The Crinoline

The crinoline was an understructure, not a dress: a bell-shaped cage of flexible steel hoops joined by vertical tapes, worn beneath the skirt to hold it out in a great dome. Its name came from the stiff horsehair-and-linen petticoat (French crin, horsehair, plus lin, linen) it replaced. The steel cage was patented in 1856, and factories such as Thomson's turned out thousands a day, making the fashionable silhouette affordable far beyond the aristocracy.

For about fifteen years nearly every woman in the Western world wore one, from Empress Eugénie — whose taste set the fashion — down to housemaids. The cage was lighter and cooler than the stack of starched petticoats it replaced, and even the dress reformer Amelia Bloomer felt the petticoat problem had been solved and quietly dropped her campaign. Skirts swelled to enormous circumferences, and the slender waist at the centre of all that fabric became the era's defining silhouette.

The crinoline was also the most mocked garment of the century. Punch cartoonists drew women sweeping men off pavements and taking up room for five at parties, and the hoops had an embarrassing habit of tilting upward when a woman sat or knelt. Worse, the vast skirts caught fire with horrifying ease and were blamed for many deaths, and they tangled in carriage wheels and factory machinery. By the late 1860s the dome was collapsing toward the back — the bustle was already on its way.