Victorian Fashion Accessories

Book excerpt: In Victorian England, women's accessories were always much more than incidental finishing touches to their elaborate dress. Accessories helped women to fashion their identities.Victorian Fashion Accessories explores how women's use of gloves, parasols, fans and vanity sets revealed their class, gender and colonial aspirations. The colour and fit of a pair of gloves could help a middle-class woman indicate her class aspirations.The sun filtering through a rose-colored parasol would provide a woman of a certain age with the glow of youth. The use of a fan was a socially acceptable means of attracting interest and flirting.Even the choice of vanity set on a woman's bedroom dresser reflected her complicity with colonial expansion. By paying attention to the particular details of women's accessories we discover the beliefs embedded in these artefacts and enhance our understanding of the culture at large. Beaujot's engaging prose illuminates the complex identities of the women who used accessories in the Victorian culture that created and consumed them. Victorian Fashion Accessories is essential reading for students and scholars of, history, gender studies, cultural studies, material culture and fashion studies, as well as anyone interested in the history of dress.