crinoline

French crinoline combined Latin crinis (hair) with linum (linen or thread). The original crinoline was a stiff fabric woven from horsehair and cotton or linen, used to make petticoats rigid enough to hold a skirt's shape. The fabric was scratchy, hot, and effective. By the 1840s, fashionable women wore multiple crinoline petticoats to achieve the wide skirt silhouette that dominated mid-nineteenth-century fashion.

The fabric crinoline was replaced by the cage crinoline in 1856. The cage — a frame of flexible steel hoops connected by vertical tapes — was lighter, cooler, and more effective than stacked horsehair petticoats. The invention is attributed to several people, but the patent by R.C. Milliet in Paris is among the earliest. The cage crinoline was an engineering solution to a fashion problem. Women could achieve enormous skirt widths without the weight of multiple petticoats.

Crinolines at their peak were spectacular and dangerous. Skirts could extend five or six feet in diameter. Women could not fit through normal doorways. They knocked objects off tables. More seriously, the lightweight fabric over the cage caught fire easily. An estimated three thousand women died in crinoline-related fires in England in the late 1850s and 1860s. Florence Nightingale campaigned against the fashion on safety grounds. The garment that liberated women from heavy petticoats killed some of them.

The crinoline collapsed in the late 1860s, replaced by the bustle. The name survived as a general term for any stiff underskirt that holds a wider skirt shape. Ballet tutus, wedding gowns, and quinceañera dresses still use crinoline — the fabric or modern synthetic equivalents. The horsehair word persists long after the horsehair disappeared.