Panniers (Side Hoops)

The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pannier_%28clothing%29).  1/6/06

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Building Width at the Hips Only

Every skirt support solves the same problem, holding cloth away from the legs, but each places the width differently. The farthingale spread a skirt in a cone all round, and the later crinoline and hoop skirt spread it in a bell. Panniers are the specialists of the family: their hoops push the skirt out sideways from the hips and nowhere else, leaving the front and back of the dress comparatively flat. Seen from the front, a woman in panniers presented the full spectacular width; seen from the side, she was surprisingly slim. That flat front was not wasted, since it displayed the decorated stomacher and the front of the skirt, the parts of an eighteenth-century dress that carried its embroidery and trim.

Construction was light engineering. A pannier frame was made of hoops, of whalebone, cane or steel in later versions, joined by tapes and cloth into two hinged baskets or a single joined frame, tied or fastened at the waist over the shift and stays. Hinged and folding versions existed precisely because the garment was impractical at full width: the hoops could be lifted or pressed in to pass through a doorway, sit in a carriage or take a chair, and wearers learned to approach doors sideways and to manage the frame with their hands when sitting. The dress skirt was arranged over the frame and often trained or draped to show the width to advantage.

The fashion rose with the court dress of the early eighteenth century, reached its famous extreme at the French court in the time of Marie Antoinette, and shrank steadily afterward, first to smaller hip pads and rolls that kept a suggestion of width, then out of fashion altogether as the high-waisted, narrow silhouette of the 1790s arrived. Panniers survive in museum collections and in the study of eighteenth-century silhouette, and exhibitions on the period, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art's material on the eighteenth-century silhouette and support, show the frames beside the dresses they carried. Their logic also survives at smaller scale whenever padding or structure is placed at the hip to shape a modern garment, the same idea reduced from several feet to a few centimetres.