Women's wear

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Elle.

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Not to Well, actually, but Well, actually ... Hoop skirts were not upper-echelon clothes. Upper-echelon clothes were a dozen or more starched ruffled petticoats which required a legion of servants to launder and iron. Hoop skirts were a cheap imitation of that made possible by the development of lightweight spring steel. All those Victorian visual gags about hoop skirts were meant to snicker at low-class women aping their “betters” but being exposed as cheap ... um, persons who couldn’t afford to wear a dozen newly laundered starched petticoats every day. Kind of nasty, really.

That’s really interesting thanks for sharing and makes complete sense.

I wasn’t thinking about the hoop skirt when I mentioned the higher class people more the intricacies of the garments they wore. The way I understand it is more details or complicated work, embroidery and others mean more time, more fabric, hence more expensive.
 

angeliz2k

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Not to Well, actually, but Well, actually ... Hoop skirts were not upper-echelon clothes. Upper-echelon clothes were a dozen or more starched ruffled petticoats which required a legion of servants to launder and iron. Hoop skirts were a cheap imitation of that made possible by the development of lightweight spring steel. All those Victorian visual gags about hoop skirts were meant to snicker at low-class women aping their “betters” but being exposed as cheap ... um, persons who couldn’t afford to wear a dozen newly laundered starched petticoats every day. Kind of nasty, really.

Can I "well actually" your "well actually"? ;)

Nearly everyone wore hoops skirts/crinolines. The more well-off women certainly did. Even maids did. Same with corsets. Hoop skirts were invented to replace the many layers of heavy, hot petticoats that had previously given skirts their poof (that and padding--and then later you get hoops WITH padding). Hoop skirts were actually an improvement, being light and collapsible. The cartoons were to poke fun at women (of any class, really) who took fashion to absurd lengths. The difference between the higher-end fashion and the lower-end fashion (and between day and evening, for instance) was the level of adornment and the quality of the fabric, as well as the number of garments you owned.

Now, even the crinoline and the skirts you put over it had some weight, even if it was less than 4 or 5 petticoats. How to keep that in place and distribute the weight? A corset. The corset helps keep it in place (it would slip around on an untrained waist) and helps distribute the weight around the torso. (And it helps to support the bust and to provide a smooth--not necessarily smaller--contour.)

Anyway, my point in going through all this is that, as crazy as it seems to modern notions, clothing that people wore in the past was put together the way it was for logical, practical reasons. The more I learn about fashion history, the more I hear fashion historians say things like, "and that's when I discovered why they did this thing that I had thought was so absurd--it DID have a purpose". We have come up with different solutions to the same problems--like the underwire bra, engineered fabrics, and production capacity that makes people feel (sadly) that clothing is disposable.

And my point in saying all that is that fashion would not stay static for that long, especially if there have been earth-altering events. There would be logical developments in the way people view and approach fashion. Can cotton still be grown? IS it still grown? Are there factories still exploiting cheap labor? Are there new synthetic fabrics? You're either going to have to think about what those changes might be in your world, or simply leave the clothing more-or-less up to your reader's imagination.
 
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