Victorian era skirt fires : Just dangerous fashion, or a bigger tragic history?

The Victorian era fashion for the crinoline dress had a tragic problem : skirt fires! But were dress fires the fault of a deadly fashion trend for hoopskirts, or part of a larger tragic pattern in history? Get 15% off your first Brooklinen order! Just click here https://bit.ly/SnappyDragon_Brookline... . This video is kindly sponsored by Brooklinen.

Dress fires are much covered in blogs about dangerous fashion trends in history, from the literary case of Miss Havisham in Dickens' Great Expectations, to the estimated 3000 fatal skirt fires over a 20-year period in the mid Victorian UK. Hoop skirt fires are unquestionably tragic, and it's extremely important to take proper safety precautions around fire! There's always been sensationalism in how modern articles talk about the tragic history of dangerous fashions in the Victorian era, but I don't think this is another of those fashion history myths! So, I wanted to look into whether crinoline dress fires, tragic as they are, fit into a bigger pattern of Victorian life.

Skirt fires are often blamed on the crinoline dress and hoop skirt, but the most famous (fictional) fatal dress fire was actually a Regency era gown! Miss Havisham, according to the timeline of Great Expectations, was wearing the wedding dress she was jilted in before 1812, when she died of a fatal dress fire in 1828. Regency dresses in the 1800s were slim and collumnar, and only court dresses used hoopskirts during this time. And while Miss Havisham was a fictional character, my research turned up two real, documented fatal skirt fires from around this time, so we can't blame the crinoline dress for the entire problem. Victorian era dresses may have increased the risk with their big, fluffy skirts supported by the new cage crinoline hoop skirt, but the problem didn't start there.

But we can't exonerate the cage crinoline either : Hoop skirts are absolutely a safety hazard in a lot of situations, whether around fire or not! They're big, unwiedly and combine a lot of fuel with a lot of trapped air, so it's no wonder they burned so easily if they caught. There was at least one case of a factory worker in a bleachworks who was in a fatal accident with machinery because her hoopskirt got caught. There was even an investigation into the death of someone who died of a fall because he was trying to step around someone else's hoopskirt! It's important to practice good hoopskirt safety, which means no machinery, fires, or tight spaces.

But there's no shortage of media bias obscuring the facts. Magazines loved to criticize Victorian womenswear, ranging from the hazard of the hoop skirt to the somewhat ridiculous idea that Victorians hiding pregnancy used the cage crinoline to do it! They also had a big problem with working-class women dressing stylishly, as evidenced by a number of mean-spirited cartoons and articles. I hate to agree with these classist, sexist writers about anything, but it's important to dress safely for work, and that does mean that for a Victorian house maid, it was safest to save the crinoline for your days off.

Here's the kicker, though. The deadly fashion leading to hoop skirt fire seems like it was just another of the Victorian era hazards of fire! The estimated figure for fatalities from this deadly fashion is 3000 over a decade, although this number is disputed. I went looking for data on house and building fires from the Victorian era, and found that in a decade there were 18,292 fires in London ALONE! So it seems to me that the shocking history isn't about the deadly fashion trends, it's about how constant a danger fires were in the Victorian era. If you take anything away from this video essay, take these two things. 1) Don't wear a crinoline dress or hoopskirt around fire, and 2) be very, very grateful that we have other options for heat, light, and cooking than open flame.

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