Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Valerie Steele

Critical Essay by Valerie Steele

SOURCE: Steele, Valerie. “Victorian Fashion.” In Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age, pp. 51-84. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Steele traces the development of Victorian fashion as reflected, in part, in manuals of etiquette and popular women's magazines of the time.

What Is Victorian Fashion?

What we think of as “Victorian” or “nineteenth-century” fashion lasted just under a century—from about 1820 (almost two decades before Victoria was crowned Queen of England) to about 1910. The period encompassed is thus synonymous neither with the nineteenth century nor with the reign of Queen Victoria. Rather, Victorian fashion begins with the transition away from the immediately preceding—and very different—female fashion known today as the “Empire” or “Regency” style. Victorian fashion ends with the appearance of a “Neo-Empire” look.

During the first Empire period (circa 1795-1815), the fashion was referred to as the “Greek” or...
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