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There was certainly no shortage of material to criticize in the 19th century. Hoop skirts, crinolines, corsets, long skirts that trailed in the mud, impossibly intricate coiffures that required a lot of time and hopefully assistance in order to construct. And ACCESSORIES. Jewels, feathers, ribbons, hair-pads, false hair and human hair-pieces. Ridiculous hats and bonnets perched atop these architecturally complicated hair-towers.
And what, pray tell, is that perching atop Ms. Linton's head? And are her eyes bulging because of that constricting neckline? Or are those PIERCING eyes???? Eyes that see the foibles of women, soooo clearly?
When I look at the old fashion illustrations of these costumes, they look so charming. Imagine, though, the reality of lacing yourself into a corset, navigating crowded rooms in a hoop-skirt, or sitting for hours while your hair is attended to(or, horrors, attempting to do your hair, yourself)...
Excerpts from "The Follies of Fashion":
"Of all our follies none perhaps are so great as those which we commit in the name of Fashion. Fashion is the sorceress to whose spell we all succumb, the tyrant whose will not one of us dares dispute, the ignis fatuus whose wavering flame we follow, indifferent to the nature of the ground through which we are led. Bog or brake—what does it matter? so long as we go precisely as we are told, and obey that mysterious and capricious leader of ours, we are all right; and if we do fall into odd places meanwhile, that is not our own fault but rather the misfortune of the times. Fashion while young is never in fault— when old you may laugh at her as much as you please; but while new and vigorous all that she does is perfect, and if you, as an individual, stand out against her and find her ways unpleasant, the blame lies with you and not with the lawgiver."
"Perhaps I am wrong in saying that not one of us dares dispute this tyrant, this great Dalai Lama of the work-room and the manufactory; for every now and then we do meet with recusants who refuse to take on themselves the yoke of fashion, and who walk in unfettered freedom, bound by no silken ties and lured by no false lights of pretended beauty. But unfortunately they are generally women who fling off the bonds of real beauty as well as the false ones of fashion, and who appear as frightful in their own originality as they would have been under the most servile imitation; women who, because they will not be slaves to conformity make themselves slaves to ugliness, and find no mean between the two opposite poles of extravagance in obedience or eccentricity in dissent. These were the women who, when all the female world went about like huge bells encased in a swelling scaffolding of steel and whalebone, walked defiantly among their structured sisters with not so much as a pennyworth of starch in their skimpy skirts, nor an inch-wide frill to faintly represent the foam of flounce then in vogue; and these are the women whor now that fashion has veered all the way round and draped herself in clinging skirts and lanky lines, still keep to the crinoline of ten years ago and sweep their harsh way among us—nuisances for whose disagreeable unloveliness there is not even the questionable excuse of conformity."
"They are women who begin a fashion just as it is dying out, so that they are always in opposition, but no more sensible than their neighbours; or they are women without the power to unite sense and beauty, and even when they are intrinsically rational—as in the days when they withstood the craze of cages and kept their petticoats undistended—are so uncompromisingly ugly in their attire, so ungraceful, so careless of what we mean by "appearances," that so far from helping their sisters to better things by offering them a beautiful model or a wise one, they throw them yet farther into the extreme of the prevailing folly from very dread of becoming like to anything so ridiculous."
"If this section of the strong-minded who are not afraid of being recusants, would devise some costume that should unite artistic grace and work-a-day convenience, something as useful and not so hideous as the Bloomer costume say, and not so defiant of present fashions, they might do a good work in their generation, and effect the most valuable of all secondclass reforms. But they only strengthen the hands of the enemy while they are merely oppositionists who cannot offer anything absolutely better than the fashions they decry..."
"The worst of it all was that every now and then some beautiful and graceful and simple fashion was struck out that one would have liked to see perpetuated, but that died away in a very few years, to be replaced by something as monstrous as this had been befitting. There was the justaucorps, which we see in the pictures of (I think) Eleanor of Provence: that sleeveless, well-adjusted but not strained kind of surcoat which we have been lately somewhat imitating. This is an article of dress that affords all manner of pretty opportunities; but it went out; and we had in its stead, after a long succession of experiments in ugliness— each more advanced than the last—the steel corset of Catherine de Medicis and our own Elizabeth, the padded hips and rigid waist accompanying, and the whole art of the Mesdames Elises of the period thrown into making a woman look as much like a wooden wasp as it was possible for bone and buckram to achieve. We have not got past that folly even yet. Only the other day a book was published which gravely —by no means jokingly or satirically—first of all asserted that the creation of a small waist by means of tight lacing, or its semblance by the artful aid of hoops and frills, &c, has been the end and aim of all fashion; and then went on to advocate this creation as the righteous end and aim of fashion, and as the one thing which women, and specially unmarried women, should set their energies to attain, no matter through what suffering; and which the author assures us to be in nowise hurtful to the health, while it is undeniably beautiful (?) to the eye."
"That the ribs are a protecting case within which are packed away certain tender and important organs —that it is vitally necessary those organs should have full space for the exercise of their functions, that they should not be pressed on, nor hampered, nor in any way impeded—seem physiological facts utterly unknown to the person who wrote that remarkable book while as for such a prosaic law as proportion, what has that to do with the integral beauty of a waist thirteen inches round ?—to which worse than foolish dimensions some young ladies, by dint of present personal torture and future certain disease, have at last contracted their bony case of ribs. A large, flat, spreading waist is as ugly as anything else which is large and flat and spreading, when it ought to be small, compact, and trim; but a wasp-like waist, with huge shoulders above and full hips below, is even more ugly. The one at least represents freedom, and such ease and health as come from freedom; the other is. eloquent of pain, of contraction, and of disease."
"But the writer was true in his premises if false in his conclusions—the meaning of farthingales and crinolines and hoops and modernized paniers, and all the other queer structures in steel, buckram, or lighterpuff in which we women have at various times invested our persons, is to create, by the shadows and contrast afforded by excessive expansion, the semblance when we have not the reality of a small waist. One can understand physiologically and sentimentally the beauty of a round, small waist in a young unmarried girl, when not carried to extremes and when kept in just proportion to the rest of the figure; but what one cannot understand is, why women of riper years and matronly condition, should take so much trouble to make themselves unsatisfactory travesties of maidenhood; and why they cannot utilize the special beauties of their own condition, and be content with the richer and fuller graces belonging to them. Girls do not set the fashions. They may and do exaggerate them, because there is very little else to distinguish one girl from another in the crowd, and because they are silly; but it is the woman who is just beginning to be on the wane, la fcmmc firesqiic passee, who wants to look still youthful and girlish, from whom proceed, nine-tenths of the devices to conceal the figure and delude die eye. The large manufacturers and wholesale millinery establishments of course decide beforehand what are to be the patterns of the season; but in the smaller details it is the married woman—who, moreover, bears the purse and possesses the social influence—who sets her wits to approximate herself to the young girl; and this is best done by such fashions as most conceal distinctions and level inequalities of graces; as in this very matter of the small waist, which is to be created in appearance when it does not exist in reality. It is for the advantage of a nicely-made girl to appear in simple costume. Her trim proportions, and the pretty run of her figure, want only leave to appear as nature has given them to her; but when she and the rotund matron dress in the same masquerading expanse of crinoline and furbelow, the girl loses all distinctive charm and the matron alone gains by the similitude."
"At present we have made ourselves only ridiculous, we are not inconvenient to our neighbours by the particular furbelow of the day. If we think the "Grecian bend" a graceful kind of thing, and that yards of material puffed out at the back make us more lovely in the eyes of men, by all means let us go on with the "bend" and the puff till we get tired of them. It does not much signify to what we shall change; it is so sure to be something both intrinsically ugly and absurd. All we can hope for is, that our tyrant may not be pleased to put on us an attire which shall be inconvenient to others as well as to ourselves, and that by degrees a little common sense may be allowed to filter into her councils, so that she may be induced to consider what is beauty in the abstract, rather than what milliners and dressmakers call "fit for any lady to wear."
"Our greatest folly at the present moment however, is not the puff we call, I believe, paniers, but the long trains which we delight in dragging after us for a yar i or so, and which make taking down to dinner, or walking across a room a trial of nerves, temper, an. I agility to all concerned. "It looks so graceful!" we say complacently, when remonstrated with. So we sacrifice convenience, cleanliness, and the good temper of the men to maintain a childish, and worse than childish fashion, because "it looks so graceful" to trail behind us silken trains not half so beautiful as a peacock's tail, nor so dignified. It seems to me we might do something better than fall below a two-legged fowl in our imitative art of personal decoration."
"Next of importance to the creation of a small waist, fashion has always held the disposition of the hair and the dressing of the head. And here again we come to those queer exaggerations in which we women so unaccountably take pleasure. Only a few generations ago, and our heads were literally built up like so much mason-work. Buckram, pomatum, powder, flowers, laces, and jewels, all were employed in the disfiguring of our hair—one of the most beautiful things which nature has given to woman; and the result was an amount of hideousness that seems to us now absolutely incomprehensible, and a state of dirt and horrible nastiness even more incomprehensible. Ladies then went from London to York, a three days journey, with their hair dressed by a town hairdresser, all ready for the county ball. They slept by the way propped up by pillows ; with their heads supported on the backs of chairs that the hideous structure should not be disarranged. This was their pride, and the sacrifice they made to fashion and appearance; for which they had their reward in the wonder of the beaux and the envy of the belles of the provinces, who could not sufficiently admire what the one never saw surpassed and the other could not hope to compass. Once a month their heads were opened, cleansed, and renewed; for which we have the authority of the Spectator; and it does not require a very vivid imagination to enable us to picture what they were like when they were opened. I am old enough to remember the huge bows, trained over wired foundations, that my elder sisters wore on the tops of their heads some forty years ago; and great was the labour and detestable was the result thereof. Then we had those cascades of corkscrew ringlets which cost so much pains to make, and which the damp brought out into ignominious lengths called by the irreverent, tallow-candles. After these we had a very pretty and simple fashion of braid that did not last long; and then we came to the reign of the chignon—and now to its offshoot, the big bird's-nest on the very crown of the head, with the fringe of short hair about the face, curled or straight But whatever type we adopt—whether that of the secretary bird, or of any other animal which has all its feathers or fur falling backwards, or that of the crested cockatoo, the bison, or the other beasts which have bristling frontlets —we carry our imitation to extremes, and caricature the lower creature whose leading lines we reproduce. "
"We cannot be content unless we caricature. No sooner do we get hold -of a tolerably pretty fashion than we set to work to torture it (and ourselves) into the extreme of ugliness and folly—as now with our hair; for though not so dirty, our heads are almost as absurdly dressed as they were in Queen Anne's time; and certainly the things we wear on them are more absurd. What can we say of the taste which coils a length of fur round and round as a cap, and then finishes off with a stuffed head—fox or what not—with glass eyes made as like to nature as is possible? Our girls dye their hair to the right shade of tawny brown, then perch on the top a thing they call a hat, which is this beast's head and (presumably) its body, with the sharp muzzle and staring eyes right in front. as if about to leap off on to the first passer-by. And this is the taste of the nineteenth century in the matter of one form of head-gear."
"Only within the last seven years how have fashions changed! Seven years ago we had the spoon-bonnet which disconcerted all our previous instinctive measurements, and led to endless discomfort in the way of knocking our spoons against the roofs of carriages and the like; now we have vanishing trifles of lace just bound round the fore-part of the head, without real fastenings properly so called, and leaving the whole face, nape, ears, and throat unprotected. It has takers just seven years to pass from spoons to the modern cap-bonnet—from enormous crinolines, yards wide, to the present lank skirts, and Japanese or ghost-like wreaths of trains eddying round the feet. Or we havelong French-formed trains much bedecked, which spread out as we walk like a peacock's tail, as I said, and are more inconvenient. The prettiest fashion, and the wisest, that we have inaugurated for a long while is the short walking costume; which it is to be hoped will become the fashion for rooms as well as fox streets. But there is little chance of that—it is too rational, too pretty, and too simple."
"But what can we say of the fashion which dyes the hair, paints the cheeks, blackens the eyelids with antimony to make the orbit look larger and the lashes longer, or that expands the pupils with belladonna, no matter at what cost of complexion or future eyesight?"
"... But fashion so willed it; and neither mother nor daughter had strength to resist her impalpable but absolute decrees. We all obey her; young and old alike: those who should keep their beauties sacred, and those who have none to show—the delicate who have to be kept alive by art and care—the lean who are too ugly for any one to find pleasure in the contemplation of their angles—the wrinkled, and the gross—we all parade ourselves in evening society without more disguise than that which a bit of gauze or lace can give; and only very few of us use that; for even when well on into tire fifties, we do not believe that anything is to be gained by concealment. As to the extent to which we cut down our boddices, that is a matter too patent and too painful to be discussed. It is a race among us who shall wear the dress the lowest, and show the largest expanse of shoulder. And yet we mean no harm: we mean only to be fashionable."
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