Crinoline - History

History

The crinoline was not the first accessory designed to support the wearer's skirts in a fashionable shape; the farthingale in its various forms was worn from the late fifteenth century through the early seventeenth century, and panniers throughout the eighteenth century. Many of these were formal and elaborate styles, often worn at royal courts and by mid to higher levels of society.

By mid-1780, England had supplanted France as the influential fashion house in the Western world, exchanging light and elaborate style for a more plain, utilitarian mode of fashion. France and most of Western Europe came to adopt this standard, particularly after the French Revolution, when French fashion turned against the styles favored by royalty, the court, and the aristocracy.

Under the prevailing neoclassical influence, women's fashions slowly underwent a consistent transformation to assimilate the simple style based on the simple draped garments of Ancient Greece and the togas of ancient Rome. Skirts became straighter and more slender, worn with fewer and fewer — if any — petticoats. As a result, the eighteenth-century pannier became extinct for all but the most formal of functions.

The silhouette did not remain this way for long, and skirt hems began to widen to give a more conical shape. By the 1810s, gores began to be used in skirts again, and skirts grew wider in the 1820s. The width of these skirts was sometimes supported by a small bustle. These were not always sufficient, and extra petticoats were worn to help.

The first crinolines were petticoats starched for extra stiffness, made out of the new crinoline fabric. They often had ruffles to support the skirts to the desired width. However, these fabrics were not stiff enough to support their own weight, which tended to collapse the petticoats out of shape. Extra rigidity was added to petticoats through rings of cord or braid running around the hem. By the 1830s, women had started to wear petticoats with hoops of whalebone or cane inside the hem.

The first hoop skirt in the US is from 1846, patent number 4,584 of David Hough, Jr. In 1858, IRJ Mann's US patent number 20,681 was the first latticework of strings and hoops.

In 1858, the American W.S. Thomson greatly facilitated the development of the cage crinoline by developing an eyelet fastener to connect the steel crinoline hoops with the vertical tapes descending from a band around the wearer's waist. The invention was patented in the United States (patent US21581), France (patent FR41193) and Britain (patent GB1204/1859). This facilitated the fashionable silhouette's development from a cone shape to a dome. It was not an entirely original idea; Thompson was probably inspired by the open cage or frame style of farthingales and panniers.

The cage crinoline was adopted with enthusiasm: the numerous petticoats, even the stiffened or hooped ones, were heavy, bulky and generally uncomfortable. It was light — it only required one or two petticoats worn over the top to prevent the steel bands appearing as ridges in the skirt — and freed the wearer's legs from tangling petticoats.

Unlike the farthingale and panniers, the crinoline was worn by women of every social class. The wider circulation of magazines and newspapers spread news of the new fashion, also fueling desire for it, and mass production made it affordable.