Linen Petticoat with Boned Bustle

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Linen Petticoat with Boned Bustle
#VC2001195
 
circa 1870
Linen, metal
 
The under-structures which supported the bustle silhouette were endlessly different: bustle pads, bustle cages, boning in the skirt itself, and sometimes an entire boned petticoat such as this ingeniously engineered example. In his book The Fashionable Lady In The Nineteenth Century, Charles H. Gibbs Smith describes how the silhouette “tends to arch up and away from the back before plunging down to the ground, giving the impression that the woman is saddled with a shrouded birdcage which sticks…out behind her.” Another visual description illustrated in our example is Norah Waugh’s observation that the bustle supports the back draperies which fall “down in a long fan-like train.”