Victorian dress reform
Victorian dress reform was an objective of the Victorian dress reform movement of the middle and late Victorian era, led by various reformers who proposed, designed, and wore clothing considered more practical and comfortable than the fashions of the time.
Dress reformists were largely middle-class women involved in the first wave of feminism in the Western World, from the 1850s through the 1890s. The movement emerged in the Progressive Era along with calls for temperance, women's education, suffrage and moral purity. Dress reform called for emancipation from the "dictates of fashion", expressed a desire to "cover the limbs as well as the torso adequately," and promoted "rational dress". The movement had its greatest success in the reform of women's undergarments, which could be modified without exposing the wearer to social ridicule. Dress reformers were also influential in persuading women to adopt simplified garments for athletic activities such as bicycling or swimming. The movement was much less concerned with men's clothing, although it initiated the widespread adoption of knitted wool union suits or long johns.
Some of the movement's proponents established dress reform parlors, or storefronts, where women could buy sewing patterns for the garments, or buy them directly.
Criticisms of tight-lacing
Fashion in the 1850s through the 1880s accented large crinolines, cumbersome bustles, and padded busts with tiny waists laced into 'steam-moulded corsetry'. 'Tight-lacing' became part of the corset controversy: dress reformists claimed that the corset was prompted by vanity and foolishness, and harmful to health. The reported health risks included damaged and rearranged internal organs, compromised fertility; weakness and general depletion of health. Those who were pro-corset argued that it was required for stylish dress and had its own unique pleasures; dress historian David Kunzle theorized that some enthusiastic fans of tightlacing may have experienced sexual pleasure when tightlacing, or by rubbing against the front of the corset, which contributed to the moral outrage against the practice. Doctors such as Alice Bunker Stockham counseled patients against them, particularly during maternity; reformist and activist Catharine Beecher was one of the few to defy propriety norms and discuss the gynecological issues resulting from lifelong corset usage, in particular uterine prolapse. Feminist historian Leigh Summers theorized that some moral panic derived from the common but unspeakable idea that tightlacing could be used to induce an abortion.American women active in the anti-slavery and temperance movements, having experience in public speaking and political agitation, demanded sensible clothing that would not restrict their movement. While supporters of fashionable dress contended that corsets maintained an upright, 'good figure', as a necessary physical structure for moral and well-ordered society, these dress reformists contested that women's fashions were not only physically detrimental, but "the results of male conspiracy to make women subservient by cultivating them in slave psychology." They believed a change in fashions could change the whole position of women, allowing for greater social mobility, independence from men and marriage, the ability to work for wages, as well as physical movement and comfort.
"Emancipation waists" and undergarment reform
Dress reformers promoted the emancipation waist, or liberty bodice, as a replacement for the corset. The emancipation bodice was a tight sleeveless vest, buttoning up the front, with rows of buttons along the bottom to which could be attached petticoats and a skirt. The entire torso would support the weight of the petticoats and skirt, not just the waist. The bodices had to be fitted by a dressmaker; patterns could be ordered through the mail. Physician Alice Bunker Stockham railed against the corset and said of the pregnancy corset, "The Best pregnancy corset is no corset at all." The "emancipation union under flannel" was first sold in America in 1868. It combined a waist and drawers in the form we now know as the union suit. While first designed for women, the union suit was also adopted by men, and is still sold and worn today, by both men and women, as winter underclothing.In 1878, a German professor named Gustav Jaeger published a book claiming that only clothing made of animal hair, such as wool, promoted health. A British accountant named Lewis Tomalin translated the book, then opened a shop selling Dr Jaeger's Sanitary Woollen System, including knitted wool union suits. These were soon called "Jaegers"; they were widely popular.
It is not clear how many women, in either the Americas or on the Continent, wore these so-called "reform" bodices. However, contemporary portrait photography, fashion literature, and surviving examples of the undergarments themselves, all suggest that the corset was almost universal as daily wear by women and young ladies until the 1920s, when girdles began to take over.
The hygienic corset
The primary result of the dress reform movement seems to be the evolution, rather than elimination, of the corset. Because of the public health outcry surrounding corsets and tightlacing, many doctors took it upon themselves to become corsetieres. Many doctors helped to fit their patients with corsets to avoid the dangers of ill-fitting corsets, and some doctors even designed corsets themselves. Roxey Ann Caplin became a widely renowned corset maker, enlisting the help of her husband, a physician, to create corsets which she purported to be more respectful of human anatomy. Inès Gaches-Sarraute designed the straight-front corset in response to her patients' gynecological issues which were attributed to wearing corsets. The design was intended to reduce pressure on the abdomen and improve overall health. The new S-curve silhouette created by this design quickly caught on among fashion houses in the early 20th century.Bloomer suit
The most famous product of the dress reform era is the bloomer suit. In 1851, a New England temperance activist named Elizabeth Smith Miller adopted what she considered a more rational costume: loose trousers gathered at the ankles, like the trousers worn by Middle Eastern and Central Asian women, topped by a short dress or skirt and vest. She displayed her new clothing to temperance activist and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who found it sensible and becoming, and adopted it immediately. In this garb, she visited yet another activist, Amelia Bloomer, the editor of the temperance magazine The Lily. Bloomer not only wore the costume, she promoted it enthusiastically in her magazine. More women wore the fashion and were promptly dubbed "Bloomers". A dress reform was supported by a campaign of the National Dress Reform Association, which was founded in 1856.They put up a fight for a few years, but were subjected to ridicule in the press and harassment on the street. The more conservative of society protested that women had 'lost the mystery and attractiveness as they discarded their flowing robes."
Amelia Bloomer herself dropped the fashion in 1859, saying that a new invention, the crinoline, was a sufficient reform and that she could return to conventional dress. The bloomer costume died—temporarily. It was to return much later, as a women's athletic costume in the 1890s and early 1900s.
Aesthetic Dress movement
In the 1870s, a largely English movement led by Mary Eliza Haweis sought dress reform to enhance and celebrate the natural shape of the body, preferring the looser lines of the medieval and renaissance eras. A historic nostalgia for more forgiving fashions, the aesthetic dress movement critiqued fashionable dress for its immovable shapes, and sought the 'fashioning and adorning of a robe' as tastefully complementary to the natural body.The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and other artistic reformers objected to the elaborately trimmed confections of Victorian fashion with their unnatural silhouette based on a rigid corset and hoops as both ugly and dishonest. Some women associated with the movement adopted a revival style based on romanticised medieval influences such as puffed juliette sleeves and trailing skirts. These styles were made in the soft colors of vegetable dyes, ornamented with hand embroidery in the art needlework style, featured silks, oriental designs, muted colors, natural and frizzed hair, and lacked definitive waist emphasis.
The style spread as an "anti-fashion" called Artistic dress in the 1860s in literary and artistic circles, died back in the 1870s, and reemerged as Aesthetic dress in the 1880s, where two of the main proponents were the writer Oscar Wilde and his wife Constance, both of whom gave lectures on the subject. In 1881 The Rational Dress Society was founded in London. The Society advocated divided skirts as a more practical form of clothing, but its president and co-founder, Lady Florence Harberton, went further - when cycling, she wore full 'Rational' dress, which was a shorter skirt worn over voluminous trousers.
The rational dress movement by country
The dress reform movement spread from the United States and Great Britain to the Nordic countries in the 1880s and from Germany to Austria and the Netherlands. The issue was internationally addressed at the International Congress for Women's Work and Women's Endeavors in Berlin 1896, in which Germany, America, Belgium, Denmark, England, Finland, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Hungary participated.Austria
In Austria the dress reform movement was connected to the Arts and Crafts movement, when the Wiener Secession was founded in 1897 by progressive artists in opposition to the Künstlerhaus.Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, Otto Wagner, Alfred Roller and Hermann Bahr supported dress reform, which they expressed in the Dokumente der Frauen in 1902, and some of them contributed with reform dress designs.
Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge are said to have cooperated in designing reform fashion, and such clothing was associated with the Wiener Werkstätte.