Large dresses were fashion — probably as commonly worn in their day as seven inch stiletto heels are today. The large dresses were large as an indicator of wealth. The larger the dress the more fabric and work that went into them.
The bustle was a fashion accessory in Victorian Europe's upper-class society throughout the nineteenth century. In its function, it replaced the hoop skirt to provide wealthy women with a desirable figure that exaggerated the curvature of the buttocks.
Women of high status wore long dresses because they could afford the extra fabric and the time to sew a dress that hung all the way to the ground. For the less fortunate, a long dress was a mark of wealth and privilege. Today, we can still see a long dress as a sign of elegance and luxury.
A bustle is a padded undergarment used to add fullness, or support the drapery, at the back of women's dresses in the mid-to-late 19th century. Bustles are worn under the skirt in the back, just below the waist, to keep the skirt from dragging. Heavy fabric tended to pull the back of a skirt down and flatten it.
The main reason for keeping boys in dresses was toilet training, or the lack thereof.
When did boys stop wearing skirts? Up until about 100 years ago boys wore dresses until age 5, sometimes older. Transitioning to pants was called breeching. Boys were kept in dresses to make potty training easier.
If you were poor you would wear linen or wool, spun and woven by yourself, or your family. The rich enjoyed silks and velvets, often brought from abroad at great expense. This changed as cotton began to be imported – everyone loved this versatile new material.
Some, such as the chimney bustle, were designed to collapse as the wearer sat down. All bustles required women to sit sideways on chairs, and they also caused a wobble effect when walking.” Figure 1 and figure 2 show the silhouette of bustle dress with different embellishments in 1870.
Women's clothes were typically fastened with laces, pins, and hook/eye closures. In the 19th century, industrialization allowed for the mass production of buttons, and suddenly buttons were everywhere! Machines were able to mold, cut, and stamp ornate buttons as well as plain utilitarian ones.
The world's oldest woven garment, called the Tarkhan Dress, probably fell past the knees originally. At 5,100 to 5,500 years old, it dates to the dawn of the kingdom of Egypt.
There used to be a time when men wore skirts and dresses. It was part of fashion, especially among noblemen. Until this fashion trend started to change in the 14th and 15th centuries. The European culture created shorter tunics for men while women were "draped" in "unshaped garments."
Across Europe, décolletage was often a feature of the dress of the late Middle Ages; this continued through the Victorian period. Gowns that exposed a woman's neck and the top of her chest were very common and uncontroversial in Europe from at least the 11th century until the mid-19th century.
The Myth: 18th Century people were more sexually repressed and modestly dressed that modern people. It was scandalous for women to show their ankles or elbows in public because those were sexualized body parts – that is why women wore long skirts and ¾ or full sleeve gowns. Low-cut dresses were also risqué.
To give extra width at the hips and roundness at the top of the skirt, a bum roll was often tied around the waist.
But, for the poor families who couldn't afford to buy new clothes, Monday became the weekly wash day. Woman bent over a bucket and wash board, while children are at play, perhaps taking a rest from their chores?
Though even wealthy families did not take a full bath daily, they were not unclean. It was the custom for most people to wash themselves in the morning, usually a sponge bath with a large washbasin and a pitcher of water on their bedroom washstands. Women might have added perfume to the water.
BASIC GARMENTS: Men: 3-piece suit (sack or frock coat, waistcoat, trousers) worn with a shirt a necktie tied like a bowtie or four-in-hand tie. Women: extremely wide skirts on gowns. Layers remain the same as Crinoline era.
Empire silhouette, Empire line, Empire waist or just Empire is a style in clothing in which the dress has a fitted bodice ending just below the bust, giving a high-waisted appearance, and a gathered skirt which is long and loosely fitting but skims the body rather than being supported by voluminous petticoats.
The ideal Victorian woman was pure, chaste, refined, and modest. This ideal was supported by etiquette and manners. The etiquette extended to the pretension of never acknowledging the use of undergarments (in fact, they were sometimes generically referred to as "unmentionables").
It was often the structures beneath Victorian clothing that gave women's fashion its form. Corsets (also known as stays) moulded the waist, while cage crinolines supported voluminous skirts, and bustles projected a dress out from behind.
Despite the popular belief, women did wear trousers in the 1800s.
To the Victorians, black dress could symbolize mourning. But as with most things, there was much more to Victorian mourning than simply wearing black. With various stages of mourning and specific fabrics for each stage, clothing defined stages of grief without the wearer uttering a single word.