5 Victorian Fashion Trends: From Flammable Skirts to Poisonous Fabrics

The Victorian era spanned from the late 1830s to the early 1900s and it is closely tied to the reign of the British Queen Victoria. Despite its connection to Britain, this term is often used to refer to Western culture and history of the same period. Victorian fashion is most commonly associated with the dark, the macabre, and the ridiculous—from mourning dresses and hair jewelry to toxic fabric dyes that could kill. Read on to learn more about 5 Victorian fashion trends that marked the era.

One of the most recognizable and notorious fashion trends of the Victorian era was mourning attire. Like every trend, it did not appear simply because of the Victorians’ love for dark colors and lace. In 1861, Queen Victoria lost her mother, also called Victoria. The mother and daughter had a rather strained relationship due to the elder Victoria’s constant control over her child. However, as Queen Victoria read through her mother’s notes after her death, she realized the true depth of the personal connection they shared. Only months later, the Queen’s husband Prince Albert passed away too. Despite the tradition of arranged marriages in royal families, the spouses actually loved each other deeply. The loss sent the Queen to a long period of depression.

The protocol of mourning rituals had already existed before, yet Queen Victoria drastically expanded it. The traditional mourning period for widows lasted for two years and was divided into three stages, each corresponding to a certain stage of grief. It started with deep mourning, marked by simple black dresses with minimal decoration, no jewelry, and a specific form of undergarments. The next stage of mourning called for black bows, lace, ruches, and black jewelry, allowing to gradually add non-black elements such as straw hats or white collars. The final stage, called half-mourning, allowed white, gray, lavender, and purple colors, as well as gold jewelry.

In the 1850s, the invention of the crinoline changed the silhouette and the structure of the basic wardrobe of the Victorian-era woman. Crinoline was a structure of steel or whalebone hoops creating a bell-shaped structure under the wearer’s skirt. It was the perfect replacement for the infinite number of petticoats and it allowed for experiments in form and shape.

Crinolines were relatively inexpensive and soon became a trend among working-class women. Then, unfortunately, the fashionable garment turned into a disaster. Voluminous crinolines took too much space to be functional in everyday life and proved to be extremely dangerous in working environments. Fabric stretched over the carcass easily caught fire, with oxygen trapped under the bell skirt only fueling it. After several instances of crinolines being caught in rotating machinery, most factories banned wearing crinolines to work. Despite initial popularity, crinoline fashion lasted a little more than a decade, giving way to a sleeker, more mobile silhouette. The hooped underskirt turned into a crinolette and bustles—small structures that created padding in the back side of the skirt, adding extra volume.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the typical silhouette was formed by a high-collar blouse worn over a corset and a long tailored skirt. Contrary to popular belief, corsets were not torture devices but functional made-to-measure undergarments that provided support for the bust and spine of its wearer. There were, however, notorious examples of tight-lacing—a practice of creating a dramatically narrow waist by lacing the corset extremely tight. Such practice could cause discomfort and even health issues, but was never widespread, remaining mostly a cautionary tale about the vanity of fashion victims.

Another fashion revolution of the Victorian era was the invention of artificial fabric dyes. Unlike natural pigments derived from plants and minerals, the new type of coloring could create a much more vivid and diverse array of hues. The discovery happened accidentally: in 1856, an eighteen-year-old chemistry student named William Henry Perkin experimented with synthesizing a malaria cure. Instead, he created a substance of a vividly purple color. After further experiments, Perkin managed to stabilize the mixture so it could be easily used on fabric and withstand exposure to sun and washing. Soon, Perkin filed a patent and opened his own factory, producing a range of blue, red, and purple hues that gained immense popularity among the Victorians.

The most difficult color to master and hence, the most desired, was green. The 1775 discovery of a vivid green dye resulted in a mass obsession with everything, from dresses to wallpaper, repainted in the new tone. Yet, the trend had a disturbing side to it: the main components of the dye were copper and arsenic. The Victorians were well familiar with the toxic qualities of arsenic, used as rat poison and a remedy against abusive husbands for centuries. Still, when it came to fashion, common sense vanished.

Green-colored gloves left sores on the delicate arms of Victorian ladies, and green wallpaper caused hallucinations and nausea. Working-class people who contacted the pigment directly were the most affected group. There were numerous reports of women who worked in the dye shops vomiting green foam, suffering from sores covering their entire faces, and even seeing in green tones, as if through tinted lenses. Even today, researchers indicate staggering amounts of heavy metals and toxic chemicals in fast fashion products, still eagerly consumed by millions.

In the Victorian era, feathers were hardly a new fashion trend, yet the desire for them reached previously unseen obsessive peaks. The British colonial expansion brought the Westerners in contact with the unknown tropical lands inhabited by colorful birds and strange animals. Soon, the vivid feathers of exotic beings like Bird-of-Paradise or Great Egret adorned hats and dresses of almost every European or American woman of status. Milliners soon moved from installing feather arrangements to mounting entire birds on top of hats and sewing cloaks from hundreds of feathery skins. Often, they tried to give the dead birds lively and active appearances so that it would seem like the creature could take flight at any moment.

The discourse of endangered species did not exist yet. In the mind of an average Victorian raised in the Christian faith, God could not allow his creatures to perish, thus the action of colonizers could not possibly bring much harm. Still, the Victorian biologists noticed the devastating impact. Millions of birds were slaughtered each year for the benefit of the fashion industry, and nature could not possibly adapt itself to the scale of destruction. Women activists started to unite in groups to put an end to the cruel industry. By the late 1910s, their actions resulted in bans on bird hunting and feather import in both the United Kingdom and the USA. Today, feathers occasionally make a comeback in fashion, but they are mostly artificially produced.

5. Fast Fashion: The Dark Legacy of the Victorian Fashion

Even though the mass-scale production of clothing was only developing, the Victorian era gave rise to the most concerning fashion-related trend of our time—fast fashion. Fast fashion as an industry relies on minimizing the cost of production at the expense of the workers, and the maintenance of a constant artificially inspired need for new garments, accessories, and styles.

As we have seen from the paragraph on arsenic green, the disregard for working conditions was too widespread in the Victorian fashion industry.

The invention of sewing machines greatly increased the amount of garments that were being produced. In an environment of economic inequality, the majority of people worked with toxic dyes and dangerous machinery for mere pennies so that the minority could afford to wear the latest trends. The consumers were well aware of the poor working conditions of the lower class but hardly saw it as the issue of their concern.

Standard Victorian etiquette for upper-class women required a different attire for different occasions, be it a church service, a shopping spree, or an afternoon tea. In their memoirs, women who lived through the height of the Victorian era often noted the astonishing amount of time wasted on changing their outfits. Appearing in the same dress twice was out of the question, so every respectable woman required a wide array of accessories and an extensive wardrobe. Although in the 20th century, wartime scarcity would put an end to such luxuries, the direct link between affluence and overconsumption retained its power, even in the age of social media.