JPK Huson 1863
Brev. Brig. Gen'l
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2012
- Location
- Central Pennsylvania
The fashion that launched a thousand nostalgic ***sighs*** , crinoline, those outlandish hoops stuck with us for over a decade. It wasn't always a bad ride.
So bear with me, looking for the lighter side of things in all the murk out there. This may not be the most staggeringly interesting topic, it's at least diverting.
BACK to those blessed hoops/crinoline, so popular factories sprang up by the gazillions, the stock market actually flinched when the fashion changed. THE iconic silhouette of the era, there was so much contention over accidents attached to them ( some deadly ) Queen Victoria condemned wearing them.
Then there's the other side, the fortunate bit attached to this unlikely fashion rage. Nope, not the belles floating between magnolia trees under a starry sky, on the arm of her beau. The one where physics came into play.
Harper's ( of course ). Starting snip in the middle of a long-ish article, easy enough to fill in the blanks here.
It's not a singular kind of event. We've heard all the awful stories, women burned when crinolined skirts caught fire, stabbed by popped wires, dragged when a hoop was caught on something- saved? That, too apparently. The following are both from 1864.
That one made it into Harper's too!
I won't bludgeon the subject to death- there are dozens of stories between the dates when crinoline came into fashion and departed this fashion life. One I can't re-find has the unwitting heroine taking a lighting strike for a group of people, grounding it through those wires- hurt, but not as dead as they could have been.