The Bustle Replaces the Crinoline: Fashion Redirects Female Curves
Poets involved
What happened
In the late 1860s and through the 1880s, the crinoline's full skirt gave way to the bustle — a framework worn at the back of the waist to project the skirt dramatically behind the body — while the corset became tighter than ever at the front, producing the distinctive S-curve silhouette fashionable in Paris and London during this period. The bustle went through two distinct phases, with its second incarnation in the mid-1880s producing an almost horizontal rear projection. The combination of corset and bustle rendered walking at speed nearly impossible.
Literary impact
The bustle era was the heyday of the 'poetess' in Victorian literary culture, and women like Augusta Webster and Amy Levy wrote poetry that pushed against the physical and social constriction of their world. Henry James's prose and the poetry of Algernon Swinburne engaged obsessively with the clothed and partially unclothed female body as a site of mystery. The bustle's absurdity was mocked in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operettas, which shaped popular culture's attitude to fashion and femininity.
Source: Wikipedia
