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Victorian fashion refers to fashion in clothing in the Victorian era, the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. The term is strictly used only with regard to the United Kingdom and its colonies, but is often used loosely for Western fashions of the period. Women's fashionable clothing started with a straight Regency silhouette, bloomed into exaggerated skirts and sleeves, moved to small shoulders and even wider skirts supported by crinolines and hoops, and narrowed by way of the bustle to hobble skirts. Charles Frederick Worth, a London draper who relocated to Paris in the 1840s, became the father of haute couture and the prototype of the fashion designer as dictator of modes.
The term "Victorian fashion" refers to fashion in clothing in the Victorian era, or the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). It is strictly used only with regard to the United Kingdom and its colonies, but is often used loosely to refer to Western fashions of the period. It may also refer to a supposedly unified style in clothing, home decor, manners, and morals, or a culture, said to be prevalent in the West during this period.
Those who have studied the period in detail would protest against vacuous generalizations. Clothing, decor, manners, and morals varied from year to year, country to to country, and class to class. Whether or not there is a style or unified culture connecting a Scottish fisherwoman, for example, and an aristocratic London lady, might well be debated.
If we carefully restrict our language, however, and take Victorian fashion to refer to the dress, or in a wider sense, the culture of an upper-middle-class London family of fashion and conventional attitudes, and describe it as it varied from decade to decade, we may be able to usefully describe these phenomena.
We can also usefully speak of contemporary stereotypes of the Victorian era. These stereotypes, while not historically valid, help us understand current uses of the term Victorian.
Several general style trends of the Victorian era transcend any one facet of fashion, but rather had broad influence across clothing styles, architecture, literature, and the decorative arts. Many of these had their roots in the 18th century but flowered in the Victorian age. These include:
The Great Exhibition of 1851 had a marked impact on fashion, especially home decor, and even social reform movements influenced fashion, through dress reform and rational dress.
Methods of clothing production and distribution varied enormously over the course of Victoria's long reign.
In 1837, cloth was manufactured (in the mill towns of northern England, Scotland, and Ireland) but clothing was generally custom-made by seamstresses, milliners, tailors, hatters, glovers, corsetiers, and many other specialized tradespeople, who served a local clientele in small shops. Families who could not afford to patronize specialists made their own clothing, or bought and modified used clothing.
By 1907, clothing was increasingly factory-made and sold in large, fixed price department stores. Custom sewing and home sewing were still significant, but on the decline.
New machinery and materials changed clothing in many ways.
The introduction of the lock-stitch sewing machine in mid-century simplified both home and boutique dressmaking, and enabled a fashion for lavish application of trim that would have been prohibitively time-consuming if done by hand. Lace machinery made lace at a fraction of the cost of the old, laborious methods.
New materials from far-flung British colonies gave rise to new types of clothing (such as rubber making gumboots and mackintoshes possible). Chemists developed new, cheap, bright dyes that displaced the old animal or vegetable dyes.
Women's fashionable clothing started with a straight, Regency silhouette, bloomed into exaggerated skirts and sleeves, moved to small shoulders and even wider skirts supported by crinolines (that had many dangers) and hoops, and narrowed by way of the bustle to hobble skirts.
Charles Frederick Worth, the "father of haute couture" and the prototype of the fashion designer as the dictator of modes, was a London draper who relocated to Paris in the 1840s. His success lead to the dominance of Paris fashion houses over women's upper-class clothing in both Britain and America.
Reactions to the elaborate confections of French fashion led to various calls for reform on the grounds of both beauty (Artistic and Aesthetic dress) and health (dress reform). Arthur Lasenby Liberty challenged the dominance of French fashion when he showed English gowns in Paris at the end of the century.
Men's fashionable clothing was perhaps the least volatile, but there was still an enormous difference between the wasp waist and frock coats of the 1830s dandy and the sober sack suits and Norfolk jackets of 1901.
Home decor started spare, veered into the elaborately draped and decorated style we today regard as Victorian, then embraced the retro-chic of William Morris as well as pseudo-Japonaiserie.
Charles Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and other Details (1868) attempted to educate the middle class on the proper artistic decoration of homes, which required "taste" rather than lavish expenditure.
Lytton Strachey writing to Virginia Woolf, November 8, 1912:
(Cited in The Letters of Lytton Strachey, edited by Paul Levy, Penguin, 2005. ISBN 0670891126.)
Lytton Strachey's 1918 book of biographical essays, Eminent Victorians, is an amusing but acerbic attack on a constellation of attitudes that Strachey believed to be Victorian. He was expressing the attitude of his time, in which forward-thinking men and women despised the staid, prim, proper, and fusty era just past. To a great extent, contemporary stereotypes of "Victorian fashion" carry on the Strachey tradition of seeing the period as a whole.
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For most, the Victorian period is still a byword for sexual repression. Men's clothing is seen as formal and stiff, women's as fussy and over-done. Clothing covered the entire body, we are told, and even the glimpse of an ankle was scandalous. Corsets constricted women's bodies and women's lives. Homes were gloomy, dark, cluttered with massive and over-ornate furniture and proliferating bric-a-brac. Even piano legs were scandalous, and covered with tiny pantalettes.
Of course, much of this is untrue, or a gross exaggeration. Men's formal clothing may have been less colorful than it was in the previous century, but brilliant waistcoats and cummerbunds provided a touch of color, and smoking jackets and dressing gowns were often of rich Oriental brocades. Corsets stressed a woman's sexiness, exaggerating hips and bust by contrast with a tiny waist. Women's ball gowns bared the shoulders and tops of the breasts. The tight-fitting jersey dresses of the 1880s may have covered the body, but they left little to the imagination.Home furnishing was not necessarily ornate or overstuffed. However, those who could afford lavish draperies and expensive ornaments, and wanted to display their wealth, would often do so. Since the Victorian era was one of extreme social mobility, there were ever more nouveaux riches making a rich show.
The materials used in decoration may also have been darker and heavier than those used today, simply as a matter of practicality. London was noisy and its air was full of soot from countless coal fires. Hence those who could afford it draped their windows in heavy, sound-muffling curtains, and chose colors that didn't show soot quickly. When all washing was done by hand, curtains were not washed as frequently as they might be today.
There is no actual evidence that piano legs were considered scandalous. Pianos and tables were often draped with shawls or cloths -- but if the shawls hid anything, it was the cheapness of the furniture. There are references to lower-middle-class families covering up their pine tables rather than show that they couldn't afford mahogany. The piano leg story seems to have originated in Captain Frederick Marryat's 1839 book, Diary in America, as a satirical comment on American prissiness.
Victorian manners, however, may have been as strict as imagined on the surface. One simply did not speak publicly about sex, childbirth, and such matters, at least in the respectable middle and upper classes. However, as is well known, discretion covered a multitude of sins. Prostitution flourished. Upper-class men and women indulged in adulterous liaisons, in French fashion. Then of course there were the artists and bohemians, as well as the lower classes.
Some people now look back on the Victorian era with wistful nostalgia. They imagine a dream world of lacy dresses, lavish balls, country house parties, and charming cottages surrounded by old-fashioned flowers (see, for example, the paintings of Thomas Kinkade). Historians would say that this is as much a distortion of the real history as the stereotypes emphasizing Victorian repression and prudery.
Also notable is a contemporary counter-cultural trend called steampunk. Youth who dress steampunk wear Victorian-style clothing that has been "tweaked" in edgy ways: tattered, distorted, melded with Goth, Punk, and Rivet styles.
The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/victorian_fashion 1/14/06
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Sixty-four years is longer than most fashion eras by a factor of six, and the first discipline in using the term is remembering that. Those who have studied the period in detail protest against vacuous generalisations, because clothing, decor, manners and morals varied from year to year, country to country and class to class, and whether a unified style connects a Scottish fisherwoman and an aristocratic London lady is debatable. Used carefully, the term can be restricted to the dress, or in the wider sense the culture, of an upper-middle-class London family of fashion and conventional attitudes, described as it varied from decade to decade. On that footing the sequence is clear and dramatic. Women's fashion began the reign with a straight Regency silhouette, bloomed into exaggerated skirts and sleeves, moved to small shoulders and wider skirts on crinolines and hoops, and narrowed through the bustle toward hobble skirts. Men's fashion travelled from the wasp waist and frock coats of the 1830s dandy to the sober sack suits and Norfolk jackets of 1901: less volatile, but an enormous difference across the span.
Broad style currents ran across clothing, architecture, literature and the decorative arts together. Orientalism, the romanticising of the Scottish Highlands, the Gothic revival, which in turn generated the Pre-Raphaelites and Artistic Dress, and Aestheticism all had roots in the eighteenth century but flowered in the Victorian age. The Great Exhibition of 1851 had a marked impact on fashion, especially home decor, putting manufactured goods from across the world in front of a mass public. Even social reform movements influenced fashion, through dress reform and rational dress. Home decor followed a parallel arc, starting spare, veering into the elaborately draped and decorated style now regarded as Victorian, then embracing the retro-chic of William Morris and pseudo-Japonaiserie, with Charles Eastlake's Hints on Household Taste of 1868 attempting to educate the middle class that proper artistic decoration required taste rather than lavish expenditure.
The production revolution inside the period is as important as any silhouette. New machinery and materials changed clothing in many ways. The lock-stitch sewing machine in mid-century simplified home and boutique dressmaking and enabled lavish application of trim that would have been prohibitively time-consuming by hand. Lace machinery made lace at a fraction of the cost of the old laborious methods. New materials from far-flung British colonies gave rise to new clothing, such as rubber making gumboots and mackintoshes possible. Chemists developed new, cheap, bright dyes that displaced the old animal and vegetable dyes, changing the colour of ordinary clothing, not just of luxury dress. Each innovation moved fashion's centre of gravity from the individual maker toward the factory and the store, and from local taste toward a national market that magazines and department stores could address at once.
Against that industrial background stands the period's most influential individual. Charles Frederick Worth, the father of haute couture and the prototype of the fashion designer as the dictator of modes, was a London draper who relocated to Paris in the 1840s, and his success led to the dominance of Paris fashion houses over women's upper-class clothing in both Britain and America. Reactions to the elaborate confections of French fashion produced the period's internal opposition, calls for reform on grounds of both beauty, in Artistic and Aesthetic dress, and health, in dress reform. Arthur Lasenby Liberty challenged the dominance of French fashion when he showed English gowns in Paris at the end of the century. Victorian fashion is therefore not one story but three running together: industry making clothing cheaper and more uniform, Paris making it more authoritative and artistic, and reformers arguing that both were deforming the body and the taste of the wearer. The modern fashion system, with its designer names, seasonal collections, factory production and department stores, is recognisably assembled by 1901 out of those three forces.
The contemporary stereotypes of the era descend largely from its immediate successors. Lytton Strachey's 1918 book Eminent Victorians was an amusing but acerbic attack on attitudes he believed Victorian, expressing a generation that despised the staid, prim, proper and fusty era just past, and much modern usage carries on that tradition. The prudery stereotype survives detailed examination badly. Men's formal clothing may have been less colourful than in the previous century, but brilliant waistcoats and cummerbunds provided colour, and smoking jackets and dressing gowns were often of rich Oriental brocades. Corsets stressed a woman's sexiness, exaggerating hips and bust by contrast with a tiny waist. Women's ball gowns bared shoulders and the tops of breasts, and the tight-fitting jersey dresses of the 1880s covered the body while leaving little to the imagination. Heavy home furnishing had practical causes: London air was full of soot from countless coal fires, so those who could afford it draped windows in heavy, sound-muffling curtains and chose colours that did not show soot quickly. Victorian manners were strict in public speech about sex and childbirth among the respectable classes, while discretion covered prostitution, adultery and the bohemian world.
The opposite distortion is nostalgia. Some people now look back on the Victorian era with wistful longing for lacy dresses, lavish balls, country house parties and charming cottages among old-fashioned flowers, in the manner of Thomas Kinkade's paintings. Historians regard that dream world as as much a distortion as the stereotype of repression. The contemporary counter-cultural trend of steampunk takes a third route, wearing Victorian-style clothing tweaked in edgy ways, tattered and distorted and melded with Goth, Punk and Rivet styles. All three responses, contempt, nostalgia and playful revival, confirm the period's hold on the imagination. Victorian fashion remains the reference point against which ideas about modesty, ornament, industry and respectability in dress are still argued.
Victorian fashion covers the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837 to 1901, and strictly refers to the United Kingdom and its colonies, though it is often used loosely for Western fashions of the period. Clothing, decor, manners and morals varied from year to year, country to country and class to class within that span.
In 1837 cloth was manufactured in mill towns but clothing was generally custom-made by seamstresses, milliners, tailors, hatters, glovers and corsetiers serving a local clientele. By 1907 clothing was increasingly factory-made and sold in large, fixed-price department stores, helped by the lock-stitch sewing machine and lace machinery.
There is no actual evidence that piano legs were considered scandalous. Pianos and tables were often draped with shawls or cloths, but if the shawls hid anything it was the cheapness of the furniture, and the story seems to have originated in Captain Frederick Marryat's 1839 Diary in America as a satirical comment on American prissiness.