Description:
Hoop skirt or cage crinoline with twenty hoops and six tapes, bustle back, stamped "T.N. Plotts pat. [1866 or 1888]" on the buckle. There are four buttonhole-stitched holes (for straps?). Variously called hoop skirts, skeleton skirts, or skirt improvers, the word crinoline comes from the French word for horse hair. As skirts became increasingly wider in the 1830s and 1840s, more and more petticoats were needed to achieve the fashionable dome shape. One solution was to stiffen petticoats with horsehair and other materials. By the early 1850s, steel was sporadically used in petticoat hems in the United States and abroad. It wasn’t until 1856 that a French patent outlined a system for entire “cages” of flexible steel rods connected by vertical tapes made from linen or cotton. Seen as oppressive today, these devices (averaging one to two pounds) were heralded as a reform in women’s dress. Nevertheless, the lighter weight was tempered by the new problem of correctly walking and sitting in society. Cage crinolines were used and modified extensively into the 1860s and 1870s by women of all classes, until they were replaced by the bustle and more figure-clinging dress styles. Cage crinolines became one of the first mass-manufactured garments for women in the 19th century. The growing steel industry produced the hoops. Vertical tapes were machine-woven in a double weave, creating evenly-spaced channels through which women, employed in factories, inserted the hoops.
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