Pictures of Women in Blue Flames in Deveint Art

Illustration past Anna Sudit

A History of Women Who Burned to Death in Flammable Dresses

No matter what they habiliment, women get burned for it. Simply in the mid-19th century, this was extremely literal.

Past Dec 19, 2017, 9:32am EST

Illustrated by Anna Sudit

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A teenage duchess who hid her cigarette from her parents. A dancer getting set to continue stage. A female parent entertaining her children in her home. Sisters dancing at a Halloween party. 2 women nigh a stove. All of these women lived differently — from actual royalty to bearding nobodies. But they all died the same manner: The dresses they were wearing caught burn and killed them.

In the mid-19th century, women wearing the style of the day would burst into flames if their dress caught burn — and I do mean burst. Their dresses were so dangerously flammable that if they caught fire, it would spread in an instant, sometimes leading to groups of women dying at the same time. "It'southward not a build-upward similar, 'Oh my gosh, you lot're smoking, let me tamp that out.' It'south like, 'Ahh!' Your girlfriend abreast you is a ball of fire, and you're at present a ball of burn down, and boom boom smash smash nail nail nail, they're all balls of fire," says Deirdre Kelly, author of Ballerina: Sexual activity, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection.

A perfect set of circumstances combined to make these dresses peculiarly flammable. First, they were made of highly combustible material. Bobbinet, cotton wool muslin, gauze, and tarlatan were all open up-weave fabrics that helped create the light, flowy, celestial gowns that were popular in the mid-1800s. (Think ball gowns made of ballerina tutus and conjugal veils.) In gaslight, these diaphanous dresses glowed white, reinforcing gender norms of soft, gentle women and contrasting with the dirt and machinery of the Industrial Revolution, Alison Matthews David wrote in her book Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Clothes Past and Present. Machines also mass-produced theses frail fabrics for the starting time time, which gave women of every social class access to them, making expiry past burn a widespread miracle.

Part of what fabricated these dresses and then flammable was the same affair that made them so beautiful. These dresses were meant to requite the illusion that women were dreamy, romantic figures, but that too meant they had air flowing effectually and through them. "If y'all imagine a sheet of newspaper and a hunk of wood, essentially, chemically, they are the same. Only one will grab lite mode more quickly than the other. So if you have a very flimsy, flowing something that mixes well with air, it will burn quite readily," says Martin Bide, a professor in the textiles, fashion merchandising, and design department at the University of Rhode Island.

"Iv Dancers in the Lobby" by Edgar Degas, belatedly-19th to early-20th century. From a individual collection.

Photograph: Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images

These dresses, combined with candles and gaslight in a globe before electricity, led to a multitude of women existence taken by the flame. Matthews David wrote that in 1860, British medical journal the Lancet estimated that iii,000 women in one yr died by fire. That's roughly equivalent to the amount of women murdered in the Usa in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The most vulnerable to death past fire may take been ballet dancers, who often wore tarlatan and gauze costumes and who danced close to gaslight every time they were on stage.

In 1862, at a dress rehearsal for an opera, dancing superstar Emma Livry wore a costume that evoked the ethereality of the ideal feminine ballerina. It had a corset bodice and a fluffy skirt that ended around her calves. But before her entrance, her skirts got likewise close to a gaslight and her costume caught fire. Instead of an angelic dazzler floating across the stage, Livry became a hellish nightmare cloaked in flames. She ran around the stage in a column of burn down earlier a fireman was able to put it out. Livry survived that nighttime and lived another eight grueling months in recovery, simply to die of blood poisoning related to the burns.

Livry isn't the only dancer who died this mode, but she is one of the most famous, so there are many documents and first-manus accounts of her death, Kelly says. Before her, there was ballet dancer Clara Webster in 1844, who was performing a ballet when her skirt caught fire. Other times, Kelly says unabridged corps de ballet — essentially, the background dancers — would perish by burn. In one instance in 1861, at least six ballet dancers died when they tried to assistance one dancer whose costume caught fire backstage. Sometimes entire theaters would burn down down.

Methods to brand textile flame-resistant existed — in fact, they were required for theater workers in French republic by prescript in 1859. But Livry refused this process because it fabricated the fabric yellow and stiff — the opposite of the delicate beauty that ballet was supposed to describe. Many dancers were poor and needed money from male benefactors to survive on top of their small salary. Dancers could either cull to exist cute to excel at their task or attract wealthy men, or to be safe from fire merely deemed unattractive. These choices had financial implications, as well as safety implications. Like many choices women face up daily well-nigh what they wear or how they act, what may seem obvious in hindsight is circuitous in the moment.

Merely frequently, women didn't cull to live dangerously; information technology was only dangerous to live.

In 1861, Fanny Longfellow, wife of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, sat down at a table in her home to play with her children. A match or lit newspaper ignited her wearing apparel. In 1865, ii women in New York came too shut to a hot stove, which lit their dresses on fire. They weren't even named in their death notice. In 1867, the Archduchess Mathilde of Austria held a cigarette backside her dorsum to hide it from her begetter. The lit cigarette acquired her apparel to catch fire. In 1871, sisters Mary and Emily Wilde (Oscar Wilde's half sisters) were at a Halloween party. While one of the sisters was dancing, her apparel defenseless fire. The other sis rushed to aid her, catching fire herself.

All of these women burned to death in front of their families or friends. None of them were doing anything peculiarly risky at the fourth dimension except for wearing clothes around a source of light or a cigarette — something men could do without the same risk. "In that location is a burden on women to call up about their bodies in space in a mode that men don't have to," Matthews David says. "The only burn I plant for men really was a guy who left a lit pipe in his adjust because woolen suits were pretty flameproof."

It wasn't just the textile, but also the shape of the dresses that acquired women'due south vesture to erupt in flames. The popular silhouette in the 1850s was a giant bong shape, like Scarlett O'Hara in her mantle clothes. "The entreatment of the large skirt was that it made you look more than slender from the waist upwards," says Colleen Hill, a curator at the Museum at FIT. This total skirt, and the air underneath information technology, created what's essentially a funnel for fire, with a human being body at the center.

To become that voluminous shape, women used a cage crinoline, a contraption introduced in the 1850s generally made from hoops that were attached with record and then attached around the waist, Hill says. "It looks similar patently nosotros're putting women in a cage in that fourth dimension period, but in many ways it was considered to exist a liberating garment," Hill says.

Fashions for August, 1857. A print from The Illustrated London News, (i August 1857).

Photograph:The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images

The crinoline allowed women to shed layers of petticoats that previously helped them create that bell shape, and thus immune women to walk more hands with space for their legs and fewer layers of heavy cloth on their bodies. The large circumference of the crinoline also created a protective barrier for women and immune them to have up space in the world. (Imagine sitting next to a homo-spreader while you were wearing an eight-human foot hoop brim, and you might encounter the appeal.)

These ephemeral gowns were deadly. Merely wearing them also fabricated it easier for some women to alive. Around the 1870s, Colina says that fashion trends evolved, and bustles became popular, which shifted the fullness of the wearing apparel to the dorsum but were slim in the front. By the 1890s and early on 1900s, skirts slimmed down all around. More than 100 years later, mode has changed even further, simply performing femininity is even so a struggle for women to navigate. The run a risk of failing may not include communicable fire, but there are often still explosive consequences — similar an commodity undermining your first day of a new job because of your outfit. At least now when women get burned for what they wear, it's not quite and then literal.

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Source: https://www.racked.com/2017/12/19/16710276/burning-dresses-history

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