Women's Clothing

The term "Victorian fashion" refers to fashion in clothing in the Victorian era, or the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). It is strictly used only with regard to the United Kingdom and its colonies, but is often used loosely to refer to Western fashions of the period. more...

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It may also refer to a supposedly unified style in clothing, home décor, manners, and morals, or a culture, said to be prevalent in the West during this period.

Usefulness of the term

Those who have studied the period in detail would protest against vacuous generalizations. Clothing, décor, manners, and morals varied from year to year, country to country, and class to class. Whether or not there is a style or unified culture connecting a Scottish fisherwoman, for example, and an aristocratic London lady, might well be debated.

If we carefully restrict our language, however, and take Victorian fashion to refer to the dress, or in a wider sense, the culture of an upper-middle-class London family of fashion and conventional attitudes, and describe it as it varied from decade to decade, we may be able to usefully describe these phenomena.

We can also usefully speak of contemporary stereotypes of the Victorian era. These stereotypes, while not historically valid, help us understand current uses of the term "Victorian".

Historical overview

Several general style trends of the Victorian era transcend any one facet of fashion, but rather had broad influence across clothing styles, architecture, literature, and the decorative arts. Many of these had their roots in the 18th century but flowered in the Victorian age. These include:

Orientalism; The romanticising of the Scottish Highlands; The Gothic revival, which in turn generated the Pre-Raphaelites and Artistic Dress; Aestheticism;

The Great Exhibition of 1851 had a marked impact on fashion, especially home décor, and even social reform movements influenced fashion, through dress reform and rational dress.

Clothing

See also fashion by decades: 1830s-1840s - 1850s - 1860s - 1870s - 1880s- 1890s

Methods of clothing production and distribution varied enormously over the course of Victoria's long reign.

In 1837, cloth was manufactured (in the mill towns of northern England, Scotland, and Ireland) but clothing was generally custom-made by seamstresses, milliners, tailors, hatters, glovers, corsetiers, and many other specialized tradespeople, who served a local clientele in small shops. Families who could not afford to patronize specialists made their own clothing, or bought and modified used clothing.

By 1907, clothing was increasingly factory-made and sold in large, fixed price department stores. Custom sewing and home sewing were still significant, but on the decline.

Read more at Wikipedia.org