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Many women nowadays are dying to wear the latest fashion trends, but back in the Victorian-era, “killer fashion” took on a whole new, very literal meaning.
We’ve all heard horror stories about women in the Victorian days rubbing their faces with ammonia and painting their skin with deadly lead makeup, in order to appear more translucent.
However, this was the popular look at the time. Victorian beauty was all about looking plump, with pale white skin, and this look symbolized a ladies privilege; they ate whatever they wanted and never worked a day in the sun.
We’ve also heard about the dreaded corsets, and how Victorian women laced themselves so tightly in order to cinch their waist. They had so much trouble breathing, and even compressed their organs and deformed their ribcages from the corsets.
All of that sounds like absolute torture, but sadly, that wasn’t even the worst of it…
The most savage and deadly “killer fashion” from the Victorian-era was actually something called “crinoline” and it caused many women to die in the most brutal and unspeakable way imaginable. What exactly is “crinoline”? Well, it’s a stiffened or hooped petticoat worn to make a long skirt stand out.
We’ve all seen depictions of those massive round, “poofy” dresses in movies and paintings.
What made crinoline so incredibly dangerous, was that at the time, it was one of the most flammable “things” on planet earth. As a result, women were being burned alive in their fancy ball gowns.
[…] crinoline skirts incorporated everything necessary to cause a deadly fire. They were made of flammable fabric, contained large pockets of air which could fuel a blaze, and were so wide that women often inadvertently brushed up against flames from candles or stovetops.
Scores of Victorian women infamously burned alive. According to the BBC, one was Fanny Longfellow, the wife of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who died in July 1861 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. According to The New York Times, she had been “making seals for the entertainment of her two youngest children [when] a match or piece of lighted paper caught her dress, and she was in a moment enveloped in flames.”
Sadly, despite efforts to save her life, Fanny Longfellow died.
Across the Atlantic, Oscar Wilde’s half-sisters also gruesomely perished after their skirts caught on fire. Atlas Obscura reports that the sisters attended a Halloween party on Oct. 31, 1871, in Ireland, where one of the sisters brushed against a candle and went up in flames. Her sister tried to save her life, but her crinoline also caught on fire. Both eventually perished.
However, Longfellow and the Wilde sisters were not the only “famous” Victorian-era women to die brutally from crinoline-related fires. Several ballerinas also went up like a torch after dancing a bit too close to the blistering hot stage lights. When all was said and done, most experts estimate that around three thousand women were burnt alive from crinoline fires.
It doesn’t always pay to follow the trends.
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