When I saw these photographs of Victorian women in their voluminous skirts and dresses, I wondered what I could say that hasn’t already been said by the usual suspects in historical books or feminists texts about patriarchy and fashion, etcetera, etcetera. I really don’t want to go down that path, but if you do there are plenty of sites out there that will supply the goods.

Honestly, my first thought when I saw these pictures was: “How the hell did these women go about their daily lives dressed like this?” It couldn’t have been easy. It couldn’t have been very practical or even remotely comfortable. But then, most fashion isn’t meant to comfortable—it’s about performance, it’s about dressing up to present a show. Victorian fashion was all about presentation—like the whalebone corsets worn to keep the female figure constrained, narrow-waisted, and artificially slim. Seems perverse to us today, but so might breast implants appear one day to our progeny’s progeny.

Fashion changed rapidly during the 19th-century with radical developments in industrialization, mass production, new techniques in printing patterns and colors, and the rise of the department store. At the start of the century, dresses were straight up-and-down maxi-lengthened Jane Austen-type garments made of linen and silk. By the 1820s, there was a flaring out of the hem and a widening of the hips to give women a more voluptuous and feminine shape.

This style of dress developed quite dramatically in the 1830s when such dresses ballooned out from the waist like a bell or a parachute, while the upper half of the body remained slim and pinched at the waist. Their bell-like shape was solely dependent on the hidden supporting structure of a bustle or crinoline cage suspended from the wearer’s waist. These “cages” were originally made of whalebone but were soon superseded by lighter more sturdy yet flexible “steel-hooped cage crinoline” in 1856.

Such hoop dresses or skirts were worn by all class of women. But it should be noted, these garments were often very hazardous as many working-class women lost their lives after their skirts were caught in machinery while many middle-class women perished after their dresses caught fire.

Rich women would have had a whole closet filled with various beautifully designed outfits. Lower class women usually had just the one outfit, which they kept fashionable by changing collars and cuffs or adding ribbons or a new layer of material.

Ultimately, the whole ensemble presented the image each of these women either wanted to or felt obliged to present.
 

 

 
More Victorian women in big-ass skirts, after the jump…

 
Ah, the French, you have to admire their idealism and their love for liberté, égalité, fraternité and all that. Now in a bid to fight sexism and inequality in schools, the education authority in Nantes, western France, is encouraging schoolboys to drop their trousers and wear a skirt to class today, at 27 lycées in the city.

Actor Laurence Olivier once remarked that he found the best way to become a character was to start with the shoes. Once he knew how the person might walk, he was able to choose the clothes that would help him best identify and understand the character more fully. This maybe some of the thinking behind the idea of “LIft the Skirt” or, as it is in French, “Ce que soulève la jupe” (literally: “‘What raises the skirt”), a campaign originally devised by pupils themselves in a bid to stop sexism, which has been sanctioned by the city’s education chiefs, and by association France’s Ministry of Education.

For those boys who would rather not bare a leg, they can show their support for the campaign by wearing a sticker saying: “I am fighting against sexism, are you?”

According to Elisabeth Costagliola, head of the organization PEEP, the campaign is supported by the pupils’ parents, saying there has been no negative reaction when the event was held last year.

“On the contrary, it was really positive with students saying that even some male teachers were prepared to come to school in a skirt,” Costagliola said.

However, there has been some backlash further afield from conservative politicians, including Olivier Vial, president of the conservative UNI party, who said:

“We’ll do any old nonsense in the name of equality. This move is inspired by the Day of the Skirt, whose original aim was to allow women to express their femininity in environments where it was often difficult. But this is just denying feminine and masculine identity,” Vial said.

“Ce que soulève la jupe” is an interesting idea, but as a Scot, from a country where men have worn plaid skirts, or kilts, for centuries (and even “women’s tights” [stockings] in the trenches during World War One—to counteract poisonous gas), sexism and inequality are still problems, which are unlikely to be solved by a one-day skirt-wearing event, though, I guess one can hope.
 

 
Via The Local, H/T Arbroath.

 
Yep, there’s an Eazy-E skirt available for ladies who strut down the street singin’ “Gimmie That Nutt.” This utterly inexplicable skirt is by Manhattan-based clothing label IdilVice and retails for $89.00. Order it here. 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Steve Buscemi dress

(via Cherrybombed)