Victorian fashion: Encyclopedia II - Victorian fashion - Usefulness of the term

Victorian fashion - Usefulness of the term

Those who have studied the period in detail would protest against vacuous generalizations. Clothing, décor, manners, and morals varied from year to year, country to to country, and class to class. Whether or not there is a style or unified culture connecting a Scottish fisherwoman, for example, and an aristocratic London lady, might well be debated.

If we carefully restrict our language, however, and take Victorian fashion to refer to the dress, or in a wider sense, the culture of an upper-middle-class London family of fashion and conventional attitudes, and describe it as it varied from decade to decade, we may be able to usefully describe these phenomena.

We can also usefully speak of contemporary stereotypes of the Victorian era. These stereotypes, while not historically valid, help us understand current uses of the term “Victorian”.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Usefulness of the term", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki