When Queen Victoria ascended to the throne of England in 1837 she cut a particular image. She was a diminutive woman, about 4′ 11″ in height, but had all the power of an empire behind her and she carried herself as such in the fashions she chose. She came to the public spotlight at a time when the fashion for women’s clothing was becoming more restrictive and confining in some ways yet these she promoted as being exemplars of a woman’s strive for virtue and uprightness. Her reign would be characterized by a high sense of decorum and moral code and developed a confirmed identity that we have since classified as the Victorian era.

What had preceded the Victorian era was the Regency period during which women’s fashion were inspired by a neoclassical aesthetic. Dresses were often made of white muslin, cut with a high waist and a flowing skirt that celebrated a romantic spirit and that, thanks to the effect of the French Revolution, nodded to a society temporarily freed from certain previous strictures.

With Victoria, as England entered the Industrial Age, censure of wayward social attitudes and actions paralleled an increase in opportunities (through urban life) to stretch the boundaries of social etiquette. Queen Victoria was paramount in popularizing a fashion of constraint and reform. Bodices were close-fitting, ending in a V-shape, and shaped by fine whalebone frames that contained the female figure formidably. Tailoring was precise in the cut of the seams so that a woman’s arms were somewhat constrained by the cut of the wide collared and low-shouldered chemises and by the narrowness of the sleeves. By the mid 1840’s the woman’s fashion in skirts had become more exaggerated and compiled of excessive cloth and bustling. The bell-shaped skirt was favored and, as the addition of fabric increased the weight on the garment, the shaping of the skirt was aided by metal or whalebone frames.

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This general tendency in women’s fashion to accentuate certain forms while confining the woman’s movements would last through Queen Victoria’s reign of 64 years. She became a reference for women’s fashions and an icon of the moral rectitude generally attributed to the Victorian period. image: Portrait of Lady Meux. James Abbot McNeill Whistler, c. 1881 image: Victorian Women’s Fashions, Harper’s Bazaar.

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