Victorian Photos: Real Fashion Across Classes (1840s-1900s)

Photographic portraits provide a more reliable source for seeing what people actually wore, and how the fashions depicted in magazines translated into real dresses on real people - of all different proportions. They are an enormous resource that gives you a realistic view of not only the fashionable dress styles, but changes in accessories, hairstyles and the general look which all develop and change throughout the decades. They give us an idea of how the fabric sits on the body and how the garments fitted according to the creases, folds and wrinkles, which help with reconstructing these garments.

The earliest photographic portraits available to us are from the 1840s, although they become much more widespread from the 1850s-60s. Luckily, this gives us photographic access to fashion in almost the whole of the Victorian period. Photography was experimented with in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Fig. 1.10. Original photographs, such as this one from the 1880s, help to give us a realistic understanding of what women actually wore and how it fitted the body

The first types of photographs, daguerreotypes, were images fixed to silver-plated pieces of copper in the late 1830s. Steady developments in technology, camera lenses and developing processes during the 1840s allowed photographs to be produced on paper, and the whole art was employed in recording landscapes, buildings and, of course, people. Carte de visite portraits became fashionable in the early 1850s, meeting the demand for portraiture from a burgeoning middle class that could not be satisfied by the slower and more expensive alternative of painted portraits. The 1860s saw the start of a craze for collecting carte de visite portraits - a fashionable trend led by Queen Victoria herself - which continued throughout the rest of the Victorian period.

Fig. 1.11. Photographic portraits required a special visit to the photographer’s studio, and often have elements of stage setting, such as the painted backdrop window and bookshelves seen here

Initially, exposure times were very long, which required the sitter to keep still or risk a blurred picture. But technology developed quite quickly, and the need declined for clamps and stands to keep the sitters in a rigid, still position. Nevertheless, the desire not to blur your portrait could explain part of the reason for the rather formal-looking nature of Victorian photographs.

Painted portraits are still a valuable resource (certainly before the advent of photography) but were often the preserve of the upper classes, and sometimes present a particular or desired version of the person being portrayed. Their fashion may not be typical as they often intend to show a certain message or emphasize a certain characteristic. Sometimes, the sitter is painted in fancy dress or represented as a historical or mythical figure, which does not necessarily help us with an accurate idea of costume.

It is interesting to note that photographic sources will also have a sense of bias and element of stage setting. In an age when a specific trip to a photographer’s studio was a luxury not often repeated, no doubt you would want to wear your best outfit and present the best image of yourself. The clothing worn is therefore likely to have been made in the most fashionable design and fabrics that person could buy, make or afford, and this would vary according to the individual.

Although the carte de visite and cabinet portraits portrayed the middle classes, photography of the working class and the poor in large cities can be found in the work of social investigators of the late Victorian period, who were recording poverty and overcrowding in industrial city slums. Whilst the purposes of these images are to record the living conditions of its poorest inhabitants, they are also useful in that one can see the simplified and more practical fashions worn by the working classes.