page_title: Crinoline
section_title: Critical response
hierarchical_section_title: Crinoline / Late 19th century / Critical response
caption_attribution_description: English: A fashionably dressed woman tells off her maid for wearing a crinoline hoop, unaware that she looks just as ridiculous in hers.
context_page_description: A crinoline is a stiff or structured petticoat designed to hold out a woman's skirt, popular at various times since the mid-19th century. Originally, crinoline described a stiff fabric made of horsehair and cotton or linen which was used to make underskirts and as a dress lining.
  By the 1850s the term crinoline was more usually applied to the fashionable silhouette provided by horsehair petticoats, and to the hoop skirts that replaced them in the mid-1850s. In form and function these hoop skirts were similar to the 16th- and 17th-century farthingale and to 18th-century panniers, in that they too enabled skirts to spread even wider and more fully.
  The steel-hooped cage crinoline, first patented in April 1856 by R.C. Milliet in Paris, and by their agent in Britain a few months later, became extremely popular. Steel cage crinolines were mass-produced in huge quantity, with factories across the Western world producing tens of thousands in a year. Alternative materials, such as whalebone, cane, gutta-percha and even inflatable caoutchouc were all used for hoops, although steel was the most popular.
context_section_description: Unlike the farthingales and panniers, the crinoline was worn by women of every social class; and the fashion swiftly became the subject of intense scrutiny in Western media. Critical articles on the crinoline were published by the Hungarian journal Az Üstökös (1858) and the Bulgarian journalist Petko Slaveykov in 1864. In the 1850s, the Welsh poet Dafydd Jones wrote a ballad decrying the fashion. A similar sentiment was expressed by a Russian song published in 1854, where the singer complains about his wife having assumed the fashion. In 1855, an observer of Queen Victoria's state visit to Paris complained that despite the number of foreigners present, Western fashions such as the crinoline had diluted national dress to such an extent that everyone, whether Turkish, Scottish, Spanish or Tyrolean, dressed alike. Victoria herself is popularly said to have detested the fashion, inspiring a song in Punch that started: "Long live our gracious Queen/Who won't wear crinoline!" Gernsheim has noted that the Queen was often photographed in crinolines, and suggests that this misunderstanding came from a request made by Victoria that female guests attending her daughter's marriage in 1858 should leave their hoops off due to limited space in the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace.
  The crinoline was perceived as a signifier of social identity, with a popular subject for cartoons being that of maids wearing crinolines like their mistresses, much to the higher-class ladies' disapproval. The questions of servants in crinoline and the related social concerns were raised by George Routledge in an etiquette manual published in 1875, where he criticised London housemaids for wearing hoops at work. As the girls knelt to scrub the doorsteps, Routledge described how their hoops rose to expose their lower bodies, inspiring street harassment from errand boys and other male passers-by. Routledge firmly opined that servants ought to save their fashionable garments for their leisure periods, and dress appropriately for their work. However, this was challenged by some servants who saw attempts to control their dress as equivalent to controlling their liberty, and refused to work for employers who tried to forbid crinolines.
  Arthur Munby observed that in the "barbarous locality" of Wigan, the sight of a female colliery worker wearing trousers was "not half as odd as a woman wearing a crinoline," exposing his own upper-class attitudes. In Australia, poorer rural women were photographed posing outside their slab huts, wearing their best dresses with crinolines. The French sociologist and economist Frédéric le Play carried out surveys of French working-class families' wardrobes from 1850–75, in which he found that two women had crinolines in their wardrobe, both wives of skilled workers. One, the fashion-conscious wife of a glove-maker, owned two crinolines and eleven dresses, although her usual everyday clothing consisted of wooden shoes and printed aprons. In America, the mid-19th century crinoline has become popularly associated with the image of the Southern Belle, a young woman from the American Deep South's upper socioeconomic, slave-owning planter classes. However, as in Europe and elsewhere, the crinoline was far from exclusively worn by wealthy white women. Both black and white women in America of all classes and social standings wore hooped skirts, including First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and her African-American dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, who created many of Mrs. Lincoln's own extravagant crinolines.
  The difficulties associated with the garment, such as its size, the problems and hazards associated with wearing and moving about in it, and the fact that it was worn so widely by women of all social classes, were frequently exaggerated and parodied in satirical articles and illustrations such as those in Punch. Alexander Maxwell has summarised crinoline mockery as expressing the male authors' insecurity and fears that women, whose crinolines took up "enough space for five," would eventually "conquer" mankind. Julia Thomas, observing the extent o
caption: Caricature showing a lady scolding her maid for wearing a crinoline. Punch, 1862
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