Fashion Victims: The Pleasures and Perils of 19th Century Dress

 

In the 19th century, the beautiful outfits fashioned by seamstresses and shoemakers supplied the privileged with enviable ensembles. Swathed from head to toe in expensive garments and shod in delicate footwear, fashion-forward women graced the boulevards and the ballrooms with their colourful presence—a pleasure to behold for painters, poets, and passersby who saw them. Their tailored male companions cut equally refined figures in their black coats, spotless white linens, lustrous top hats and shiny boots. Yet, presenting an elegant exterior was not without its perils for both the makers and wearers of fashion.

 

Curated by Elizabeth Semmelhack, Senior Curator, Bata Shoe Museum and Dr. Alison Matthews David, Associate Professor, School of Fashion, Ryerson University and building on Dr. Matthews David’s research into the dangers of dress in the 19th century, this exhibition explores a wide variety of pleasures and perils associated with fashion from head to toe. In addition to highlighting exquisite examples of footwear and clothing from the 19th century, the exhibition also explores many of the often untold stories related to fashion and its production.  Included in the exhibition are the dangers of dresses and shoes dyed arsenic green, the plight of mad hatters and mercury poisoning as well as the effects of constricting corsets and impossibly narrow footwear.  The exhibition also looks at shifts in the making of fashion from independent craft to fragmented labour completed in garrets or on factory floors. The move from traditional shoemaking to factory-made footwear is also emphasized as is the role of those workers who were integral to the presentation of the fashionable figure from the seamstress to the shoeshine boy.

 

The exhibition featured over ninety artifacts from the Bata Shoe Museum’s extensive holdings augmented by loans from private collections.  Highlights from the exhibition included dresses that span the century, mauve-hued footwear dyed with the first coal tar colours invented in 1856, a shoemaking automaton monkey by famed French automaton maker, Jean-Marie Phalibois, beautiful hand-embroidered boots manufactured by the exclusive Parisian shoemaking firm of Francois Pinet, impossibly narrow Adelaide boots and gloves worn by Empress Elisabeth of Austria and a corset with a sixteen-inch waist from the Cleaver/Suddon collection.

 

Fashion Victims:  The Pleasures & Perils of Dress in the 19th Century was on view until June 2016.
The Bata Shoe Museum gratefully acknowledges funding provided by the Government of Ontario.

Press materials for this exhibition can be found here:

BSM Fashion Victims Press Release

BSM Fashion Victims Curators Picks smaller

Elizabeth Semmelhack Bio

Alison Matthews David bio

 

 

French, late 1870s – early 1880s. 

Francois Pinet manufactured some of the most exquisite footwear of the 19th century. Much of it was factory made, but he also employed seven hundred embroiderers who laboured in less than comfortable conditions creating botanically accurate floral embroidery.

French, 1880 – 1885

 The high heel was reintroduced into Western fashion in the late 1850s as part of the nostalgia for the 18th century dress that captured fashionable imaginations of the period. Along with this interest in 18th century came the specter of the licentious woman, this pair of boudoir slippers which features many hallmarks of 18th century mules, would have been perfect for this highly charged image of femininity.

English, c. 1860s

Berlin was the dye center of Europe in the mid-1800s and the highly saturated yarns in bright hues–many laced with arsenic–stimulated a craze among privileged women to do “Berlin work.” Some of the most popular items to needlepoint were slippers made as gifts for the men in their lives. These labours of love were time-consuming to make but unfortunately many of the extant examples show little evidence of wear.

European, c.1840s

The dark green satin used to make these “Adelaide” boots tested positive for arsenic-based dye. Their deep colour was just one of the many shades of green that could be produced using arsenic.

French, late 19th century

 Highly polished footwear was the obligation of the well-dressed man in the 19th century and the cities of Europe and North America were littered with ragged shoeshine boys who offered a shine for a pittance. This pair of boots is said to have belonged to the Grand Écuyer of Napoleon III in charge of the royal stables who certainly didn’t shine his own boots.

Swiss, c. 1885–1925

The desire for beaver fur hats in European men’s fashions dates back centuries and spurred the development of the 17th century North American fur trade. However, it was not until the 1730s that mercury began to be used in the making of beaver top hats. This hat, which dates to the end of the 19th century, still contains small amounts of mercury.