'Her Graceful Drapery, the Soiled Hem'

Victorian Women's Fashion and Contemporary Anxieties

Abstract

In the Victorian era, fashion both shaped and was shaped by the wider political and social contexts of a rapidly changing world. That process created the body and the clothes that dressed it as a site for the reproduction of society itself: its problems, its successes, and its goals for the future. This article examines three aspects of Victorian women's fashion, namely the cage crinoline, the dress reform movements, and influence from non-western styles. It argues that clothing operated as highly visible symbols of gender, class, race, and nationality, and thus both embodied and was made to assuage the contemporary anxieties that surrounded those categories.