The Bustle

As the crinoline's great dome deflated in the late 1860s, fullness migrated to the back of the skirt. The bustle — the tournure in French — was a pad, a small steel half-cage, or a arrangement of stiffened petticoats worn at the small of the back, pushing the skirt out behind while the front fell flat. The 1874 fashion plate shown here, labelled robe à tournure, captures the first bustle era at its height.

The new line was promoted above all by Charles Frederick Worth, the English couturier who dressed the empresses of Europe from Paris. His gowns draped fabric in swags and pleats over the bustle's frame, often with a train, producing the long, narrow, shelf-backed profile of the 1870s. After a slimmer interlude, the bustle returned around 1883 in an even more extreme form, jutting out almost horizontally like a shelf.

The bustle became a music-hall joke — comedians sang about 'dress improvers' and the impossibility of sitting down gracefully — but it also marked something real: the skirt was finally slim enough at the front for a woman to walk briskly, climb into new omnibuses and trains, and move through the modern city. By the 1890s it had vanished, leaving the long bell skirt of the decade's end.