The year was
1884, and Oscar Wilde was already something of a London celebrity. Though he
had not yet published the plays that would earn him his spot among the
Victorian literati, he had made a name for himself as aesthete, man-about-town,
and lecturer—with public views on everything aesthetic, including clothes. At
the beginning of the year, he announced his engagement to Constance Lloyd, who
he had met in Ireland some years earlier. Newspapers frothed about the news,
and appeared relieved that Wilde, and his new wife, would not be moving to
Dublin: “there was some fear lest London should lose its lion and society its
favorite source of admiration and ridicule. … Happily this danger is averted.
We keep Oscar.”
But Wilde also
appeared in the papers that year for another reason. In a series of letters
published in the Pall Mall Gazette, he wrote about how women ought to dress.
The following year, in the New York Tribune, he published his essay “The
Philosophy of Dress,” in which he stressed the important relationship between
clothing and one’s soul.
At that time,
women commonly wore heavy, restrictive underwear, and long, cumbersome skirts
with crinolines or bustles. Corsets were certainly uncomfortable, but they
could also be lethal, deforming skeletons, compromising fertility and even
driving internal organs into places they oughtn’t have been. Despite that,
people continued to wear them, and to “tight-lace,” ignoring doctors’ concerns
and claiming these devices improved posture.
It was in this
climate that people began to call for dress reform, with some asserting that
these corsets were immodest and promoted an objectifying take on women’s bodies.
In time, “dress reform” would come to be seen as a crucial part of the fight
for women’s equality. It’s ironic, then, that many of the “reformed” clothes
suggested as an alternative were themselves deemed shocking and morally
questionable.
Wilde’s letters
were strongly in favor of simple, comfortable outfits for women, with minimal
“fringes, flounces and kilting.” More radically, he expressed his fondness for
the “divided skirt.” This controversial article of clothing was essentially an
extremely wide-legged pair of trousers. It had caused some anxiety in the
British press, amid concerns that two-legged clothing for women would promote
immoral ideals. The divided skirt—a trouser posing as a skirt—was a compromise
of sorts. In a public letter, Constance, Wilde’s wife, described it as trying
to “look as though it were not divided, on account of the intolerance of the
British public.” Those who did wear it loved the liberty it afforded them. One
wearer described “the delightful sense of freedom that results from the removal
of petticoats.”
Constance was
propelled to stardom through her celebrity marriage. Even the New York Times
reported on her wedding dress, which Wilde is alleged to have designed. (In his
biography of Wilde, Richard Ellmann describes “rich creamy satin,” “a delicate
cowslip tint … a high Medici collar; ample, puffed sleeves [and a] veil of
saffron-colored Indian gauze.”)
On her
honeymoon, the now-Constance Wilde ruminated on what to do, beyond being mother
and wife, writing to a friend that she wanted a career: “I am thinking of
becoming a correspondent to some paper, or else going on the stage.” Though she
didn’t go on the stage, nor became a reporter, she was instead a star
campaigner for multiple causes. Women’s dress reform, and the divided skirt,
would be one of her most public targets.
A few years
earlier, in 1881, Lady Frances Harberton had launched the British arm of the
Rational Dress Society, an organization that later promised to “promote the
adoption, according to individual taste and convenience, of a style of dress
based on considerations of health, comfort and beauty.” Staggeringly, it
advocated for underwear that weighed under seven pounds. The Society came four
decades after the bloomers craze of the 1850s, but similarly promoted towards
the liberation of bifurcated leg cladding: the “divided skirt.”
The satirical
magazine Punch had plenty to say about the “divided skirt”: in June 1881, it
published a not-inaccurate poem about what, exactly, the divided skirt was:
“Skirts be
divided—oh, what an atrocity!
To ‘dual
garmenture’ folks must attain.
True that
another skirt hides this insanity
Miss Mary
Walker in old days began;
Yet it should
flatter our masculine vanity,
For this means
simply the trousers of Man!”
The following
month, they decried it simply as “revived Bloomerism,” and proposed that its
proponents be nicknamed “Pantaloon-atics.” Bloomers were Turkish-style trousers
popular in the early 1850s, for similar reasons to the “divided skirt”. It was
short-lived, but the media furore it provoked continued, and it loomed large in
the popular imagination.
Constance seems
to have agreed with, and sought to propagate, Wilde’s strong views on women’s
clothing. She dressed as much for him as herself: The actress Elizabeth Robins
remembered meeting her at home, where she wore a white muslin dress, despite
the relatively cold August day. Seeing Robins staring at her “midsummer frock”,
Constance is said to have remarked: “My husband likes me to wear white.” On
other occasions, onlookers remembered Constance’s “very peculiar and eccentric
clothes,” which she wore apparently “to please Oscar, not herself.” At a
private viewing, “instead of looking at the pictures on the walls, a great many
people were asking each other if they had seen Mrs. Oscar Wilde.”
All of these
things collided—Constance’s sudden shunt into the limelight; her readiness to
wear unusual clothes; Wilde’s strong and supportive views on dress reform; her
desire to do something beyond being Wilde’s wife and mother to their two sons.
She quickly became one of the Rational Dress Society’s most vocal and visible
advocates.
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