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Patricia A. Cunningham ; Kent State University Press, Kent,Ohio, 2003, 250p,
ISBN 0-8733-8743-0
£32.00 (Pbk)
The dress reform movements of the mid to late 19th century and the early 20th century have been the subject of only intermittent interest to fashion specialists. It is quite usual, even today, to find references, in histories of fashion, histories of women and general histories, only to Amelia Bloomer, as though she single-handed had promoted the wearing of trousers for women. Yet she was but part of a movement - which was actually various different movements, sometimes apart, sometimes converging - to reform not simply women's dress, but also the conventions and attitudes that dictated what women should wear. As Aileen Ribeiro has demonstrated, dress and morality are always closely connected, so the reform of dress in its heyday in the 19th century, the role of women and the policing of female behaviour always went hand in hand.
Patricia Cunningham has relatively little to say about the period of the French Revolution, when fashionable dress underwent an ideological upheaval as women abandoned corsets, panniers, heavy skirts and wigs in favour of styles that symbolically referenced the republics of ancient Greece and Rome. These styles were later again abandoned, but the stiff and bulky fashions of the mid 19th century continued to...