Boho (Bohemian) style has been in fashion for two hundred years expressing free spirit, style unlimited by strict rules, out of general conventions. It is essentially linked to young people who have been trying over the centuries to distance themselves from the dominant materialist culture (even if only through clothes).
Imagine floaty, colourful, light, unbiased, dashing. Boho style developed as an “exotic alternative” to the fashion status quo, a vivid counterculture, initially linked to artists, writers, intellectuals, creative and unconventional people in general.
A certain dose of indifference towards the traditional, social repression of sexuality and freedom of choice, the imperative of material and accelerated, but also to some other norms, has been included in the construction and perception of the bohemian style – such a style was often superficially, for example, related to the lack of hygiene and various forms of ‘primitivism’.
The term bohemianism emerged in France in the early 19th century when artists and creators began to concentrate in the lower-rent, lower class, primarily Rromani neighbourhoods. Deprived of the past system of patronage and support of their benevolent benefactors, numerous artists lived in poverty, without any significant property, as nomads. They would wear worn clothes, eat poorly or barely anything, and drink. So they came into contact with the everyday life of the Rroma, marginalized.
Bohémien was a common term for the Rromani people of France, who were mistakenly thought to have reached France in the 15th century via Bohemia (the western part of modern Czech Republic).
The original bohemians, that is, the inspiration for the later bohemian style, both in fashion and in the broader cultural sense, were the Rromas who lived in France, fascinating nomads with vivid history and culture, and with a different view of life and approach to art and fashion expression.
Later, the term ‘bohemian’ was used mostly for artists, people who live unconventional, usually creative and ‘dishevelled’ lives. By the middle of the 19th century, French bohemian artists and Romantics accepted ‘oriental’ fashion, colourful fabrics, clanking cheap jewellery, a variety of hats, long fluttering hair – a look that fully imitated the image of the Rromani community at the time.
Writer Henri Murger wrote collection of short stories “Scènes de la Vie de Bohème” about artists and intellectuals in shabby coats and old shoes in the poor Paris neighbourhood, which later formed the basis of Giacomo Puccini‘s opera La bohème.
At the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries the aspects of the bohemian fashion reflected a specific way of life, representing a “code” for reading a character and their life “missions”. When Boho-Chic as a fashion style materialized on the European streets, the Sunday Times thought it ironic that “fashionable girls wore ruffly floral skirts in the hope of looking bohemian, nomadic, spirited and non-bourgeois”, whereas “gypsy girls themselves … are sexy and delightful precisely because they do not give a hoot for fashion”
As the mass media and the wider fashion industry later adopted the Boho style, and the counterculture became the mainstream, it is difficult to find alternatives in it nowadays. When fashion magazines offer expensive designer bohemian clothes, in which spiritually empty rich people should feel “liberated” and “dematerialized”, it is clear that the matter is somewhat depleted and empty.
It is interesting to pay attention, however, to the development of Boho style and philosophy, and note that in parallel with fashion and widespread cultural celebration and acceptance of this expression, the position of the Rroma in society has stagnated and has often been degraded. The Rroma did not prosper through this “bohemian boom”, and there was no appreciation for the creativity, originality, diversity and talents that came from the Rromani ranks, nor was there any opportunity for the Rroma to create and absorb their own stories.
And while the art was constantly inspired by the Rroma and fascinated by them in an objectifying way from afar, societies all over Europe, and also in France, have never really accepted the Rroma. Boho became chic, while Rroma were harassed.
