Are you a fan of the Victorian fashion revival? Then you may already know Recollections, a site offering a wide range of garments and accessories inspired by the Victorian era. The site has a blog section with a wide range of articles about history, fashion ideas, style evolutions, films and tips about Victorian costume and dress.
Irenebrination appears in a recent post on the Recollections blog, together with a wide range of experts - historians, authors, journalists, curators and bloggers - sharing their thoughts and ideas about Victorian fashion. You can check out the interviews with all the 14 experts analysing the revival at this link, but I'm also republishing my answers here in this post. With many thanks to the Recollections Blog for getting me involved in this fun interview.
Recollections: Questions What do you enjoy about the Victorian fashion revival?
Irenebrination: It is always a pleasure to learn new things about a precise historical period for me and, whenever there is a revival, I rejoice discovering information about specific garments and their constructions or about accessories and materials that may have been popular at the time. I’m fascinated by the internal structure of Victorian clothes, but I admit I have a soft spot for accessories and jewelry in particular, which means I'm very interested in Victorian forms of adornment. A highly-charged symbolic ornament in the Victorian era, jewelry reflected the aspirations and preoccupations of its owners, communicating them through the use of different materials. Hair jewelry was for example made with the hair of beloved friends and relatives transformed into wearable keepsakes, while jet jewelry was a public statement of mourning that had become popular following the death of Prince Albert in 1861, when Queen Victoria started wearing black jet (fossilized coal) as a material for decorative mourning pieces. I'm particularly fascinated by the instruction manuals that offered directions for preparing hair and plaiting it at home, and by the intricate hair and jet coal patterns developed for mourning pieces. Design-wise I'm interested in modern technologies that may be derived from the past, for example Google do-it-yourself cardboard VR visor, a sort of modern reinvented version of the mid-to-late 1800s visors so popular amond the Victorian middle-classes (remember Brewster's 1860 stereoscope on a tortoise-shell stand?) originally used to watch early stereoscopic portraits, images of faraway places, or comedic scenes.
R: Why do you think there has been a resurgence of Victorian inspired garments?
I: I guess we could attribute revivals to different reasons. First and foremost, fashion proceeds in cycles, so specific trends will keep on returning after so many years. In the case of Victorian-inspired garments we have also seen popular films and series, quite often with great costume designers, that have maybe reintroduced this era to us. Think about a Victorian horror/fantasy series such as Penny Dreadful: it features visually striking costumes by the mighty Gabriella Pescucci who is an amazing fashion researcher and connoisseur, and the female characters wearing them in this series are very strong as well, so they subvert the Victorian canons, even though they are living in very conservative times. Another reason of such a comeback may be the fact that, up until two or three years ago, fashion designers went for very revealing outfits, while more recent trends – think about Valentino by Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli – re-shifted the attention onto longer silhouettes that may look more conservative but actually show us that a woman can be sensual even when she doesn't bare it all. Last but not least, our collective mania for technology and new digital means of communication may have played a part in making us reconsider the past, and longing for a time when people (though, mind you, only richer people as laboring classes did not have much time for leisure activities…) may have had more time for leisure activities or manual hobbies such as knitting, sewing and embroidering.
R: How would you style a Victorian piece from the trend?
I: I’m afraid I’m not the corset type, so I would opt for a piece of black jet jewelry and wear it every day with more or less any kind of clothes. It would be a Memento Mori but in a positive key: it would remind me and the people I meet every day that, since we're just spending a brief time of our lives on this earth, we should try and spread more love rather than hate, and be more cheerful as well!
R: How do you think the trend will evolve in seasons to come?
I: I think designers will keep on distilling bits and pieces of Victorian trends in their garments. We have seen an emphasis on details such as high necks, puffy sleeves and ruffles and I think that's where the trend will develop. So it will be Victorian details, motifs and patterns mixed with modern silhouettes and fabrics, imagine Victoriana meets casualwear. In some Italian seaside resorts there has been a late summer trend among teenagers that I have found interesting: many young girls started wearing a sort of modern Victorian uniform consisting of black or navy blue Adidas Entrada 14 shorts with the trademark white triple stripes, matched with an all-black or navy top. By doing so they have uncannily recreated the classic Victorian swimwear style. Check out indeed any fashion history books or images on the Internet about Victorian styles and you will stumble upon many images of dresses and shorts with horizontal white stripes around the edge. I would personally like to see the mantelet being reinvented in a modern key, maybe in unusual materials such as denim and I wouldn't mind seeing some of the most beautiful and most interesting pieces of jet jewelry from museum archives being recreated with the 3D printed technique.
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