Fashioning women's agency in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The wearers and makers of historicised fancy dress 1796-1856

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, royal and aristocratic women used fancy-dress costume to fashion political and cultural agency in British society. This study, centred around Queen Victoria's costume balls held in 1842, 1845 and 1851, situates those events within the world of elite fashion. By uncovering references to historical figures that inspired guests at those balls, I argue that their costumes were carefully constructed forms of self-expression. Fancy dress was an intricate, luxury commodity, but costumes were often only worn for one night. By contrast, the craftspeople who transformed the costumes from raw material to finished garment, spent weeks working with the materials. Drawing together a range of approaches and literatures, from cultural history to material culture studies, the principal innovation of this study is to recover forgotten histories of the women who wore and made historicised fancy dress to reveal their vital contribution to the vogue for historicism in Britain during the nineteenth century. Show more