Step 1:

Read the online "lecture" on dress in the Industrial Revolution below and click on any links that interest you.  You are not required to read all the material on all the links, however:

Dress in The Rise of the Industrial Revolution

Clothing from 1825-1850 The "Romantic" Period

The trend towards sexual dimorphism in dress reaches an absurd apex in this period.   Men's fashion becomes a series of undecorated black tubes, like the smoke stacks of the The Industrial Revolution (an analogy they were even conscious of at the time), while women's dress continues to balloon out with ruffles, decorations and petticoats until women look like ambulatory wedding cakes.

Fashion Plates from Le Folliet c.1839-1840

Both men's and women's dress becomes more complex during this era due to the invention of the Sewing Machine, and the popular dissemination of pattern books and systems for garment cutting.   Men's clothing construction, while outwardly simple, begins to acquire the internal padding, interfacings and complex structure that makes modern men's suits fall so smoothly even over an object as lumpy and mobile as the human form. 

early Hand crank sewing machine

Elias Howe, the inventor of the first mass produced, practical sewing machine, originally demonstrated it's utility to a group of prospective investors by holding a sewing race between himself and his machine, and ten professional hand stitchers.  He easily won, and the economic situation of stitchers (mostly female) declined as a consequence of the adoption of the invention.  With a sewing machine, a stitcher could produce ten times the output as before, with greater quality, but the stitcher rarely could afford the machine, and with so many stitchers out of work, stitchers were easily replaceable.  Industrialists would invest in the machines, hire the stitchers cheaply, and then swallow the profits that their increased output produced.  With profits so high, soon competition between manufacturers of clothes got fierce, and so producers tried to "improve"   their product by adding more sewing decoration, such as ruffles, pleats, and top stitching, to lure customers.   The end result was that fashionable Women's dress became incredibly over decorated in the 19th Century.

• The Seamstresses
• Vintage Fabric - A History of Sweatshops
• American history sweatshop exhibition

Another result of this increased output in clothing manufacture was that poor people's clothing got better, and the rags of earlier eras were replaced by cheaply made mass manufactured work clothes.  The middle classes were able to afford more than clean simple clothes, and began to actively indulge in fashion for it's own sake.  

"The Last of England" by Ford Maddox Brown, showing the dress of poor English people as they emigrate to Australia.

Fashionable women's dress grew more and more cumbersome and impractical during the 1830's and 1840's.  The visual line of 1840's gowns, hats and headdress all point down, and the eyes of women depicted in fashion plates are demurely cast to the floor.   The increasing size of the skirts, held out only with voluminous and usually unsanitary crinoline (horsehair canvas) petticoats, made the weight of the skirts oppressive, and movement awkward.  Tight laced Corsets of a waist-cinching style, pinched the waist without providing the back supporting properties of corsets of other eras.

This is the time of the tortured and victimized Bronte heroines, not to mention the tortured and victimized Bronte Sisters themselves.   The 1840's proved such a low point for women in Western history, that the worm finally turned, and women began to organize and agitate for the vote, dress reform, and the right to enter schools and professions closed to them.

1850-1870 The Era of the Hoop

Illustration from Punch, 1857, showing the complete understructure of a fashionable woman's wardrobe.

An American suffragist and reformer, Amelia Bloomer  led the forefront of dress reform in the 1850's propagating what became known as The Bloomer Costume (originally designed by Elizabeth Smith Miller), a very modest ensemble consisting of a knee length gown worn over demure Turkish trousers.  It is a measure of how severely cumbersome and repressed mid-19th Century Western women's clothes were that a garment worn by conservative Moslem women was so comparatively freeing in style that it actively shocked most contemporary observers.

1851, Mrs. Bloomer in the costume she wore as a response to the restrictive petticoats of the 1840's-50's.  

• Elizabeth Smith Miller: bloomers

Only a small percentage of the female population ever wore The Bloomer Costume, but periodic attempts at dress reform continued throughout the rest of the 19th Century, exerting a growing influence on fashionable dress. 

The Crinoline (hoop petticoat), c.1860 from Karl Kohler's Kostumewerk

Fashionable women enjoyed a slight dress "reform" of their own in the 1850's by the adoption of the Hoop Skirt.  The hoop (or Crinoline as it was named after the former petticoats of horsehair), liberated women of the weighty, hot unsanitary bulk of petticoats, and gave free movement to the legs.

The tendency of the hoop to flip up showing the legs, also required women adopt a version of the bloomer trousers as underwear.  The earliest hoops were rigid iron that had a tendency to thwack the unhooped sex in the shins.  As a consequence, when added to the horror of seeing one's female dependents wearing (oh!) bifurcated garments beneath the hoop, men were appalled, and tried to put a stop to the fashion by decrying them from newspapers and the pulpit, ridiculing them in song and poetic lampoon, and mercilessly caricaturing them in cartoons.

Second Empire Fashion plates from Petit Courier des Dames 1852-5 provided by Acarter of eBay

  The benefits of the hoop for the wearers, however, insured that women defied disapproving fathers and husbands in droves, and iron quickly gave way to more forgiving spring steel wire, which made larger and larger skirt foundations light enough to be possible.

Women's dress in the era 1850-65 gets progressively larger and more horizontal in outline.  Gone are all the lines pointing down, and women in fashion illustrations get a slightly more assertive look in their expressions, more often looking out at the viewer at eye level.

1865. Images courtesy of Aquarian Gallery Antique Prints and Maps

By 1860, the hoop itself was so large and awkward it was in itself oppressive. The shape of the hoop began to become ovoid, with the bulk of the skirt trailing behind the wearer. In 1866 the size of the hoop began to diminish somewhat, and the ovoid trend continued, slowly turning, by 1870, into what they called the Tornure or Bustle.  The result was to give the female figure a forward leaning stance, rather like the prow of a ship. 

Men's dress in this era continued the trend towards decreased individuality of style, crossed with increased technical perfection of manufacture. 

Man in frock coat with plaid vest, 1855. from Karl Kohler's Kostumewerk

Facial hair gained in popularity in the 1850's, 60's and 70's, not really going out of fashion until after 1900, and then only gradually.

Pianist A. Thalberg in an overcoat and vest, 1860's from Karl Kohler's Kostumewerk

Men's dress found the form that it has held in modified form to this day in this era, formalizing the suit into a uniform worn by men in all strata of income in varying degrees of quality.

 This Concludes Week #8's Lesson

• Return to Class Index

1833

1846

Fashion Plates c.1845-50 Images courtesy of Aquarian Gallery Antique Prints and Maps  

The 19th Century - By Miles Hodges

Fashion plates of the 1840's provided by RaveOnline

1853 portrait of Suffragist and Reformer Lucy Stone as she appeared giving a lecture  in a "bloomer" suit. Image courtesy of Aquarian Gallery Antique Prints and Maps

Hoopskirt of steel wire and webbing worn in Philadelphia in 1855.

1851 1853

1855   1857

1859   1861  Image courtesy of Aquarian Gallery Antique Prints and Maps

1863 

1866

1867

  Petit Courier, 1868

1869

  1870

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