Items men are obsessing over to convey wealth and style
Victorian fashion might look incredibly glamorous in period dramas, but there is more to hoop skirts and top hats than just being aesthetically pleasing. Victorian fashion was also dangerous, and many times even deadly. Toxic chemical compounds were often used, and then there were, of course, diseases that spread through fabric. But there's more—a lot more.
Browse through the following gallery and discover how harmful fashion was during the Victorian era.
Green was not a very easy color to make. Dressmakers would mix yellow and blue dyes to try and make it.
This was until a chemist named Carl Wilhelm Scheele invented a new green pigment.
What became known as Scheele’s Green, and later Paris Green, was made by mixing potassium and white arsenic in a solution of copper vitriol.
The new green pigment was used for a variety of things, from wallpaper, to candles, toys, and, of course, fabrics.
Arsenic dyes exploded in popularity, but these seemed to cause a few side effects, including sores, scabs, nausea, colic, diarrhea, and headaches.
It’s speculated that Napoleon was poisoned due to exposure to arsenic-laced wallpaper he had at home.
Disease would spread through clothes during Victorian times. Soldiers and others would catch diseases carried by clothes made or cleaned by sick people.
From lice to typhus, fabrics would many times carry diseases and spread them.
Poor people would also wear second hand clothes, and without being properly disinfected, diseases such as smallpox spread through the fabric.
The daughter of Victorian Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel died after her riding habit was finished in the house of a seamstress who had used it to cover her husband, who was sick with typhus.
Women’s long skirts also swept through the dirty city streets, where disease would thrive.
These may look glamorous in period dramas, but they didn't really combine well with industrial machinery at the time.
Accidents in factories were reported, and the dresses were banned in some of them as a result.
These were also a problem with traveling in carriages and mounting animals.
Not only were the popular flowy white cotton garments one of the products sourced from slave-operated plantations, they were also a real danger for those who wore them.
But it was about to get worse. In 1809, what we now know as tulle was invented. Can it get more flammable than that?
Reportedly, in 1845, British ballerina Clara Webster died after her dress caught fire at a London theater after her skirt came too close to the lights onstage.
A popular material for nightshirts and undergarments, the fabric was also susceptible to household accidents, such as catching fire from a candle.
Dead birds, such as songbirds, were popular on ladies' hats at the time.
The birds as such were not harmful. The arsenic used by taxidermists, however, was.
If you were an upper-class man in Victorian times, you'd have to wear a hat.
The problem was that many of those hats were made with mercury.
Mercury was used to turn stiff fur from animals such as rabbits and hares into more flexible felt.
Mercury would cause a wide range of harmful effects, including convulsions, abdominal cramps, trembling, paralysis, and reproductive problems, among others.
Some say that the Mad Hatter in 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' portrayed elements of mercury poisoning.
Looking extremely pale was definitely in during Victorian times, so why not apply lead white paint to your face?
One of the most popular cosmetic products was called Laird's Bloom of Youth.
A doctor at the American Medical Association treated three women who used the product and temporarily lost full use of their hands. He described the condition as "lead palsy."
The health risks of Victorian fashion
From arsenic-laced clothes to flammable fabrics
FASHION Victorian era
Victorian fashion might look incredibly glamorous in period dramas, but there is more to hoop skirts and top hats than just being aesthetically pleasing. Victorian fashion was also dangerous, and many times even deadly. Toxic chemical compounds were often used, and then there were, of course, diseases that spread through fabric. But there's more—a lot more.
Browse through the following gallery and discover how harmful fashion was during the Victorian era.