritten script; Art Nouveau style drawing and painting was applied by artists to illustrate national fairy tales or epics, creating stage designs for nationally themed operas (in the process artistically valorizing the style of the nation’s peasant dress); traditional peasant crafts were often used or invoked to create and design new decorative objects, such as the matr’oška nesting doll.

Inspiration in folk-art was a common denominator for a number of very different initiatives. Although they were searching for distinctiveness, these groups actually looked to similar sources. Moreover, the resulting experiences were all initiated by an educated urban elite. Their confidence in their task was such that in some cases, they even started teaching folk-art to peasants, as happened in Russia. Nevertheless, the instrumentalization of folk-art differed in each case. In many cases, the veneration of folk-art was only relative, as designers incorporated folk-art into their own stylistic development. Anthropological approaches proved to be no obstacle to the search for a new style. As a result, the relationship between Art Nouveau modernity, historicism and folk-culture was not one of opposition, but of intersection. In theory, the modernity and internationalism of Art Nouveau was counteracted by folk-art. Both, in their turn, were in stark opposition to the lingering after-effects of Romantic historicism. In practice, however, these three trends coexisted and intermingled, resulting in hybrid styles.