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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
CLOTHING
AND FASHION
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Women wearing bustles. Bustles have been an element of Western fashion intermittently since the seventeenth century. Women's
dresses were form-fitting on top and created with a tuck and flounce in the back, below the waist, to avoid appearing masculine.
© BETTMAN/CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
from all classes, as well as by little girls with their short
skirts. As The Delineator noted in February 1886 (p. 99),
some women did not wear a bustle pad, "except when
such an adjunct if necessitated by a ceremonious toilette,"
relying instead on a flounced petticoat to support the
drapery of simpler dresses.
After about 1887 the bustle reduced in size and skirts
began to slim. The skirts of the early 1890s featured some
back fullness, but emphasis had shifted to flared skirt hems
and enormous leg-of-mutton sleeves, and bustle supports
were not as fashionable. With skirts fitting snugly to the
hips and derriere in die late 1890s, however, some women
relied on skirt supports to achieve a gracefully rounded
hipline that set off a small waist. While not as extreme as
examples from the mid-1880s, the woven wire or quilted
hip pads worn beyond the turn of century show the tenacity of the full-hipped female ideal.
Despite some historians' view that bustle fashions were
surely the most hideous ever conceived, this very feminine silhouette has continued to fascinate. In the late 1930s,
ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF
CLOTHING
AND
Elsa Schiaparelli made playful homage to the bustle in
some of her sleek evening dresses, while late-twentiethcentury bustle interpretations by avant-garde designers,
such as Yohji Yamamoto and Vivienne Westwood, have
utilized the form with historically informed irony.
See also Mantua; Skirt Supports.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blum, Stella. Victorian Fashions and Costumes-from Harper's Bazar
1867-1898. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1974.
Cunnington, C. Willett. English Women's Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. London: Faber and Faber, 1937. Reprint,
New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1990.
Gernsheim, Alison. Fashion and Reality: 1840-1914. London:
Faber and Faber, 1963. Reprint as Victorian and Edwardian
Fashion: A Photographic Survey. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1981.
Hill, Thomas E. Never Give a Lady a Restive Horse. From Manual of Social and Business Fonns: Selections. 1873. Also from
Albmn of Biography and Art. 1881. Reprint, Berkeley, Calif.:
Diablo Press, 1967.
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
CLOTHING
( S H O E S , WOMEN'S •>
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PHYSICAL C U L U R E
ANOTHER WORD FOR
NOW ONLY
NEW FOOT NOTES
Physical Culture women's shoes advertisement, 1938. By the
1930s, the color, shape, and decoration of shoes had expanded
to offer numerous options for fashionable women. © LAKE COUNTY
MUSEUM/CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
and the shapes of toes varied, with no one style predominating. The square toe, introduced as early as the 1790s,
did not become the main style until the late 1820s but
would remain so for the next half century.
As factories disfigured the horizon, many longed for
the picturesque qualities of an unspoiled landscape. A naturalism movement brought long country promenades
into fashion; ladies began to wear "spatterdashes," leggings adapted from men's military dress that protected
stockings from spatters and dashes of mud. Walking became a fad called "pedestrianism" and a prescribed activity for women. Boots were worn for this activity as a
sensible alternative to fashion shoes. Ankle boots, referred to as demi-boots or half boots, found international
appeal in this period.
By the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne in
1837 a sentimental, romanticized movement had swept
popular thought. Women became expressions of virtue
and femininity, their conservative costume and demure
decorum reflected conscious gentility. Fine slippers of kid
and silk were made in great quantities in Paris and exported around the world. Soles, which had been made
without left or right definition for more than 200 years,
were exceptionally narrow now and the delicate uppers
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tended not to last long ;
at the ball of the foot,
Colored footwear founi
kle-length skirts, but
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decades.
1 he 1long, hill
tury hid the feet from view, with perhaps the occasional
peep at a vamp when the woman walked or waltzed across
a floor. By the mid-1850s, black or white footwear was
deemed by fashion delineators to be the most elegant and
tasteful choice, a standard that would last for many years.
However, after the mid-1850s, with the introduction
of wire frame "crinoline" skirt supports, skirts tended to
tip and swing, exposing the foot and ankle. This brought
about interest in the decoration of shoe vamps. Machine
chain-stitched designs with colorful silk underlays,
dubbed "chameleons," became fashionable for home and
evening wear. For daytime, however, boots became modest essentials underneath the wire-frame supported skirts.
Side-laced boots called "Adelaides" in England, after
William IVs consort, were made for most outdoor occasions until improvements in the elasticity of rubber resulted in the development of elastic thread which, woven
into webbing, was used for ankle-boot gussets. Elasticsided boots were referred to as "Garibaldi" boots in Europe after the Italian statesman who united Italy during
the 1860s, and as "Congress" boots in the United States
after the American Congress. Front-laced boots came
back into fashion by 1860. Called "Balmorals," after
Queen Victoria's Scottish home, the style was deemed
suitable for informal daywear and sporting occasions at
first, but by the 1870s had become the more common
closure of all boots. Button boots were introduced in the
1850s, but were generally not favored until the 1880s
when their tight fit and elegant closure flattered the slim
ankle and foot more than laced styles.
Heels were re-introduced on ladies' footwear during
the late 1850s, but did not find universal appeal until the
late 1870s. Historicism was an important movement of
the mid-nineteenth century; Rococo and Baroque styling
was evident on shoes in the 1860s with a return to buckles and bows. Large, multiple loop bows were called
"Fenelon," after the seventeenth-century French writer.
Mules, too, came back into fashion as part of the historical revival of the ancien regime.
Exoticism was another important movement of the
nineteenth century. Via the Crimean war, Turkish embroideries were exported for the production of shoe uppers in the late 1850s and when Japan opened its doors to
foreign trade in 1867, a taste for all-things Oriental made
a strong comeback. Chinese embroidered silks or European embroidered silks in the taste of Chinese and Japanese textiles were in fashion and a Japanese-influenced
palette of colors resulted in brown leather footwear coming into vogue, which would become a fashion staple.
By the late 1880s the square toe had finally fallen
from fashion, replaced by rounded and even almond-
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
CLOTHING
ROMA AND GYPSY
Y \a men. A group
AND FASHION
must not touch any clothing on the lower body. © WOLFGANG KAEHLER/CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
The presentation of self through dress and fashion
is very important to the Roma and part of their public
performance as Roma. Roma fashions do change over
time and place. Furthermore, fashions for men and
women seem to be based on different criteria. Whereas
men dress to present an image to the outside world that
they associate with power and authority, women dress to
present an image to the Roma that is associated with
Roma ideas of the power of purity and pollution.
Men
In the United States Roma have adopted fashions that
project a particular masculine stereotype, often gleaned
from the movies. Their public and private appearance is
a performance of a certain recognizable style that they
associate with masculinity and authority. They are not
concerned with being stylishly up-to-date, rather they are
concerned with the images of power projected by the
clothing. Examples of commonly seen styles include:
1. Urban cowboy—hat, cowboy shirt, bolo tie, jeans,
and boots; sometimes a Western-style jacket.
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2. 1930s Chicago gangster—loose pants, two toned
shoes, wide splashy tie, and double breasted jacket.
3. Palm Springs golfer—white or loud color pants, red
golf shirt, Irish hat.
4. Casual modern—polo shirts, white shirts, or Hawaiian shirts, long pants.
Young men who are not yet old enough to present
an image of power may adopt a more youthful modern
dress. For example: (1) Beatles attire—pencil thin tie,
loud tight shirt, and stove pipe pants; (2) Spanish or Hungarian Gypsy musician—longish hair, red diklo at the
neck, "Gypsy" shirt; or (3) Modern—shirt and baggy
shorts.
Women
Women are interested in fashion that shows their sense
of "shame" and their status as guardians of purity for the
family. Because of this role, women are expected to cover
their legs at least to the mid-calf. Married women traditionally cover their head with a scarf and tie their long
hair up or braid it. There is no shame associated with
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Occult Dress to Zoran, Index
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question whether it is
a physical possibility for women to reduce their natural
waist measure below 17 or 18 inches."
This is not to say that women did not use corsets to
reduce their waists. Writing in 1866, the English author
Arnold Cooley claimed that, "The waist of healthy
women . . . is found to measure 28 to 29 inches in circumference. Yet most women do not permit themselves
to exceed 24 inches round the waist, whilst tens of thousands lace themselves down to 22 inches, and many deluded victims of fashion and vanity to 21 and even to 20
inches."
The discourse on tight-lacing needs to be analyzed
in ways that move beyond simple measurements. Because
the practice of tight-lacing was so ill-defined and yet was
perceived as being so ubiquitous in the nineteenth century, it became the focus of widespread social anxieties
about women.
Tight-lacing disappeared as a social issue with the
decline of the corset as a fashionable garment in the early
twentieth century. However, there still existed individuals who wore tightly laced corsets. In the mid-twentieth
century, Ethel Granger was listed in the Guinness Book of
World Records for having "the world's smallest waist,"
which measured 13 inches. In the early twenty-first century, the most famous tight-lacer is probably the corsetier
Mr. Pearl, who claims to have a 19-inch waist. His friend
Cathie J. boasts of having reduced her waist to 15 inches.
See also Corset; Fetish Fashion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kunzle, David. Fashion and Fetishism. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1982.
Steele, Valerie. Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
. The Corset: A Cultural History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001.
Summers, Leigh. Bound to Please. Oxford: Berg, 2001.
Ward, E. The Dress Reform Problem: A Chapter for Women. London: Hamilton, Adams, 1886.
Valerie Steele
TOGAThe toga was a wrapped outer garment worn in
ancient Rome. Its origin is probably to be found in the
tebenna, a semicircular mantle worn by the Etruscans, a
people who lived on the Italian peninsula in an area close
to that occupied by the Romans. Several Roman kings
were Etruscan and many elements of Etruscan culture
were taken over by the Romans. The toga may have been
one of these elements.
The toga was a highly symbolic garment for the Romans^ It had numerous forms, but the toga pura or toga
virilis was the most significant. In its earliest form the
toga pura was a semicircle of white wool.
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Statue of Emperor Augustus in a toga. The toga, a garment
wrapped around the body and over the shoulder, was worn by
all ancient Roman men, though larger and longer togas were
generally reserved for Romans with status and wealth. © ARALDO
DE LUCA/CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
At the time of the Roman Republic (509 B.C.E. to 27
B.C.E.) and after, only free male citizens of Rome who were
at least sixteen years of age could wear this toga. It was the
symbol of Roman citizenship and was required dress for
official activities. Men wore togas to audiences with the
Emperor and to the games played in the Roman arena.
The toga was worn outermost, over a tunic. (A tunic was a T-shaped woven garment, similar in form to a
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