Funny and peculiar things about corsets, hoops and other fashion clothes in grandma's closet

 For centuries, women were forced to dress in an unnatural and unhealthy way. They squeezed their ribs, hide their face, wore heavy and stiff garments. They often could not breath right, bend, sit, or run. Some of the clothes women wore were even dangerous, making them vulnerable in a case of extreme emergency like fire or drowning. Like today, the dress code was fallow by everybody, young or old, poor or rich.

Some centuries were worse then others. For example, the Victorian Era (under the Queen Victoria’s reign 1837 - 1901) was one of them. Victorian Era was a time a prosperity and pace, but when it came to fashion was more restricting and austere then others, and the rules of the social game were more sober then ever. Some times, decency was the word of the day, but other times extravagance made the news.

The history of women fashion is fascinating. Not only speaks about the way we dressed in the past but tells us why we dressed like that. From crinolines to bikini, the evolution of women fashion is a marvelous travel in time and in our own minds.

I collected this anecdotal information while reading books and articles on history of fashion.
All these contraptions were meant to hide or disguise one’s natural body lines. As one author put it women “fashion was a form of legalized torture.”

• Corsets  are contraption meant to make a lady’s waist very thin. They are made out of fabrics stiffened with whale, elephant or moose bones They have been women companions for centuries. No women was supposed to start a day without it. They were worn by men too. Today, corsets are called shape-wear and they are much more comfortable.

• Here is what “The Metropolitan” magazine had to say about corsets, on 1871: “The size of the waist was more important then the size of the brain”.
• A woman needed 15 minutes to lace her corset and almost o1 hour to get dressed.
• Some doctors believed that women cannot stand upright without a corset, they would bend from the waist.
• Girls as young as six or seven years old were put in training corsets by their carrying mothers.

• Hoops were called Farthingale in 16th and 17th centuries and Crinolines in the 19th century. At first these structured undergarments were only worn around the waist to pump up a skirt to a round, circle, plate like shape. Later, thy looked like a enormous bell coming from a woman’s waist to her ankles. At the beginning they were made out of whalebone or stiff natural fibers from willow or reed but later they were made out of steel. Today only special occasions dresses, like wedding dresses, are made do be worn with a hoop that is constructed out of layers of stiffened textiles.

• It looks like Queen Victoria of England (1819-1901) did not like crinolines, so she banned them in 1857, at a wedding,  because “a crowd of hoopskirted ladies would never fit into the Chapel Royal”.
• Though she did not like them, it was under her ruling that the hoops became the largest.
• The ladies wearing crinolines were occupying so much space that the omnibuses from New York started charging extra for these passengers.
• Crinolines were also dangerous and often thy were the cause of dead for their owner. One young lady’s crinoline got caught in a carriage wheels as the horses started racing, dragging the young girl on the ground and killing her. In Santiago, Chile, 2000 women died when a crinoline started on fire.
• Falling while wearing a hoop was quite common. When such accident happened, the stiff crinoline would expose “the gates of Paradise” as King Victor Emmanuel of Italy once put it, speaking about a lady’s private parts. That’s why they started wearing drawers.

• Up until the second half of 19th century, bathing or swimming in lakes rivers or seas was done nude, women going in one part of the beach and men on the opposite. At public baths and spas, both men and women were supposed t wear some kind of clothing, drawers and waistcoats for men and wear jackets and petticoats for women.
• The Victorian era, with its austere dress code, banned women from exposing any parts of their body. So, at the beach or in the water, women were to be dressed and covered, in almost street like suits.
• At the end of 19th century swimming suits or bathing suits for women were often called “death traps” because they were very heavy when wet and could become a real danger of drowning while in the water. The suits were long like a dress, made out of wool and often weighted at the bottom so they will not float while in the water.

• Cleaning was so time consuming and so expensive that women would dedicate it one to two days a week ad often some clothes were skipped, being won without washing for months in a row.
• At the beginning of the 20th century, a white muslin dress cost as much as a monthly income of an average man.
• The white wedding dress trend started when Queen Victoria of England married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. She wore a white wedding dress that took 200 people and eight months to get done.

• Women hats have evolved during the last 200 years from a bonnet to a big hat with floppy trims and strange things on it. so much women loved their hats that by the end on the 19th century the fancier the hat the higher he social status.
• Also, from around the same time, here is a short list of fashion decorations to put on top of a hat: insects (butterflies and spiders), reptiles (lizards and toads), animals (bear cubs and squirrels).
• Flowers and feather were the most desired decoration for a hat. So much women liked the feathers that some states believed that the birds were near extinction so New Jersey officials banned the killing of any non-game birds.
• Another city, New Orleans, banned the use of hatpins with long noticeable points, as dangerous.  

This is just a short bullet list of fashion oddities from 19th and and beginning of the 20th centuries. Behind these oddities lies the true social status of women. By the middle of the last century women fashion was dramatically changed. Women throw away the old clothes and with them, the ties to their traditions.