CRINOLINE

In the 1956 version of The King and I, there’s a bit where Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr) is surrounded by an army of small children trying to lift her skirt up. Understandably disturbed (her background is, after all, in the mores of Victoriana), she seeks an explanation from the eponymous King’s ‘head wife’, who replies placidly that they think she is dressed like that because she’s “shaped like that”.

“Well, I certainly am NOT,” she replies, lifting up her crinoline to reveal a neat little pair of ankle-length bloomers.

Deborah Kerr: A Crinoline Made of Children

The King and I was one of my mother’s army of VHS tapes recorded off 1990s TV to keep her offspring pacified of a Saturday night, and I always watched Deborah Kerr sailing around the orientalist palace with a confusion similar to that expressed by the child army. Why did these women wear clothes that made them look like a different species from their male counterparts? It’s apparently illogical, one of fashion’s many confusing mistakes, yet the big skirt trend was one that dominated female fashion for at least three centuries, and continued to have iconic moments long after the Victorians. In fact, it’s a true constant, from Madame de Pompadour and Elizabeth the First to Dior’s New Look, Marilyn Monroe’s subway moment, Grease (where Sandy rejecting it in favour of spray-on wet look leggings always feels troubling), and, relatively more recently, the designs of Vivienne Westwood.

There is an obvious explanation for its attractiveness which can be seen simply by looking at the silhouette: in algebraic terms, massive hips = lots of lovely womb space to let. In the case of the twentieth century’s most famous blonde, the explanation reaches new realms of subtlety (big skirt + wind + camera = £££). But this precludes their frequent favour with the women themselves: Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette were, as Westwood is, fashion leaders, not followers, and it cannot be denied that there is a certain something about a skirt with a big twirl factor that feels inoffensively joyful. And looking back to Elizabeth ‘Heart and Stomach of a Man’ The First, it seems unlikely that the Ditchley Portrait is trying to convey nothing more than Hey Boys, Check Out My Womb.

Hair of the Dog

So what is a ‘crinoline’? It’s actually something very specific; in its original sense specific enough to be a brand name, referring to ‘a stiff fabric made of horse-hair and cotton or linen thread’. The brand name in question uses crinoline‘s literal meaning, ‘hair-thread’ to allude to its composition from horse hair, but later on, crinoline comes to refer to other materials, such as ‘whalebone or iron hoops’, which serve to expand petticoats. The dictionary gives as a second definition the crucial word ‘hoop-petticoat’, which it glosses as something ‘worn under the skirt of a woman’s dress in order to support or distend it’.

The much-touted Ditchley Portrait. Check out the womb.

This ‘hoop-petticoat’ was the eighteenth century term for the big skirt, and here it took the form of an architectural arrangement of side-panniers so wide that doorways frequently had to be expanded to accommodate their wearers. But it was not something new: on the contrary, the hoop bore no small resemblance to earlier innovations, most notably the sixteenth-century (Ditchley Portrait) ‘farthingale’, supposedly so named in reference to the wooden structure that gave it its shape – which was, ironically enough, a sort of wooden cage. Conversely, the crinoline, a nineteenth century invention, reached new heights of freedom, since for the first time the skirt could move independently of its owner, a phenomenon that may have led to the Victorian preoccupation with ankles, but which certainly created a new erotic focus for men walking through the park on a windy day. Previous to this, women hankering after widened hips had to wear many layers of heavy under-petticoats in addition to the cage-structure, which not only hindered their movement but also hampered the skirt’s possible circumference, so once the light and airy crinoline-cage appeared, a side-effect was the virtually limitless expansion of the skirt’s width – reaching its nexus in Anna Leonowens’ ridiculous garments, whose recreation in 1956 combined the excesses of the New Look silhouette with the historical extravagance of the Victorian empire.

Indeed, it is perhaps here that the crinoline shows its teeth: the well-known Getting To Know You sequence shows a maternal, wide-hipped Anna Leonowens sitting among her Gentle Savage pupils and breezing about the palace with an ease denied to the stiffly clad king’s wives, making the big skirt somehow emblematic of the West’s superior treatment of women, and the ‘enlightened ideas’ of the British Empire, while its unstoppable expansion may itself have something to do with the ever-increasing size of colonial ambition.

Her crinoline defences

Perhaps, then, with all these sartorial possibilities, it was to be expected that the term should gradually itself expand, to encompass transferred meanings: a piece of diving equipment allowing the diver to ‘breathe more freely’ – of course, everyone knows about whalebone’s famous facilitation of easy breathing – and, for ships, a ‘defence against torpedoes’. I particularly enjoy the use of traditional pronouns in the last citation the dictionary gives, from 1885: ‘Her crinoline defences against torpedoes’, because it returns to one of the petticoat’s primary social significations, mooted in The Spectator way back circa 1711:

‘Our sex has of late years been very saucy, and [so] the Hoop-Petticoat is made use of to keep us at a distance’.
The Spectator, 1711

Another journal commented that the hoop’s ‘compass’ keeps ‘men at a decent distance, and appropriates to every lady a spacious verge sacred to herself’. It is interesting to note the strength words in this context – from the whalebone ‘supporting and distending’ the skirt, steel hoops and all the way to the initial definition of the word as a ‘stiff lining’. The suggestion here could be that the structures underneath a woman’s clothes must either lend strength to something fundamentally flimsy (that old ‘body of a weak and feeble woman’ chesnut), or, conversely, that this is a type of armour, the armour worn by, as Elizabeth I would probably have put it, a ‘king, and a king of England too’. In the queen’s case, I’m sure there’s something going on with metaphorical hip-circumferance fertility: the virgin mother of the nation, but one whose regal power gives her a strength akin to a sacrificed Christ, a mother who will fight tooth and nail to protect her child-country. Less maternal, more martial?

NEXT WEEK: D is for Doll