Fashion in the 1890s

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A Plainer Skirt, an Unrelenting Corset

The 1890s are defined by a paradox. Judged by the skirt alone, dress became simpler: in the early years of the decade the skirt was gathered at the waist and fell more naturally over the hips and undergarments than it had for a generation, freed from crinoline, bustle and the skin-tight fit of the late 1870s in turn. Judged by the body inside it, nothing relaxed at all. Corseting continued unmitigated, or even slightly increased in severity, and the tight bodice remained the fixed point of the outfit. Fashion had removed the machinery around the body while keeping, and tightening, the machinery on it. That distinction explains the decade's look: a comparatively natural skirt supporting a highly artificial torso, the hourglass figure that Charles Dana Gibson's drawings made into a cultural ideal.

The Great Sleeve of the Mid-1890s

Into this relative calm, the mid-1890s introduced the decade's one extravagance. Leg-of-mutton sleeves returned — as they had been in the 1830s — and grew in size each year, balancing the A-line, almost bell-like skirt that developed in the same years. For a brief moment the fashionable outline was wide at both shoulder and hem, with the corseted waist pinched between them. Then, in about 1896, the great sleeves disappeared, and the late 1890s reversed course completely: sleeves became tight again, finished with only small puffs or ruffles capping the shoulder and fitted close to the wrist. Skirts likewise changed shape, taking on a trumpet form that fitted closely over the hip and flared just above the knee, a smoother, more column-like line that led directly toward the new century.

Sport, the Tea Gown and the S-Curve

The most forward-looking changes of the 1890s were social. Changing attitudes about what activities were acceptable for women made sportswear genuinely popular, and the bicycling dress and tennis dress were designed for movement in a way fashionable dress had never needed to be — the bicycle in particular demanded a practical answer to the problem of skirts and wheels. At home, aesthetic dress moved into the mainstream through the uncorseted tea gown, accepted for at-home wear and, according to Dress, the Jenness Miller Magazine, worn outside the home for the first time at fashionable American summer resorts. A fashionable woman could thus be uncorseted at tea and tightly corseted at dinner in the same day.

The corset had one more transformation to make. In the very late 1890s it elongated, pushing the body into a slight S-curve silhouette that would remain popular well into the Edwardian era. The skirt had shed its extravagances, the sleeve had shrunk, but the shaped torso carried the 19th-century ideal forward into the 20th century almost intact.