The Amazing Shrinking Skirts of the 1890s

One of the things that was so appealing to me about writing Belle was its time period. The real-life murderer Belle Gunness was most active after 1900, but my book is set in 1890, and I had a lot of fun researching the 1890s.

Researching dress fashion was fascinating to me. I went down a lot of rabbit holes with fashion in general—What kind of closings did men’s pants in the 1890s have – buttons? When was the zipper invented? What kind of underwear did men and women wear in the 1890s? When did women start wearing bras and underpants?

Because that’s the thing with rabbit holes. You start with a question, like “what did an everyday dress for a middle-class American woman look like, and what kind of corset or undergarments did she wear?” and you end up browsing dresses from the Regency era in England. I looked at a lot of images of dresses not just in Belle’s time period, but also throughout history. It got so I could identify the era of a dress down to the decade by its silhouette – the high waistline of the Regency dresses, the ¾-length ruffled sleeves of the mid-1700s, the voluminous Scarlett O’Hara skirts of the Civil War period. Fashion experts can probably do this with any time period, but what’s amazing to me about the period from about 1880 to the turn of the century is that you can see the passage of time as skirts diminish in volume and sleeve puffs blossom and then shrink.

One of my favorite pages to visit was the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Fashion History Timeline, which was tremendously helpful in figuring out what people wore when. And according to Fashion in the 1890s, “1890 saw the establishment of a very slim, perpendicular silhouette. The voluminous bustle skirt skirt had collapsed and disappeared almost overnight in 1889…The emphasis on the skirt that had dominated the crinoline and bustle eras would give way to an emphasis on the bodice… The sleeves would become the most important feature of the dress. They gradually grew in size from the ordinary tight sleeve with a few upright gathers at the shoulder, of 1890, filling out at the top and often tapering to a point over the wrist, forming the classic leg-of-mutton sleeves of the mid '90s.” Sleeve puffs of different styles “all reached enormous proportions by 1895.”

Check out this amazing photo (photographer unknown, credit: Toronto Public Library):

Staff of the Mechanics Institute Reference Library, 1895. Photographer unknown, credit: Toronto Public Library.

Photographs of actual people helped me immensely with verisimilitude. Looking at these women—I mean, first of all, they’re librarians and nobody’s as badass as a librarian—immerses me in that time and space. Look at that woman on the right, with her jaw askew. I think she’s still thinking about her research.

It was a surprisingly modern time in history, which was reflected in women’s dress. Skirts because less voluminous and more practical because this was the era of the invention of the bicycle, which was a liberating force for women. The bicycle allowed a freedom of movement and consequently independence that women had previously lacked. For one thing, it was affordable, and you didn’t have to have a carriage or horse, you didn’t need to have a groom or a driver. You just needed to hop on your bicycle, and you could do your errands and visit friends at a whim.

Part of the move toward modernization was the availability of ready-made clothing that could be purchased, for example, from one of the mail-order catalogs like Sears, Roebuck. You could buy anything from these catalogs — everything from clothing and hats to kitchen goods, stoves, furniture, musical instruments, guns, and more. One of the items of clothing you could purchase, was the blouse. The blouse would replace the traditional bodice, and “The widespread adoption of the blouse was arguably the greatest development in dress in the 1890s. It allowed a more versatile style of dressing — one skirt could be worn with a number of different blouses, suitable for different occasions. It could also be purchased ready-made, as the fit was not as important as that of a bodice.”

In a future newsletter, I’ll write about Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, which were essential to being able to write about La Porte, Indiana, a city I’ve never visited.

Although I’m far from a historical expert, I did my due diligence when I came to making Belle historically accurate. And this research, which I did almost exclusively online, was far and away one of the most fun parts of the process.

Below the closing is an incomplete list of all the things I researched over the course of writing this book.

BELLE is available now, and you can order now from Amazon or your local bookstore.

Research topics

Food

Advertising

Sex attitudes

Vocabulary

Cost of living, cost of particular items

Typical farmhouse chores

Firefighting

Pastimes

Periodicals

Post office, postage stamps, and mail

Mail order catalogs

Banking, checks

Shopping

Travel

Traveling salesman wagons

Popular music

Records, record players

Interior design, popular colors

Architecture styles

Drugstore/candy shop/news/soda fountain

Dry goods store

Clothing

Fashion

Trouser crease history

Butchering

Cuts of meat

Knives

Buffalo hunting

Captive bolt pistol

Interior lighting

Old West dialectal terms

Pentecostal preaching

Sanborn maps

Bricklaying

Mozart’s The Magic Flute

Norwegian folklore and idioms

History of La Porte, Indiana

Seasons and climate of La Porte area

Flora and fauna of La Porte area

Absurd deaths

Writing abusive characters

Historical lonely-hearts ads

Common poisons and their effects

Contemporary slang

Contemporary language