Corsets must rank with foot-binding in “not made by or for women” fashion history. But the search for wasp waists and swan-curve backs did call up the ingenuity of Victorian engineers – and some benighted attempts to make these armatures…

Irma delights in buttons, the pewter buttons she is given on leaving Opi and the many different and wonderful kinds she sees in Madame Hélène’s dress shop. Which got me thinking in a button way and discovering that . .…

“The Song of the Shirt,” a dolorous Victorian poem by Thomas Hood (1843) was a lament against the exploitation of the seamstresses doing piecework, usually at home, “in unwomanly rags.” Irma struggles to avoid this fate and the helpless piety…

In the 1880s, as my protagonist Irma entered the world of women’s fashion, machine-made clothes were readily available and upper class women, with money to burn sought out skilled dressmakers to embellish, over-lay, tuck and gather, creating elaborate architectures, often…

Not all Victorians were bustle boosters. This cartoon is from Punch (1870). Bustles were hot, uncomfortable and cumbersome and an impediment to every useful activity except perhaps tatting. [image in public domain]