… the Worth creation of the crinoline (see prior month’s discussion on Early Victorian development of petticoats to hoops and crinolines). It is easy for us today to look back and identify the Mid-Victorian era by the crinoline with its giant diameter and wide back of the early 1860’s, but one must remember it had never existed before. Eugenie was showing the world something entirely new and different that had never been seen nor done before.
It was a Charles Worth creation, and a Worth marketing effort that brought the crinoline to fame.
(Portraits: left Empress Eugenie of France; right Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Worth about 1861)