Preview
Creator
Unknown
Date Created
c. 1885
Subject
Costume; Underwear; Underwear and accessories for shaping and supporting; Underwear (lower body); Bustles
Description
c. 1885. Brown cotton twill lobster-tail bustle with four spring steel hoops and a horsehair-stuffed pad, tied to the waist with a cotton waistband.
A full width of cotton twill fabric (approximately 81.3 cm / 32 in. long and 71.1 cm / 28 in. wide) is cartridge pleated at the top onto a cotton waistband, reducing the fabric width to 25.4 cm / 10 in., and with its selvedges finishing the long sides. The bottom 2/3 of its length are sewn with three equidistant channels parallel to a channel-width hem. Each of the channels has a flat spring steel hoop wire fed through it, and each channel has a short strap (variable, approximately 25.4 cm / 10 in.) sewn to both ends, which both seals the channel shut and forces the spring steel to bend into a semi-circle. The straps are made of the same fabric as the bustle, and are designed to both maintain the tensioned shape and keep the bustle in place in back of the body by resting on the wearer’s legs and petticoats.
A small rectangular pad (20.3 cm / 8 in. long, 17.8 cm / 7 in. wide) made of a lighter brown cotton twill and stuffed with horsehair is whip-stitched to the waistband at center back. It rests on top of the bustle at the small of the back and provides support for the garment worn over it. Machine-sewn and hand-sewn.
Extent
Overall length: 71.1 cm / 28 in.
Overall width: 35.6 cm / 14 in.
Provenance
Gift of Mary Sanborn
Museum Number
14
Publisher
University of New Hampshire Library
Medium
Cotton twill, spring steel
Contributor
Astrida Schaeffer, photographer/curator
Date Digitized
3-1-2019
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Keywords
Bustles, Tournure, Lobster-tail bustles, c. 1885, Durham, New Hampshire, United States, Cotton, Twill, Brown (color), Spring steel hoops, Pad, Horsehair, Machine-sewn, Hand-sewn, Sanborn (donor)
Comments
The Irma G. Bowen Historic Clothing Collection digital catalog was produced by the UNH Library Digital Collection Initiative, supported in part by a grant from the Mooseplate program and New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. Additional funding provided by the E. Ruth Buxton Stephenson Memorial Fund.
Photography copyright, Astrida Schaeffer.