Empresses in Empire Lines and Queens in Crinolines – Dressing to Impress in the 1800’s

As maxi dresses seem set to stay for Autumn/Winter 2010, we look back to the 1800’s at how the empire line took women by storm and how this may have influenced the modern day maxi.

            It was designer Leroy (who dressed the Empress of France, Josephine Bonaparte) who designed the first 19^th century maxi-equivalent. The dresses she wore were a similar shape to those seen on the highstreet today with stores such as New Look focusing on softer, draping fabrics, falling from an under-bust seam. The style worn by Josephine contrasted the previous century’s fixation on corsets and hooped skirts as women preferred loose-fitting, more comfortable dresses with a low neckline and puffed sleeves. These dresses were more practical than the hooped skirts and corsets which Marie Antoinette detested so greatly in the late 1700s. They could be made from a variety of fabrics therefore making them more accessible to the masses as dresses could be simply muslin or more elaborate silk designs. Dresses were often focused on frills around the hem and lace around the neckline, drawing attention to the bust and ankles.

Not only were the ankles exposed by Leroy’s dresses but when Charles Frederick Worth became the first designer to open a fashion house and produce an entire season’s collection, he also chose ankle-skimming designs. Though he is only rumoured to have invented the crinoline, his use of the ‘crinolinette’ gave women the freedom to do all sorts of activities that the conventional, floor length crinoline prevented them from doing. The crinoline was a compressed horse-hair structure, made of hoops, into a cone-shaped cage. It was worn underneath the skirt and shaped it in a way that petticoats could not. Women preferred the crinoline to petticoats as it was lighter, though sitting down posed a problem. Worth commissioned the ‘crinolinette’; this was a crinoline which finished above the ankles, making dresses more practical. The size of the skirt showed the wealth and power of a woman since it the amount of money a woman had which determined how large she could afford her dresses to be. The silhouette of the female figure became so exaggerated by the use of the crinoline as Worth placed emphasis on the hourglass figure by using corsets to pull in the waist. Unlike Leroy’s designs, Worth returned the waistline of his gowns to the natural waist and even young girls wore close-fitting corsets as this became the height of fashion.

Worth had other ideas however when in 1864 he declared that crinolines were out and bustles were in. Again, a compressed horsehair structure, the bustle quickly changed the female silhouette from hourglass to pear-shaped. The bustle was a horseshoe shaped cage which was attached around the waist and protrudes from the lower back with skirts draping over it. Once again, fashion changed like the flick of a switch, completely unexpected yet still followed by all.