Figure 1 – Hoop-skirt by Napoleon Sarony c 1893. From the Wikimedia Commons, original in the US Library of Congress and in the public domain because of its age.

Our discussion this past Saturday about crinolines, crinolettes, and bustles left unanswered the two most critical questions of all: first how do you get into one, and second how do you sit in one. Fortunately, there is an army of historical dress makers and re-enactors preserving this heritage ofr us. As a result these questions can be answered.

First, of all there is a famous pair of Sarony Studios photographs from 1893 in the United States Library of Congress that show or reveal a woman’s crinoline cage. Even this it must be realized is pretty late from an historical perspective. I have reproduced them here as Figure 1.

It also turns out, perhaps not so surprisingly that there are lots of instructional videos on the web that span the subject matter from how to make to how to put on and wear these dresses. Oh yes they also answer the perhaps more critical question of how to take them off. I say perhaps because you can approach that question in much the same way you answer people worried about a cat stuck in a tree. “Ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree.” Kitties have a way of getting down, although it might be inelegant.

Anyway just a few suggestions regarding videos to watch. Historical sewing has an excellent video of how to sit in a hoop-skirt, and you can go from there an make your own.

And if you want to see how a woman got dressed in the 1860’s I recommend Nevada Culture’ website. This is significant in that it demonstrates that it could be done without staff; so even if you were more strapped than Lady Cora, it could be done.

Figure 1 – Napoleon Sarony Portrait of a Young Woman in a Crinolette, c 1875. Digitized albumen print.  In the public domain because of its age.

A few weeks back, I posted a photograph from the 1870’s by Napoleon Sarony of a beautiful woman in an equally beautiful hooped skirt. I recently purchased on Ebay another Sarony photograph (Figure 1) from the same period showing an equally beautiful young lady in an even bigger hooped skirt. And note how Sarony extends the size of the dress by placing a fabric over the posing chairs which the lady holds. What is, or was, going on here? Certainly the hooped skirt is an alien feature, which we cannot quite relate to, that projects a sort of mysterious exoticism into mid-nineteenth century portraits. I mean, the men’s clothing is not so bizarre or different from ours, with the exception perhaps of the ties – and truth to tell, so few men wear ties today anyway.

Figure 2 – Steel wired crinoline cage c 1865 from the Wikipedia original from This file is in the public domain because it has been released by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art www.lacma.org with its “Public Domain High Resolution Image Available” mark.

An interesting side point, is that women’s dresses grew to monstrous proportions at precisely the same time that nineteenth century paleontologists pondered the evolutionary etiology and advantages of greater size among dinosaurs. In reality however, hooped skirts provided no such evolutionary advantage with thousands of women killed each years when such dresses caught on fire or were caught up by wagon wheels on bustling streets. Indeed, there was a public campaign against them. But these pleas fell on the deaf ears of slaves to fashion. And slaves they were indeed. I went several years ago to visit the National Historic Site at Seneca Falls New York, the Museum of the Suffrage Movement. It was pointed out by a guide that, by necessity, the first step in the emancipation of women in the United States and Europe was to free them from the bonds of their clothing.

Initially the hooped skirt was devised as a modest-mechanism to separate the long dress from the legs. Arguably, in warmer climates it offered a solution of how to stay cool while wearing a long dress with due modesty. In Tudor times, it was referred to as a ‘farthingale’. Structurally, hooped skirts consisted of a stiff-fabric petticoat sewn with channels designed to hold stiff semi-flexible materials like rope, osiers, whalebone, steel, or rubber. And as Tchaikovsky so elegantly proved with his “Mother Ginger” character in the ballet “Nutcracker,” you can hide a lot under all those hopes including a troupe of small children.

One material that was popular in the production of stiff petticoats was crinoline made of horsehair (“crin”) and cotton or linen. However, by the mid 1850’s the word “crinoline” came to refer to the “fashionable” silhouette provided by horsehair petticoats, and to the underskirts made using steel, cane, whalebone or rubber hoops. How times and fashions of aestheticism change. Today, arguably, these once striven for body shapes as more reminiscent of the back sides of hippopotamuses than shapely young ladies. These hoops came to be known as crinoline cages. that replaced them in the mid-1850s. Figure 2 shows a typical crinoline cage of the day. Despite widespread criticism, crinolines became the height of women’s fashion in the United States and Europe from the 1850s to the 1870s.

In the early 1870’s crinolines were replaced by crinolettes and bustles. Again we may turn to paleontology and speak of transitional forms. The crinolette was fashionable from 1867 through to the mid-1870s, and I believe that is really what we are looking at in Figure 1, and indeed enables more accurate dating of the photograph to the mid 1870’s. The crinolette was typically composed of half-hoops, sometimes with internal lacing or ties designed to allow adjustment of fullness and shape. The key design point was that the hoop was confined to the rear.

The transition from the crinoline cage dresses to the crinolette posed a problem for Victorian ladies, what to do with out of fashion dresses. Anyone who saved their youthful bell-bottomed jeans of the 1960’s realizes that even when items come back into fashion, they are always different enough to fuel a profit thirty fashion industry.  Indeed, the crinoline and other hoops still make their way to the Paris runway of 2015. But there is always just enough difference …  The British humor magazine Punch offered a thrifty suggestion to the question of what to do with all those crinolines taking up excessive spaces in ladies’ closets,  that they could be used to protect plants against the rigors of the winter months.

If photographs are kisses, what about photographs of kisses. It turns out that kisses and kissing has been a fairly prominent theme in photography. I set out to find the five most famous kiss photographs and immediately found that there were a lot of them. However, the number gets manageable if you ignore famous smooches of the cinema. So here is my selection in chronological order.

1. First, we have to ignore the no cinema rule and start with the very first screen kiss. Thomas A. Edison’s short film “May Irwin Kiss, 1896?” It asks the age old question about first kisses that persists to this day and was a major scandal at the time of its release. The film is around 18 seconds long, and depicts a re-enactment of the kiss between May Irwin and John Rice from the final scene of the stage musical, The Widow Jones. Said one critic: “The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting”
2. The second is one of those decisive moments by André Kertecz (1894-1985) called alternatively “The Kiss” or “The Lovers” Budapest 1915. This photograph is famous, certainly, and brings to real-life coyness of the lady in the moment. “Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime.”
3. Third I think must be Man Ray’s(1890-1976) innovative  “Rayograph Kiss,1922” taken without the benefit of camera. A photogram is a picture made on photographic paper without the aid of a camera.
4. Fourth must be Alfred Eisenstaedt’s (1898-1995) 1945 image of a sailor spontaneously kissing a nurse on VJ day in Times Square in NYC.
5. Fifth and finally, we have Annie Leibowitz’s 1980 photograph of a naked John Lennon kissing a fully clothed Yoko Ono.

All great and memorable kisses!