Fashion in the 1850s

Width Built from Layers, Then from Steel

At the start of the decade, width was achieved the laborious way. The domed skirt inherited from the 1840s was made fuller with flounces — deep ruffles usually in tiers of three, gathered tightly at the top and stiffened with horsehair braid at the bottom — worn over layered petticoats. The effect was magnificent and heavy, and it set the problem the decade would solve. The steel cage crinoline of 1856 replaced much of that weight with a light framework of hoops: the skirt could expand further while asking far less of the wearer's hips and legs, and its surface could settle smooth instead of breaking into tiers. Flounces faded because they were no longer needed to fake fullness. The cage did not make dress modest or practical by modern standards — pantalettes remained essential underneath, since a hoop can tilt — but it changed the engineering of fashion and made the great bell skirt of the late 1850s and 1860s possible.

Printed to Fit the Dress

Fabric design adapted ingeniously to the flounced skirt. Special dress fabrics were printed a la disposition, with a small figured print over most of the cloth and an elaborate coordinating border print down one selvage. The dressmaker cut the fabric so the border decorated the flounces and parts of the bodice or sleeves, meaning the pattern was designed for the garment's construction rather than simply repeated across it. Borders landed exactly where the eye was meant to go: at the hem of each tier and at the edges of sleeves and bodice. It is a useful reminder that the wide skirt was not only a silhouette but a canvas, planned at the printing stage.

The First Stirrings of Dress Reform

Alongside expansion, the decade saw the beginnings of dress reform — criticism of fashionable dress for its weight, restriction and impracticality, and early attempts at alternatives. Reform made little immediate dent in the fashionable silhouette, which grew wider after 1856, not narrower. Its importance in the 1850s is as an argument that would keep returning: that women's clothing should answer to health and movement, not only to display. Hair and headwear, by contrast, stayed comparatively simple: hair in a chignon with sides puffed over the ears or in clusters of curls, and deep bonnets outdoors, framing the face above the wide dress below.

Above the wide skirt, dress was carefully zoned by time of day and degree of formality. A new fashion for a jacket bodice, buttoned in front and worn over a chemisette, offered a neater, more tailored daytime alternative to bodices that fastened in back with hooks and eyes. Day bodices covered the shoulders and arms fully, even as their pagoda sleeves opened wide over linen engageantes, while evening dress did the opposite: a very low neckline falling off the shoulders and short sleeves exposed what day dress concealed. That contrast was systematic, not incidental. A fashionable wardrobe in the 1850s was a set of calibrated variations — covered and uncovered, jacketed and low-necked — all arranged over the same expanding foundation of flounce, petticoat and, after 1856, the steel cage that held the whole structure out.