Changing Victorian Fashions - From the 1830s to the Crinoline

Across the decades between 1837 and 1901, the Victorian-era fashion silhouette was in a continual state of drastic changes. Fashion has a way of swinging like a pendulum between extremes; between restraint and extravagance, simplicity and opulence. With the aid of corsets, padded bodices, and elaborate under-structures such as crinolines and hip pads, Victorian dress became almost architectural. These garments did more than clothe the body, they sculpted it. They encapsulated and exhibited the wearer, serving simultaneously as statements of identity and symbols of status.

In an age of rapid social and economic transformation, clothing was a visual language of progress. Dress in the Victorian era allowed affluent wearers to demonstrate the middle- and upper-class prosperity of an industrial society, and to command physical space by the clothing’s volume. In the 1800s, women of means often changed their attire multiple times a day, at least once in the late morning and again before dinner. Each hour and activity demanded its own costume, a reflection of an expanding consumer market tailored to those with disposable income. While most people worked extremely long days, a small but notable part of society fuelled a new type of quasi fast fashion.

There were different outfits for different parts of the day and different activities, part of a growing market made for a social demographic with the disposable cash for consumerism. The option to buy more clothes had become more accessible due to the industrial revolution, and the introduction of ready-made and factory-made fabric and garments. Fortunes made in the new economic realities of this period also allowed for greater spending. This made a vast variety of frequently changing dress styles possible. There was:

• The Informal ‘Undress’: the dressing gown, and the morning dress for receiving home visits and attending to household tasks;

• The Public ‘Half Dress’: the day dress, the visiting dress, the afternoon dress, the walking costume to go for promenades, the carriage dress to see and be seen in town, and the riding habit;

• And Grand ‘Full Dress’: the splendid dinner and evening toilette with low necklines and short sleeves, and the most extravagant ball gowns and ‘Full-Dress’ toilette for very formal occasions at court.

The dissemination of these ever-changing fashions relied on the print technology of this period. The Victorian era was a golden age of fashion magazines, and print publications in general. With literacy rates on the rise and printing costs falling, magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar or the Journal des Demoiselles flourished.

Their fashion plates circulated widely among networks of friends and families, becoming topics of conversation and inspiration. Women ordered garments from the makers who advertised in these magazines, stitched decorations from the patterns provided, or brought the prints to their dressmakers of their choice.

After the years of the neoclassical Empire-waisted gowns of the early nineteenth century (the era of the likes of Jane Austen), the hourglass figure started coming back into fashion by degrees. By the mid-1820s, the waistline reached its natural position on the body and long stays (corsets) were worn. The waist was made to look particularly small by the contrast of increasingly full skirts (even padded with animal hair to give them shape) and rather wide, voluminous sleeves shaped by inserted corset boning and padded under-sleeves. In the 1830s, the hour-glass silhouette is then fully present. Hairstyles mirrored this sense of drama. The hair was often arranged in lofty loops, or even doughnut-shaped rings, adorned with silk flowers and foliage. It was a style ripe for caricature and satirical prints.

When Queen Victoria ascended the throne on 28 June 1838, she did so in a gown that reflected this very fashion, accompanied by ladies-in-waiting dressed in similarly grand attire. On the continent in German-speaking regions, this is the Biedermeier era. Yet, as always, fashion evolved swiftly. Already by the mid-1840s, significant alterations are visible. By the mid-1840s, the wide sleeves were largely deflated and a fitted, narrow shoulder marked the fashion. The skirts grew usually somewhat less puffy and more conical, but often layered or decorated. Decorative elements such as lace collars and capelets drew the eye down in a gentle v-shape, creating the illusion of length and grace. The resulting silhouette, two opposing triangles meeting at the waist, refined the earlier hourglass into something smoother and more fluid. When dancing the waltz, a then still relatively new dance considered scandalous due to the closeness of the dancers, these skirts swish and turn gracefully and give a floating effect to the dancing lady.

This, however, was merely an interlude before the next dramatic shift. While the 1840s relied on layers of stiffened and corded petticoats (strengthened with rope sewn into fabric channels), the following decade introduced a revolutionary new foundation garment: the crinoline. Made of steel hoops sewn into fabric tapes, the crinoline provided structure and supported the increasingly immense skirts that would come to define mid-century 1800s fashion.