Victorian fashion consists of the various fashions and trends in clothing in British culture that emerged and developed in the United Kingdom and the British Empire throughout the Victorian era, roughly from the 1830s through 1900. The period saw many changes in fashion, including changes in styles, fashion technology and methods of distribution. Various movements in architecture, literature, and the decorative and visual arts as well as a changing perception of gender roles also influenced fashion.
During Queen Victoria's reign, the U.K. enjoyed a period of economic and political growth along with technological advancement. The large cultural and technological forces that supported that growth had equally sweeping influences on fashion for women, men and children. For fashion, these forces are the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the British Empire (on which the sun was said never to set), the social classes (and the expanding middle class), differentiation of the genders and technological advancements.
Mass production of fabrics and threads for factory-made clothing, industrial sewing machines and the invention of synthetic dyes made clothing that was mass-produced. This mass production also made the materials for clothing constructed at home and by professional dressmakers and tailors, who in turn hired piece workers. Individually constructed (bespoke) clothing made by professional dressmakers and tailors was generally made for the upper classes until home sewing machines were introduced in the 1850s, making designed couture more available to the middle classes. Clothing could be made more quickly and cheaply. Increasingly, over the 19th century, fashion changed more frequently, with more fundamental differences than it had in prior centuries. (The print, right, shows a remarkable diversity of styles for one century of dresses.) The styles of Elizabethan England, in contrast, changed much less extremely over the course of its century.
Advancement in literacy and printing and the proliferation of fashion magazines opened the evolving trends of high fashion and the markets of advertising and mass consumption to the middle and working classes. By 1905, clothing was increasingly factory made and often sold in large, fixed-price department stores, spurring an age of consumerism with the rising middle classes.
The genders differentiated during the Victorian Era in ways that affected clothing and fashion. Middle-class women were increasingly relegated to the private, domestic "sphere" over the course of the century, and men's world was the public one."Gender roles in the 19th century". The British Library. Archived from the original on 8 July 2022. Retrieved 21 October 2016. That is, the "'ideology of separate spheres' (or 'domestic ideology') ... dictated that respectable middle-class women were domestic creatures." Respectability was highly valued for middle-class women, distinguishing them from women of their class or of lower classes whose "virtue" was not apparently perfect. The personification of this domestic ideal was "the angel in the house" (from Coventry Patmore's arguably prescriptive poem).
Many upper-class married women were not concerned about respectability in the same way, although discretion was expected for those who had, for example, affairs outside of their marriages. The boundary between the working class and the middle class was porous for upper-working-class women, especially those with more education, which means that the "ideology of separate spheres" affected them and made the middle-class value of respectability important for them as well.
Men's fashions also show the effect of the domestic ideology, with their increasing uniformity over the century. According to Carolyn Kirby, a shift in men's fashions occurred abruptly at the end of the 18th century, with the French Revolution:This sudden and profound shift in the style of men’s clothes was coined ‘The Great Male Renunciation’ by psychologist John Flugel in 1930. He argued that at the end of the 18th century, men gave up any claim to be considered beautiful and became instead "only useful."Flugel's theory is no longer accepted uncritically, but his observation that men seemed to renounce highly decorated and ornate style is sound. Business attire in particular lost much of its color and visual diversity, and those who could afford it substituted fine fabrics and subtle design for ornamentation. Sarah Gharmallah Alzahrani and Safia Abdelaziz Saroukh see this transformation to be rooted in industrialization:The Industrial Revolution that began in the late 18th century had a great impact on the development of fashion in the 19th century, there was a clear change in men's clothing at the beginning of the 19th century, not only in style but also in the appearance of the English sewing machine, and from this date, English clothing became world-class, and this was not only for England but for all of Europe is undoubtedly due to the French Revolution that stripped Europe of its previous leadership of fashion, so the 19th century belonged to the English in terms of [men's] fashion.But men's clothing did have variation based on purpose. Sports (and, to the Victorians, country) clothing, for example, developed into its own genre. Peter McNeil sees the primary influences on men's fashion through the 19th to the 21st centuries to be "the cult of youth[,] ... the secularization of sport[,] the [uniforms] of modern warfare ..., [and] the tendency to prefer modern ideas of comfort and convenience."McNeil, Peter. "Men's Fashion: 1800–2022." Chapter 22. The Routledge History of Fashion and Dress, 1800 to the Present. Routledge, 2024. https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/182707/2/Men%27s%20Fashion%20200822_24_12_20_09_29_44.pdf
DOI: 10.4324/9780429295607-27. These influences have had their greatest impact in men's informal wear and made menswear generally informal.
Women's fashions The clothing choices women made were affected by social class and the prevailing ideologies and values of their class.Gernsheim, Alison (1963). Victorian and Edwardian Fashion - A Photographic Survey. New York: Dover Publications Inc., p. 26. For example, the location of middle-class women in the domestic sphere influenced their sense of fashion and of what was appropriate to wear.
The largest social class was the working classes (about 3/4 of the population in 1760), and almost all "working-class women earned money, whether in agricultural work, factories, service, domestic industry, or the new white-collar and service jobs, and their work was an important contribution to their families’ well-being or even survival." All of this work was in public, and the women's clothing reflected the work they did, whether the uniform of a servant, the practical dress of a laborer or the accessories helping to identify what they were selling.
Restricted by the "ideology of separate spheres" as they were, middle-class women also did both paid and unpaid work outside their homes. Lower-middle-class women did (often) unpaid work in the family business, makingvaried and crucial contributions to family businesses and incomes. ... In addition, [more affluent] middle-class women worked, some occasionally or sporadically, others extensively and tirelessly, in and through religious or philanthropic organizations at a wide range of valued activities."The middle classes grew during the course of the century. At the beginning they were only about "one quarter of the population by 1850, [but] between 1851 and 1871 the number of solidly middle-class families doubled." After the middle of the century, middle-class women — much of whose work occurred in the public sphere — were likely to be making their own dresses, following perhaps the fashions of haute couture but bounded by the need to appear respectable.
The women in what David Cannadine calls "the British landed establishment," the ruling class, about 1–5% of the population, lived their lives in public unless they personally chose to be more private and domestic. Besides serving on boards and running philanthropic organizations, they were the leaders of the social world, essential for the political work not only of their own interests but those of their husbands and other male relatives. Some wore haute couture, some were very active in sports and took advantage of clothing (and foundations) designed with more freedom of movement in mind and some went their own way and developed their own style.
Regardless of class, most women wore a corset over a chemise, followed by a gown or skirt paired with a bodice, blouse, or chemisette. The shape of the skirt would be supported by layers of petticoats or, later in the period, structured foundation garments like cage crinolines or bustles. The clothing of upper-class women, who generally did not do paid labor, was often elaborately decorated with more layers and trims. Middle-class women wore less complex dress styles with less expensive fabric and trim. Working-class clothing was simpler still, with less expensive fabric, fewer layers and little trim, and sometimes it signaled the work they did. Including the undergarments, the amount of fabric in women's clothing made it much heavier and the construction made it much more restrictive than ours, especially in the waist (due to the boning in the corset) and the shoulders (due to the popularity of dropped shoulder seams). The amount, quality and type of fabric were displays of wealth and status.
Throughout the 19th century, journalism increasingly targeted women and addressed an increasingly more class-diverse audience. According to the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism,The closely allied fashion and women's journals can be divided into three phases: titles such as the Lady's Magazine continued eighteenth-century models, addressing readers as "ladies" and catering to a leisured, fashionable elite; a more domesticated format by the 1840s, targeting middle-class women with instructive and entertaining content including dressmaking and etiquette articles ...; finally, from the 1870s, a livelier, more engaging style of fashion reporting influenced by the New Journalism was integrated with an increased amount of imagery, including better quality fashion plates ....For example, Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics magazine (which ran from 1809 to 1829, became a fashion-only periodical in 1829) "appealed to fashion-conscious Britons." Ackermann's was ultimately absorbed by La Belle Assemblée, or, Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine Addressed Particularly to the Ladies (which ran until 1837), which was also influental in the U.S. By the end of the century, women's periodicals included patterns for dressmaking in their pages, reflecting the presence of middle- and working-class readers as well as technological change like sewing machines for home use and mass-produced fabrics and trim.
Elements of Victorian Fashion It is important not to oversimplify the fashion of the Victorian age. The rate of change in fashion accelerated in the 19th century to the point that styles were distinctly different from one decade to the next (see the print called "When Was That Dress in Fashion?", top right).