Victorian Fashion AccessoriesIn Victorian England, women's accessories were always much more than incidental finishing touches to their elaborate dress. Accessories helped women to fashion their identities.Victorian Fashion Accessories explores how women's use of gloves, parasols, fans and vanity sets revealed their class, gender and colonial aspirations. The colour and fit of a pair of gloves could help a middle-class woman indicate her class aspirations.The sun filtering through a rose-colored parasol would provide a woman of a certain age with the glow of youth. The use of a fan was a socially acceptable means of attracting interest and flirting.Even the choice of vanity set on a woman's bedroom dresser reflected her complicity with colonial expansion. By paying attention to the particular details of women's accessories we discover the beliefs embedded in these artefacts and enhance our understanding of the culture at large. Beaujot's engaging prose illuminates the complex identities of the women who used accessories in the Victorian culture that created and consumed them. Victorian Fashion Accessories is essential reading for students and scholars of, history, gender studies, cultural studies, material culture and fashion studies, as well as anyone interested in the history of dress. |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
The Glove and the Making of MiddleClass Womanhood | 31 |
Pushing the Boundaries of MiddleClass Womanhood | 63 |
Umbrellas as Symbols of Imperialism Race Youth Flirtation and Masculinity | 105 |
The Celluloid Vanity Set and the Search for Authenticity | 139 |
Conclusion | 179 |
Bibliography | 183 |
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Common terms and phrases
accessories advertising American Anon aristocratic Arthur Munby beauty became Britain British Xylonite Company Brush Makers brushmakers Catalogue celluloid colonial Combs Company of Fan consumers create domestic Dress DuPont elephant England English etiquette manuals Evans Picture Library Fan Makers Collection Fan Museum fanmaking fashion plates Female School femininity figure flirt flirtation gender gloves Guildhall Library Hagley Museum hair hands helped historians History ideal imperial Imperial Leather ivory Ivory Pyralin Japan John Johnson Collection Journal Judith Butler Lady’s leisured Liberty & Co London Lucite Magazine manufacture Mary Evans Picture Material Culture men’s middle middle-class women Mikado Munby Newspaper clipping nineteenth century objects Oxford parasol phrenology Plastics Pont de Nemours Pyralin Robarts Library School of Design sexual social Society of Brush story suggested Sunshade symbol trade umbrella United Society University of Toronto University Press Uzanne vanity sets Victorian period woman woman’s Woman’s Toilet Book working-class Worshipful Company York