The fashion industry has been a controversial one. And while there are many discussions to be had about the modern-day consequences of the fashion industry, it is interesting to look back in time to see what fashion trends were like centuries ago. After researching Victorian fashion, I became annoyed at some of the ridiculous things that women, in particular, were conditioned to believe was attractive. What startled me the most was the intrinsic and obvious link between sickness and fashion, and how this impacted women of the time and women today.
Tuberculosis – a deadly disease, especially in the Victorian era, which causes those infected to cough up blood and lose extreme amounts of weight – quickly became a fantasy that entrapped women into dangerous habits in the name of fashion.
“Consumption, I am aware, is a flattering malady,” wrote Charlotte Brontë in 1849.
It sounds bizarre but the idea of the consumptive women, the ‘fragile feminine’, was the desired beauty standard in the Victorian Era, and with Tuberculosis symptoms providing those standards it became all too common to see women tighten their corsets to look emancipated, and paint their face a ghastly shade of white. Some women went to extreme lengths to obtain these symptoms by ingesting tapeworms, eating and drinking poison, and even openly trying to catch tuberculosis itself. In her book ‘Consumptive Chic: A history of fashion, beauty and disease,’ Carolyn Day emphasises the toll of this romanticisation of diseases. She explores the clothes worn to accentuate a fragile frame, the makeup worn to make eyes appear glassier, cheeks and lips to appear redder, and hair to appear thinner and silkier.
Even after it was discovered that tuberculosis was contagious and deeply affected the lungs, women were still expected to uphold this standard of sickness. As more information about the disease came to light there was some scrutiny over excessive and constrictive corsets, and in response, corsets with elastic panelling were created to help airflow into the lungs. Despite this, the issue still remained; women continued to be held to an unrealistic standard of beauty, that of which was linked to grave sickness.
This ideal of the consumptive woman was hard to escape. It permeated all kinds of culture and art – consuming the minds of artists, composers, and writers alike. Many romanticised the consumptive look in the romantic novels of the era. For example, in Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel, ‘Clarissa’, characters speak of the death of a woman as ‘lovely’: “The women declared, they never saw death so lovely before: and she looked as if in an easy slumber, the colour having not quite left her cheeks and lips”. There are many other examples of the consumptive chic appearing in art and literature – Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son (1848) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854) are just a couple of the more famous examples of consumptive ideals.
The lasting legacy of a tuberculosis diagnosis has prevailed. Most notably, doctors began prescribing sun bathing as a treatment for TB, which gave rise to the modern phenomenon of tanning. Similarly, corsets have stayed a consistent part of women’s fashion since the Victorian era. In the modern day, corsets are still used and promoted by some of the biggest celebrities across social media platforms like Instagram. The Kardashian clan are known to use corsets to achieve a skimpy waist that would be almost impossible for any body to naturally recreate.
It would seem that the Victorian ideal of the small, frail woman has lasted in the psyche of people today, and as such, modern women look to the sickening ideals of the past in the hope of newfound beauty.
Sources:
smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-tuberculosis-shaped-victorian-fashion-180959029/ https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tuberculosis/symptoms-causes/syc-20351250
https://hyperallergic.com/415421/consumptive-chic-a-history-of-beaty-fashion-disease/