What They Wore: The Governess Was Wicked

I love historical fashion from pantaloons to pelisses, and over the years more and more of it has made its way into my books. Clothing can be a wonderful way to ground a scene in a time and place, and it can also tell you a lot about a character.

Afternoon dress, ca. 1855, French, cotton, from @metmuseum

A photo posted by Really Old Frocks (@reallyoldfrocks) on Jul 25, 2016 at 5:54am PDT

When I started writing Elizabeth Porter, the heroine at the center of The Governess Was Wicked, I knew I'd set myself a particular challenge. Governesses typically wore simple clothing in a limited range of colors (think functional colors like greys and dark blues and greens) and with few embellishments. She would have had a few dresses including her "best" dress that would have been worn to church or on special occasions. Otherwise, her clothing would have had to last as long as possible to maximize on cost.

Most of what we see in museums are beautiful examples of exquisite — and exquisitely expensive — gowns. The more workman-like dresses weren't necessarily preserved for history. That means that you'll see a lot more of Mrs. Norton's wardrobe when you go to museums than you will Elizabeth's.

While her clothing might not have been as luxurious and fashion-forward as the woman whose children she educated, a governess did share something in common with her mistress: they both wore the same silhouette.

The late 1850s was characterized by large, bell-shaped skirts that flared out from a tightly cinched waist. One big development in undergarments allowed women to achieve these huge skirts: the cage crinoline. Up until this point, ladies would have piled on petticoats to create a full effect. Although they look horribly impractical to us, crinolines of wire covered with cotton actually created a structure for a dress to lay on top of and flare out from the body.

Crinolines were relatively inexpensive, so women of all classes eventually adopted them (although the massive yards of fabric needed for truly huge skirts would be a fashion statement only very wealthy women could afford).

The shape crinolines created was so popular that reports were 200 pound of product was lost in the Staffordshire potteries in 1863 due to the wide skirts of working women accidentally sweeping shelves clean.

If you're interested in fashion history (or just really like all of the pretty pictures of dresses I've shown), join my Facebook group Really Old Frocks and follow my @reallyoldfrocks Instagram for more beautiful old-fashioned fashion.

And last but not least, I'm giving away two huge prize packs to celebrate The Governess Was Wicked thanks to a little help from my author friends. You could win ebooks, signed paperbacks, audiobooks, and an Amazon gift card!. All you have to do is enter here:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

BONUS: I had to include this stereoscopic picture I ran across in doing my research for this article. It's both creepy and flirtatious with the older gentleman kissing the hand of a young woman who is fending him off coquettishly with her fan.

Women and the Victorian-Era Tennis Dress

Tennis, anyone? It seems ridiculous to us today to look at fashion plates from the Victorian era and realize that some of those huge, voluminous dresses with full bustles and flounces were meant to be tennis dresses. In the modern era, tennis players look like this:

via GIPHY

So how do you get to Serena's nearly complete domination of the women's game for the last decade in a totally functional tennis dress (or skirt and top) from these ladies?

During the Victorian era an increasing number of women picked up a wooden racket and hit the courts (in full-length gowns of course). Women of the upper and middle classes began to take an interest in sport — croquet in the 1860s, tennis in the 1870s and 1880s, and the daring sport of cycling in the 1890s, according to Catroina M. Parratt in her article "Atheltic 'Womanhood:' Exploring Sources for Female Sport in Victorian and Edwardian England."

The growing popularity of sport among women came about during a time of hyper-masculinity among Victorian men.* But it was also a time when women's education reformers were pushing for healthful — although moderate — exercise for girls. They argued that girls could also learn lessons on the field much as boys did while playing cricket and rugby.

However, Parratt argues that womanhood and athletics were not necessarily compatible, and so sporting women had to find a way to reconcile those two things by "project[ing] an image of moderation and becoming femininity." While women who supported Victorian dress reform might have tried to argue that shorter skirts and bloomers would have been more rational uniforms for playing tennis, feminine modesty won out. Reformers couldn't rock the boat too much by putting girls in functional athletic clothing, so instead women continued to swathed themselves in the hyper-feminine dresses of the era while playing sport. As Parratt puts it, the sporting woman's experience was "at one and the same time, a liberating and constraining one."

*The Victorians were remarkably preoccupied by masculinity, especially in relation to the empire. There's a ton of scholarship that's been done on this topic, particularly about male education and masculinity, that's worth tracking down if you're interested.

I Went to the Death Becomes Her Exhibit at the Met

This Sunday was Marathon Day here in NYC. I, like many New Yorkers, live right near the route. While I love the marathon, sometimes the crowds can get a little rough. This year I cheered on some of the runners earlier in the day and then left the neighborhood to do something I never do. Dear Reader, I went to the Met on a Sunday and took a boatload of photographs.

Normally the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a mess on the weekends (even more so when it's raining). I try to avoid it as much as possible, but I was determined to see the museum's new exhibit Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire. Victorian fashion? Death? Mourning? This is pretty much right in my wheelhouse, so off I went to a delightfully empty Met thanks to all of the crowds being diverted to the marathon.

Arriving so early, I had the gallery mostly to myself which was an incredible experience. The exhibit is small but incredibly details and representative of several trends in mourning attire. The curator's notes addressed some major themes:

• Women bore the brunt of the responsibility when it came to mourning. Rules for men were much more flexible, but women were strictly regulated in what they could wear and when as well as the social activities they could partake in while in mourning.
• The stages of mourning and the way that fabrics mirrored the gradual coming out of mourning. The exhibit discusses the use of crepe as well as the incorporation of more lustrous fabrics like silk moire and taffeta in the later stages. Color also comes into play.
• The tension between fashion and grief. Especially in the later examples of the dresses, the curator's notes emphasizes that the wearer, despite being in a deep state of mourning, was still at the cutting edge of fashion when it came to silhouette.

And speaking of silhouette, I was delighted to see that the exhibit shows the progression of the Grecian-inspired dresses of the 1810s-1820s through the bell-shaped crinolines of the 1850s all the way to the princess cut dresses of the lat 1870s to early 1880s and then into the very late Victorian period (there's even an Edwardian dress or two in there). Oh! And one of Queen Victoria's dresses is on display (which I sadly did not photograph because I was overwhelmed by seeing one of Her Majesty's dresses in the flesh)!

If you have the chance to see this wonderful exhibit, definitely do. Sadly there is no museum catalog for Death Becomes Her, and photographs do not do these works of art justice (all of the detailing gets lost on black fabric, and these are rich with details).

Death Becomes Her is on until February 1, 2015.