They say beauty is pain, but for some Victorian women, beauty was death. During the mid-19th century, many fashionable women ...

By the mid-1860s, the museum writes, the crinoline had already begun to be replaced by the bustle. As city living became more common and women spent more time in public, the crinoline was simply ...

In the 1850s and 1860s, more middle-class women started wearing the crinoline as caged hoop skirts started being mass-produced. Soon, “ Crinolinemania ” swept the fashion world.

In the 1850s and 1860s, more middle-class women started wearing the crinoline as caged hoop skirts started being mass-produced. Soon, “ Crinolinemania ” swept the fashion world.

LADIES: The Queen has commanded me to express the pain with which her Majesty reads the account of daily accidents arising from the wearing of the indelicate, expensive, dangerous and hideous ...

It was also a deadly fire hazard. For nearly a decade from the 1850s to 1860s, around 3,000 women died in crinoline fires in England.

“By the 1860s in the South, a crinoline was 200 inches in diameter. That was fancy–for a ball,” Chemler, a Naperville resident, said. “In the North, it would have been only about 120 ...

“A really fluffed-out, layered hoop skirt could use 180 feet of wire,” Alfred writes–so making flat wire was big business from the mid 1850s to the late 1860s, when crinoline hoop skirts had ...

A circa 1860s lithograph titled "Fire: The horrors of crinoline & the destruction of human life." | Wellcome Collection // CC BY 4.0 In the 19th century, the Grim Reaper was seemingly around every ...