Dressed Like Lamp Posts, Pumpkins

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30535, 2 September 1964, Page 2

Dressed Like Lamp Posts, Pumpkins

Women had dressed to resemble lamp posts, hour-glasses, bells, pumpkins and pyramids at various stages of last century, Miss Rose Reynolds demonstrated to members of the Association of Friends of the Canterbury Museum, at their meeting last evening in the Museum Lecture Theatre.

The honorary custodian of colonial exhibits at the museum. Miss Reynolds, gave an address on fashion in the nineteenth century and illustrated it wtih many coloured slides of period costumes, reproductions of paintings and portraits showing costume changes. The life of women was portrayed by their dress, Miss Reynolds said. From the

“squashed” fashions of the latter part of the Victorian era, when women were expected to be unassuming, unobtrusive, and to stay at home and have few outside interests there was “a burst of enthusiasm” into new styles, with more frou-frou at the opening of the Edwardian era. "There was a feeling of expansion and release.” Sophistication and simplicity, comfort and tight-laced misery were portrayed in the slides. “The hour-glass shape was : amusing—but it must have been very uncomfortable,” said Miss Reynolds. After the magnificent costumes at the end of the eighteenth century, a neoclassical fashion had brought the vertical or “lamp post look.” “It was followed by a false classical period—a kind of false innocence that was in fact extremely sophisticated.”

In the later 1830's, with the young Queen Victoria on the throne, a very charming style was in vogue, but by the 1850’s the style had lost a little of its charm. The advent of the sewing machine about the middle of the century encouraged many more frills and ruffles, but the general quality of clothes and style deteriorated. The bustle era began its evolution. Miss Reynolds also spoke on changes that had taken place in men’s and children’s fashions. “Look—-that’s the Beatles,” a member of the audience remarked as one slide was shown. It was a colour reproduction of three characters from Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers”. “Well, when I saw that picture of Snodgrass, I did feel I had seen him somewhere before,” Miss Reynolds said, lamid laughter.