185 Day dresses, 1853. The skirt with many flounces is very typical of the early 1850s. Its shape is maintained by a multiplicity of petticoats, the crinoline not yet having been brought in to support it.
After the Hungry Forties, the bustling, prosperous Fifties. The Year of Revolutions (1848) had resulted in the defeat of the Left all over Europe. In some countries this had resulted in the re-establishment of centralized tyranny; but in England and France it was really the triumph of the bourgeoisie. It is true that the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon in 1851 gave rise to some anxiety, but in spite of his military adventures later in the decade, the real supporters of Napoleon III were the bankers, industrialists and capitalists. In England the Great Exhibition of 1851 not only demonstrated new kinds of technology but gave hope (a misguided hope as it turned out) that an era of universal peace and brotherhood was about to begin. Trade and commerce were certainly flourishing. We have only to look at the immense number of houses in London with stucco fronts and a portico with two pillars, nearly all of them built in the 1850s, to realize that the London businessman and merchant now had enough money to cease living ‘over the shop’ in the City and retire to the gentility of South Kensington and Belgravia.
Increasing prosperity meant an increasing elaboration of dress, and we find R. S. Surtees, in one of his novels (Ask Mamma, 1853), complaining that ‘the housemaid now dresses better – finer at all events – than her mistress did twenty years ago, and it is almost impossible to recognize working people when they are in their Sunday dresses’. Skirts continued to expand, and for the first half of the decade the desired effect was obtained by wearing underneath them a larger number of petticoats. The weight of these finally became intolerable, and in 1856 they were replaced by a ‘cage crinoline’ or hooped petticoat.[187]
185 Day dresses, 1853. The skirt with many flounces is very typical of the early 1850s. Its shape is maintained by a multiplicity of petticoats, the crinoline not yet having been brought in to support it.
This was not, of course, the first time that skirts had been supported by hoops. We have already noted the clumsy cart-wheel farthingale of the Elizabethan period and the side panniers of the eighteenth century, but the new crinoline was a much more scientific apparatus, for technology was now sufficiently advanced for the manufacturers to be able to supply flexible steel hoops which could either form a separate garment, hung by tapes from the waist, or be sewn into a petticoat.
When the crinoline was first invented, it must have seemed to women an instrument of liberation. No longer hampered by multiple layers of petticoat, they could, inside their steel cage, move their limbs freely. Of course there was a danger in this, and the caricaturists of the period delighted to show what could happen to crinolined ladies ‘in a high wind’. Legs were still supposed to be invisible, and in case of mischance it was customary to wear long linen pantaloons edged with lace and sometimes reaching to the ankle. Little girls also wore these pantaloons in spite of the fact that their skirts were comparatively short. Indeed, it became a mark of gentility for the lace pantaloons to be seen. Mothers who could not afford the complete garment had to be content with what were called ‘pantalettes’, which were simply tubes of white linen ending just above the knee. These strange compromise garments were sold in enormous numbers.
It seems to be one of the principles of fashion that once an exaggeration has been decided on it becomes ever more exaggerated. Thus, by the end of the decade, the crinoline-supported skirts were truly prodigious, until it was impossible for two women to enter the room together or sit on the same sofa, for the frills of one dress took up all available space. A woman was now a majestic ship, sailing proudly ahead, while a small tender – her male escort – sailed along behind.
186 A Windy Corner, 1864. The crinoline is now worn by every woman, and even by the little girl pushing the primitive perambulator.
187 Maiden helping a woman to dress, c. 1850. The woman wears a corset, and a crinoline over her petticoats: the rigid underwire that gave width to the dress is visible.
All this did not pass without protest. Even before the crinoline had come into being there were rumours from America of a new movement for a rational dress for women. The formidable Mrs Bloomer came to England in 1851 to spread her gospel and to try to induce women to adopt her sensible and certainly not unfeminine costume.[190] This consisted of a simplified version of the bodice in vogue, and a fairly ample skirt which reached well below the knee. Underneath it, however, were to be seen baggy trousers reaching to the ankle, usually with a lace frill at the bottom. This very modest attempt to reform female dress provoked an almost unbelievable outburst of excitement, ridicule and vituperation. What might be called the trouser complex came into full play. Women were endeavouring, it seemed, to ‘wear the trousers’, and the mid-Victorian man regarded this as an outrageous attack on his own privileged position. Punch, that faithful mirror of middle-class opinion in the nineteenth century, brought out dozens of cartoons emphasizing the consequences of a possible sexual revolution, a world in which timid men were in complete subjection to their bloomered spouses: ‘As the husband, shall the wife be; he will have to wear a gown / If he does not quickly make her put her Bloomer short-coats down.’
188 Paris fashions for September 1855.
However, as an attempt to influence contemporary fashion, the Bloomer Movement was a complete failure. A few ‘advanced’ ladies adopted the costume, but the upper classes refused to have anything to do with it, and Mrs Bloomer had to wait for almost fifty years before she had her revenge in the adoption of ‘bloomers’ for cycling.
Her attempt was premature, for the mid-nineteenth century was the high-water mark of male domination, and in such patriarchal periods the clothes of the two sexes are as clearly differentiated as possible. A visitor from Mars contemplating a man in frock coat and top hat and a woman in a crinoline might well have supposed that they belonged to different species. And the crinoline certainly bore a symbolic relation to the age in which it thrived. In one of its aspects it symbolized female fertility, as an expansion of the apparent size of the hips always seems to do. This was an age of big families, and since the rate of infant mortality was not quite so high as it had been in previous periods, the population of England expanded rapidly.
189 In a box at the Opera, 1855.
190 Mrs Amelia Bloomer, c. 1850. Mrs Bloomer’s very modest attempts to reform female dress met with a storm of hostility and ridicule.
In another sense the crinoline was a symbol of the supposed unapproachability of women. The expanded skirt seemed to say: ‘You cannot come near enough to me even to kiss my hand.’ But of course the enormously expanded skirt was a hollow sham; it was itself an instrument of seduction. As I have written elsewhere, ‘when we see engravings of ladies with skirts like old-fashioned tea-cosies we are apt to think of the structure as solid and immovable; but, of course, nothing was further from the truth. The crinoline was in a constant state of agitation, thrown from side to side. It was like a rather restless captive balloon, and not at all, except in shape, like the igloo of the Eskimos. It swayed now to one side, now to the other, tipped up a little, swung forward and backward. Any pressure on one side of the steel hoops was communicated by their elasticity to the other side, and resulted in a certain upward shooting of the skirt. It was probably this upward shooting which gave mid-Victorian men their complex about ankles, and it certainly resulted in a new fashion in boots’ (Taste and Fashion). Throughout the Forties the footwear of women had been reduced to a heelless slipper, scarcely seen among the voluminousness of the dress; but now boots came in, with higher heels and laced halfway up towards the calf. The crinoline was certainly not a moral garment, and the period in which it reached its greatest development, Second Empire France, was not a moral period. The social history of the Second Empire is the history of the grande cocotte.
191 La crinolonomanie – Une tournure à faire tourner toutes les têtes!, Charles Vernier. The silhouette of male and female costume has never differed more drastically than in 1860.
There certainly seems to have been a symbolic relationship between the crinoline and the Second Empire, with its material prosperity, its extravagance, its expansionist tendencies – and its hypocrisy. And the Queen of the Crinoline was the Empress Eugénie herself.[192] She was perhaps the last Royal personage to have a direct and immediate influence on fashion, and the crinoline suited her style to perfection. It was never more proudly or effectively displayed than during her reign. And now a new race of fashion designers had arisen to transform the whole world of haute couture.
In former ages the fashion designer had been a comparatively humble person, visiting ladies in their homes. And the vast majority of them had been women. Now M. Worth, who, in spite of being an Englishman, had in ten years made himself a dictator of the mode in Paris, required ladies (with the exception of Eugénie and her court) to come to him. The French historian Hippolyte Taine described the scene, as ladies, anxious to be dressed by Worth, waited upon him in his salon:
‘This little dry, black, nervous creature sees them in a velvet coat, carelessly stretched out on a divan, a cigar between his lips. He says to them, “Walk! turn! good! come back in a week, and I will compose you a toilette which will suit you.” It is not they who choose it, it is he. They are only too happy to let him do it, and even for that need an introduction. Mme B., a personage of the Beau Monde and elegant to boot, went to him last month to order a dress. “Madame”, he said, “By whom are you presented?” “I don’t understand.” “I’m afraid you must be presented in order to be dressed by me.” She went away, suffocated with rage. But others stayed, saying, “I don’t care how rude he is so long as he dresses me.”’ Worth soon had innumerable imitators, but few or none equalled his panache or his success.
192 The Empress Eugénie and her maids of honour, F. X. Winterhalter, c. 1860.
The crinoline lasted for about fifteen years and in that time went through several modifications. It reached its greatest extent about the year 1860. At that time it projected as much to the front as to the back. The skirt looked like a bee-hive, not only from the front but from the side. Waists were tight, and the bodice was fitted to the figure; but out of doors it was the custom to wear a shawl or mantalette, with the result that a woman’s general appearance was that of a broad-based triangle, the effect being enhanced by the smallness of the bonnet, which had now begun to slip back from the forehead to reveal the front hair. Then, in the mid-1860s, the crinoline began to slip to the back of the skirt, leaving the front more or less straight, and in 1868 there was a further change, the reinforcement of the skirt having slipped entirely to the back and being indeed no more than a half-crinoline.[196] There was a mass of material at the back, ending in a train, and when the crinoline was removed altogether, towards the end of the Sixties, this was looped up into a kind of bustle, the characteristic of the next decade. The crinoline, in fact, having served as a symbol of the Second Empire, collapsed with it like a pricked balloon. In the street it was the fashion for younger women to wear a shorter skirt, which could be looped up by means of strings to reveal a skirt underneath, but this was a very temporary fashion, the skirts of the Seventies being excessively long and trailing.
193 Ball gown designs by Worth, c. 1865. As Worth could not draw, he had lithographs made of heads and arms and then sketched in the dress.
194 Le Journal des Dames et des Demoiselles, 1864, Belgian edition. The crinoline has begun to slip to the back and is no longer a perfect circle.
195 Women in the garden, Claude Monet, 1866–67. Even in light summer dresses the crinoline was still considered essential.
The defeat of France in 1870 and the troubles of the following year kept Paris out of the picture for a while, and it was some time before she recovered her ascendancy. Contemporary writers saw a return to a greater simplicity, though to our eyes the dresses of the early 1870s seem voluminous and luxurious enough. They even seem a little garish, an effect to which two recent inventions contributed. One was the sewing machine, and the other the introduction of aniline dyes. Gone were the subdued soft colours of the former decade, their place being taken by all kinds of bright hues. It was the fashion to have the bodice of a different colour from the skirt and to cut the dress out of two different materials, one patterned and one plain, the plain portion of the dress being trimmed with the patterned material and the patterned portion being trimmed with the plain. The effect was sometimes that of a patchwork quilt, and a writer in the magazine The Young Englishwoman (1876) complains that ‘it is now impossible to describe dresses with exactitude: the skirts are draped so mysteriously, the arrangements of trimmings is usually one-sided and the fastenings are so curiously contrived that if I study any particular toilette for even a quarter of an hour the task of writing down how it is all made remains hopeless.’
196 London and Paris fashions for 1869. The silhouette is now straight down the front and the crinoline is about to give place to the bustle.
197 Headdresses, 1870.
198 Fashion plate from the Tailor and Cutter, c. 1870. A curious example of the practice at this period of sticking the heads of well-known people on a fashion plate.
Bonnets had now given way to hats, very small hats perched over the forehead and worn on top of a mass of hair which now formed an enormous chignon of plaits or curls. So much hair was required for this new fashion that many women were unable to provide it themselves, and enormous quantities of hair was imported and made up into ‘scalpettes’and ‘frizzettes’. Seen from the side, the shape of the back of the hair was a curious echo of the shape of the back of the skirt.
The dresses were of two kinds: those which were all in one piece (the so-called ‘Princess’ style) and those which consisted of a separate bodice and skirt. The jacket bodice was carried over from the previous decade and was made with short basques or with long basques forming a kind of overskirt. A loose skirt in a contrasting material or colour was sometimes worn with this garment; and a similar effect was obtained from the cuirasse bodice, which came in about 1874 and often had a plastron of different material down the front. The cuirasse bodice was very tight and moulded to the hips. This necessitated the use of a long, tight corset, and ladies who did not wish to encase themselves in this in the home wore a blouse. Sleeves were in general tight. An overskirt was sometimes used; it was draped at the sides in various ways, and in the early 1870s was, as we have seen, bunched out at the back into a bustle.
The ‘Princess’ style was capable of considerable variety, one of the most popular of which was the polonaise, sometimes buttoned all down the front. The popularity of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge brought in the ‘Dolly Varden’ dress. It was usually of brightly patterned chintz or cretonne, and was fondly imagined by its wearers to be some kind of eighteenth-century costume. It was worn with a picture hat tilted forward over the forehead. At the end of the decade a knitted costume came in. It was made fashionable by Mrs Langtry, the ‘Jersey Lily’, and was therefore known as the ‘jersey dress’. Another variety was the tea gown, which was loose enough to allow corsets to be discarded. Originally intended as a robe de chambre – and the name indicates its French origin – it had become very elaborate by the late 1870s, with many frills and flounces and much lace. It was essentially a matron’s gown, and a lace cap was always worn with it.
199 Lady’s and child’s dresses, September 1873, from the Magasin des Demoiselles.
200 Madame Moitessier, J.-A.-D. Ingres, 1844/5–56.
201 Omnibus Life in London, William Egley, 1859. In the mid-century the crinoline was still in full swing in spite of the inconvenience of squeezing it into the narrow confines of an omnibus.
202 Ladies’ and child’s costume, March 1876.
By the middle of the decade the bunched-up bustle had disappeared. The skirts were still full at the back, but the fullness was lower down, and even day dresses were provided with a surprisingly long train – to the disgust of Ruskin and others, who pointed out how very unhygienic such a style must necessarily be. Skirts were extremely hampering and, about 1876, we find in Punch a whole series of cartoons depicting ladies whose dress was so tight that they could neither sit down nor climb stairs. The waist was ferociously tight-laced, and it was made to look even smaller by wearing the corset, so to speak, outside, as part of the bodice running down to a sharp point in front. This became the prevailing mode in the early 1880s, the skirt emerging underneath the corset bodice being horizontally draped to make the waist look smaller still. In the mid-1880s there was a revival of the bustle, but it was of a different kind. It stuck out horizontally from the small of the back, but the supporting structure was no longer, as it had been in the early 1870s, a contrivance of horsehair. We find advertisements of ‘the braided wire health bustle, warranted to be less heating to the spine than any others’. There was also the ‘Langtry’ bustle, an arrangement of metal bands working on a pivot.[207] It could be raised when sitting down and sprang back automatically into place when the lady rose to her feet! One of the most extraordinary inventions in the whole history of fashion.
203 Evening dresses, c. 1877.
204 Too Early, James Tissot, 1873. The gentleman in the doorway has brought his ‘gibus’ (crush hat) into the ballroom, as was the custom.
205 La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1884–86. The bustle of the mid-1880s is quite different from the bustle of the 1870s.
206 Evening and visiting dress, 1884. The extreme form of the second bustle built over a wire frame.
One cannot omit from a study of the 1880s some reference to Aesthetic costume, and to the Rational Dress movement. Some intellectuals, as a protest against the ugliness of contemporary fashion, began to wear clothes influenced by those of the Pre-Raphaelites. In essentials they followed the lines of fashion but were looser, with full sleeves, and were worn with no corset, heelless shoes and softer, less formally arranged hairstyles. Punch satirized these clothes, particularly male Aesthetic dress: knee-breeches, a velvet jacket, a flowing tie and wideawake hat.[208] This was the costume worn by Oscar Wilde, who was associated with the Aesthetes and the Rational Dress movement, on his lecture tour of America, and also by Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, which made the whole Aesthetic movement the target of its ridicule. Members of the Rational Dress movement, which originated in 1881, were concerned about the unhealthiness of current fashion, protesting particularly about the tight and deforming corset and about unnecessary layers of clothes, padding and boning. Although scorned by many at the time, the movement did eventually achieve its aims, as women began to lead more active lives and rigid corsets thus became unfashionable.
207 Bustle advertisements, 1888–89. The ‘Langtry’ bustle folded up to allow the wearer to sit down and sprang into place again when she got up.
208 Nincompoopiana – The Mutual Admiration Society, George du Maurier, 1880. Satire on the costumes and attitudes of the Aesthetes.
Ordinary male costume at this period showed little change from that of the preceding decade. The cut-away coat was worn only in the evening and was embellished with black silk facings. For daytime the frock coat had now established itself as the accepted town wear. Another possibility was the morning coat, cut away in a curve over the hips and buttoning rather high over the chest. Among the young, the short jacket was becoming increasingly popular, particularly at Oxford and Cambridge. Double-breasted ‘reefer’ jackets were also worn, especially for yachting. The influence of sport is very noticeable at this period. All kinds of new sports were now coming into favour, and it was impossible to practise them with any comfort in the formal dress of the day. For shooting, a man could wear a Norfolk jacket, with its characteristic belt and vertical pleats, and rather loose knee-breeches with gaiters. The hat worn with this outfit was of soft felt and sometimes had a dent in the crown like the later homburg. Cricket costume was the same as today, except that it was still permissible to wear a coloured shirt. Bright-coloured blazers were now coming into fashion.
209 The Reception, James Tissot, 1886. No nineteenth-century painter is more useful to the costume historian than Tissot. He observed the toilettes of the period with the greatest attention and painted them with meticulous accuracy.
For the new sport of cycling, which was still in the ‘penny-farthing’ stage, an extraordinary costume was devised: tight-fitting knee-breeches, a very tight, military-looking jacket and a little pillbox cap. The really smart wearer of this outfit carried a bugle to warn pedestrians of his approach. This peculiar get-up does not seem to have been adopted in France and Germany, where cycling was almost equally popular.
The most popular overcoat was the chesterfield, which began by being knee-length but gradually grew longer; it was made of such materials as miltons, worsteds and cheviots, in black, brown, blue or grey. It usually had silk facings and was edged with braid. The top frock was almost a replica of the frock coat underneath, except, of course, that it was cut more loosely and was generally made of heavier material. The inverness and the ulster were capes, or rather half-capes, attached to a coat. A short double-breasted overcoat, with a shoulder cape sometimes trimmed with fur, was called the ‘Gladstone’ overcoat; another variety with a half-circle cape was known as the ‘Albert’. In the evening the tail coat was still essential at all formal functions, but the dinner jacket was increasingly worn at home or when dining at the club. When the ladies had retired, it was permitted to put on a smoking jacket. This was similar in form to the dinner jacket, but was almost invariably quilted, presumably for warmth, since the smoking rooms and billiard rooms of country houses were often unheated.
210 The Picnic, James Tissot, 1875. Informal clothes, painted in the garden of Tissot’s own house in St John’s Wood.
211 Les Parapluies, Renoir, c. 1884. Renoir is a very useful portrayer of ordinary middle- and working-class costume at this period.
212 Male and female cycling costume, 1878–80.
213 Male and female seaside costume, 1886.
214 British spring and summer costume, 1884.
There is little difference between male costume in the 1880s and in the 1890s, except for the increasing use of informal attire. It was still considered rather ‘caddish’ to wear anything but a frock coat or a morning coat in town, when paying calls or when taking part in the Sunday church parade in Hyde Park. Lounge suits could be of blue serge or patterned tweeds. With them it was quite permissible to wear a fancy waistcoat, sometimes extremely brightly patterned, although the Tailor and Cutter issued a warning in 1890 that ‘gentlemen with abdominal convexity will use discretion in the employment of hues and patterns calculated to draw attention to that unromantic formation’. Trousers in the early 1890s were of the peg-top variety, and dashing young men began to wear them with turn-ups. These, however, were still looked on with disfavour, and it created quite a sensation when, in 1893, Viscount Lewisham appeared in the House of Commons wearing them.
Ties and bows could be adjusted in several ways. Sometimes they were ready-made. The height of the collar increased steadily throughout the decade until it became a real ‘choker’.
The bustle finally disappeared from female costume, together with the horizontal skirt draperies so characteristic of the 1880s. Dresses were smooth over the hips and made to fit more snugly by being cut on the cross. Skirts were long and bell-shaped and usually had a train even when worn in the street. Day dresses were high in the neck and finished with ruching or a large bow of tulle. A good deal of lace was worn, even day blouses being elaborately adorned. Some evening gowns were made entirely of lace, and much was worn also on petticoats, which now assumed a new importance. Since it was impossible to cross the street without holding up the long skirt with one hand, the gesture inevitably displayed the lace frilling of the petticoat, which seems to have had at this period an extraordinary amount of erotic appeal. Sleeves, which at the beginning of the decade were peaked at the shoulders but otherwise fairly narrow, had grown to enormous proportions by 1894. Some sleeves were so large that cushions were necessary to keep them in place. They were even thought essential in stage costume and fancy dress – a requirement which, on the stage, made any attempt at historical accuracy in period plays an impossibility.
By now, the bicycle had become immensely popular. This made it inevitable that some kind of bifurcated garment should be worn, since it was impossible to ride a bicycle in a trailing skirt. Divided skirts were one solution and so were baggy knickerbockers called ‘bloomers’. They caused almost as much excitement as the original bloomer campaign of the 1850s. They were ridiculed in the Press and denounced in the pulpit, but it was all to no avail; young women continued to wear them. Indeed, the new enthusiasm for outdoor sports of all kinds made it necessary to wear more rational garments in general and there was a new vogue for the tailored suit, consisting of jacket, skirt and ‘shirtwaister’. The odd thing is that when women went in for outdoor pursuits they insisted on wearing men’s hats and men’s stiff white collars. Sports clothes for women were in general heavy, made of homespuns or tweeds, and the colours were usually dark.
215 Portrait of Sonja Knips, Gustav Klimt, 1898.
216, 217 Examples of the extreme form of the balloon sleeve in the mid-1890s: Autumn walking dress, 1895 (LEFT); At the races, 1896 (RIGHT).
Hats throughout the decade were rather small and perched squarely on the top of the head. Outdoor garments consisted of mantles, cloaks and capes, the first two terms being more or less interchangeable. The cape, however, was usually shorter, fitted closely over the shoulders and reached to the waist. The early mantles often had medici collars up to the ears, kept in position by means of wires. Many women wore the masculine chesterfields and three-quarter-length coats. Shoes had comparatively high heels and rounded toes and were laced up the front. Boots could be laced or buttoned. They were made of leather or cloth. Stockings were nearly always black, of lisle thread in the daytime and silk in the evening. In the evening it was fashionable to wear very long suede gloves, sometimes with as many as twenty buttons, and to carry a very large fan of curved or straight ostrich feathers. Jewellery was extensively worn. Colours in general were rather bright and discordant, the favourite of all being yellow. It is no accident that the most exciting publication of the decade was called The Yellow Book.
Political events were not without their effect on fashion. The dominance of Paris was still unquestioned, and the French government was now inclined to ally itself with Russia. The Russian fleet visited Toulon in 1893, and three years later the Tsar himself came to Paris amid scenes of the greatest enthusiasm. This inaugurated a vogue for furs, which were adopted by women as well as by men: in former ages fur had been almost entirely a male prerogative. The position was now somewhat reversed, in that women wore furs in the form not only of trimmings, but of whole fur coats, whereas men’s fur coats had the fur on the inside, the fur being visible only in the collar and the cuffs.
218 Cycling dress, March 1894.
219 Riding costume, February 1894.
The 1890s as a whole was a period of changing values. The old, rigid society-mould was visibly breaking up, with South African millionaires and other nouveaux riches storming the citadels of the aristocracy. For the young there was a new breath of freedom in the air, symbolized both by their sports costumes and by the extravagance of their ordinary dress. It was perfectly plain that the Victorian Age was drawing to its close.
220 Walking dress, February 1899.
221 Travelling costume, 1899.