Charles Frederick Worth

French dominance of what is chic for nineteenth century women is absolute.

Parisian designs of garments and accessories are publicized throughout Europe and America by fashion plates and journals.

At first originating from England and France, after 1850 they come from all European countries.

Haute couture takes control of the fashion-design world at this point.

The Englishman Charles Frederick Worth, who had emigrated to Paris at twenty in 1845, establishes his own ladies' shop in 1858; he is among the first of the great couturiers and one of the most influential.

Through Princess Metternich, wife of the Austrian ambassador to France, he gains the patronage of the fashionable empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III of France.

Worth introduces the practice of preparing and showing a collection of designs in advance, and he is the first to use young girls as live mannequins to display designs to buyers.

He pioneers in designing dresses to be copied in French workrooms and distributed throughout the world.

Although only the rich can afford designer fashions, the styles gradually reach the ready-to-wear market (in a modified form that nonetheless prompts the introduction of new fashions for the upper classes), so that haute couture comes to dictate women's fashions.

The shape of the crinoline has gradually changed during the 1860s, its metamorphosis directed by the great couturier Charles Frederick Worth, who is especially noted for designing sumptuous crinolined gowns that reflect the elegance of the Second Empire period (1852-70).

From the dome shape of the 1850s, the crinoline had been altered to a pyramid in the 1860s.

Worth had flattened the front of the crinoline in 1864, and in the winter of 1867-68 he had abolished the garment completely in favor of long trains.

In 1869, he revives the Baroque rear bustle, or tournure, used at various times since the fourteenth century for pushing out the skirt in back just below the waist.

The bustle begins its new incarnation as a bunching up of material behind the waist.

This pouf, or small saddle cushion at the back, revives a fashion originating in France in the 1780s.

Worth has also devised smaller, shorter “walking” skirts.

The invention and widespread use of photography has effectively abolished any further need for the establishment of a specific clothing policy for art in opposition to that of high fashion.

It has become acceptable for painters and sculptors—like photographers—to render contemporary fashions accurately.

Extreme trends are still usually avoided, however, and portraitists of royalty often use uniforms and robes of orders of knighthood to confer a historical character.

Fullness in the skirt had moved by 1870, to the rear, where elaborately draped overskirts are held in place by tapes and supported by a bustle.

This fashion requires an underskirt, which is heavily trimmed with pleats, flounces, rouching, and frills.

This fashion will be short-lived (though the bustle will return again in the mid-1880s) and will be succeeded in the mid-1870s succeeded by a tight-fitting silhouette with fullness as low as the knees:  the cuirass bodice and the princess sheath dress.

Charles Frederick Worth, the dictator of Paris fashion, slims the skirt down in 1874 and launches the longer, fitted cuirass bodice, a form-fitting, long-waisted, boned bodice that reaches below the hips.

The narrower skirts allow the outline of a woman's legs to be seen for the first time in fifty years.

The pleasure will be brief.

Sleeves are very tight fitting.

Square necklines are common.

Day dresses have high necklines that are either closed, squared, or V-shaped.

Sleeves of morning dresses are narrow throughout the period, with a tendency to flare slightly at the wrist early on.

Women often drape overskirts to produce an apronlike effect from the front.

Evening gowns have low necklines and very short, off-the-shoulder sleeves, and are worn with short (later mid-length) gloves.

Other characteristic fashions included a velvet ribbon tied high around the neck and trailing behind for evening in a similar style to Georgian era fashion (the origin of the modern choker necklace).

The design and promotional talents of Charles Frederick Worth build his design house into a successful international business during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The first to introduce innovative commercial and sartorial concepts, Worth is credited for dividing fashion into seasons and for deciding to sell paper patterns of his creations to the international market, preferring to sell his own ideas himself, rather than falling victim to inevitable imitation.

Although the crinoline is generally out of fashion by 1878, Worth revives bustles in 1881, this time in a squarer, sharper look.

The material behind the waist becomes a wire cage attached to the petticoat, sticking out backward like a shelf, over which the dress material is draped.

The brief exposure of the female person is thus ended.

Only in evening dress is the bosom disclosed, and anything below that point is unseen and unmentionable.