At the last Oscars 2026, there was no doubt: for costumes, Guillermo del Toro’s spectacular Frankenstein triumphed, whose outfits, curated by Kate Hawley, had viewers dreaming between gothic atmospheres, Victorian romance and horror-tinged fantasy, a poignant combination of great pathos. Credit, in particular, to the lavish looks worn in the film by leading lady Mia Goth, who has become Hollywood’s new queen of creepy movies, as well as a style icon off the set. A Dior muse, the actress sported two Jonathan Anderson creations, both during the ceremony and at the after party, where we couldn’t help but notice the silhouette of the latter, a black-and-white dress with a peculiar structure in the back that has become a trademark of Anderson’s new Dior. The Irish creative director has never hidden that he loves to be inspired by designs from the past to be brought to life in the present, through conceptual and architectural reinterpretations, which nevertheless do not give up that romantic and dreamy esprit that is also typical of the maison’s DNA.
Apart from Goth, the passion for revisited silhouettes of yesteryear, we had also seen it in the cobalt blue Dior gown worn by actress Alba Rohrwacher at the last Venice Film Festival, but we could safely say that, on the catwalk as on the red carpets, the craze for the past has taken over. Merit for the costumed films and series, which are increasingly seen and destined to become a popular phenomenon, but also for the timeless charm that certain dresses continue to emanate, between lace-up corsets, embroidery, decorations and maxi and voluminous skirts. Here, precisely the volume of skirts, is a focal point of Anderson’s in his Dior, which was able to bring back the concept of crinoline, the most loved and hated garment of women of the past, the one that allowed skirts to widen out of proportion and entered by right into the imagination of hundreds of little girls all over the world, watching twirling in the sumptuous ballrooms protagonists such as Scarlett O’Hara of Gone With the Wind or Princess Sissi.
But how, where and when was crinoline born? Actually, ancestors of the crinoline, we find them long before the 1800s-the century in which it acquired its identity as we know it today-going back to the 15th century. The reason from which this need takes shape? Purely aesthetic: women wanted their skirts to be more and more voluminous, so that the prototype that has long dominated female beauty-that of the very narrow waist-would be favored and exaggerated precisely by the effect conferred by the volume of the part underneath, and, as history has taught us, women were indeed willing to do anything to fit into those canons, even to endure the most castrating uncomfortableness. The first true ancestor of the crinoline is the Spanish Verdugado, an overlapping circle structure composed of wooden rings and thick wire, which was used as an underskirt to achieve the desired volumetric effect; it could be conical or paraboloid in shape. The most common shape, however, was the drum shape, typical of French fashion, which softened somewhat the stiffness of the lines in vogue at the time. In this period fashion wanted the female body sandwiched between two cones, the upper one given by the flat, V-shaped bust, the lower part exaggerated by the shapes of the skirt. The bib, which was worn at the front of the dresses, accentuated this effect with its shape and decorations.
After the Verdugado, it is the Guardinfante that is the most commonly used ploy to puff up skirts. The term originated with reference precisely to pregnant women, as if it could act as protection, thus “guarding the infant.” It consisted of metal hoops of increasing size or even, to lighten the weight, a wicker frame. It was in use in Europe from the 16th to the 18th century, the latter being the period when it was most in vogue: skirts had to be so wide that hands could be placed at the hips. In the Rococo period of Versailles and Marie Antoinette, however, we find the Panier, the most direct predecessor of the 19th-century crinoline. It differs from its predecessors in that it is very prominent on the sides and less so on the front: formed of bags or circles on the sides, the Panier was part of the undergarments worn in the 17th and 18th centuries to extend the width of skirts to the side, leaving the front and back relatively flat. Paniers, which maximized the flatness of the abdomen and the contrast of shapes, returned in this period.
A break from structural volumes occurred during the rise of Napoleon, in the late 1700s: in this period, ladies of high society rediscovered the pleasure of the essentiality of cleaner, more flowing lines, with references to the fashion of Ancient Greece and the establishment of the so-called Empire style, with cuts below the breast. But this break was short-lived because, with the end of the Regency era and the beginning of the Restoration, women slowly returned to bodices, corsets and wide skirts. And it was in the 1850s, with the beginning of the second half of the century, that crinoline as we all know it was born. It is named for a special fabric made from horsehair; crinoline is in fact lined with horsehair, steel hoops, and whalebone that women wore underneath their actual robes.
This accessory was worn over ankle-length lace panties, topped with a flannel petticoat, three percale petticoats, and four starched muslin petticoats. Invented around 1830 by the Frenchman Oudinot as an underskirt made of stiff fabric stuffed with horsehair, it was later Charles Worth-known as the first couturier in fashion history-who revived it. An Englishman transplanted to Paris, in 1860 Worth reinstated the crinoline into a “demi-crinoline,” with a cage of metal hoops and steel springs, which further increased the volume of the skirts and gave greater lightness to the ensemble, which by then had become of no inconsiderable weight. Soon, there was no woman who did not use crinoline in her own dressing process. Not only upper-class women, but also those from the lower strata: crinoline was not the exclusive preserve of one social stratum, but a fundamental component of women’s fashion at the time. Not without criticism, of course: considered a birdcage, soon doctors and scientists declared its use harmful, as it would keep air under the skirt by cooling the body temperature.
If we think of the trend brought back by Anderson for Dior, we cannot then fail to refer to the Tournure, which within a few years also permanently replaced the new crinoline. The first type of tournure featured a flat front and a bulging back, recreating the famous “balloon butt” effect that we could admire in Dior’s latest collections. Unlike the demi-crinoline, the shape of the Tournure was given by a single circular splint (or strap) tied at the waist and some semicircular splints present only at the back. A legacy that continued into the early 1900s, during the magnificent years of the Belle Époque, when the padding at the back was referred to as the “Cul de Paris,” giving it that iconic and sinuous S-shaped silhouette that we find in the fashion of the period. As the decades passed, crinolines, corsets and Tournure gave way to a new conscious freedom, one brought about in part by the advent of designers such as Paul Poiret and later Coco Chanel. However, in 1947 itself, Christian Dior with the New Look reaffirmed an all-round concept of femininity, with waistlines enhanced by the Bar Jacket and full skirts. It was the exaltation of a new hedonism after the difficult war years, one that laid the foundations of 1950s clothing that, though without crinolines, harkened back to the hyper-exalted silhouettes of nineteenth-century curves.
Besides Jonathan Anderson, a return to the fundamentals of women’s fashion of yesteryear we have also seen in Simone Rocha, Dilara Findikoglu, Magda Butrym, and Alessandro Michele’s Valentino. But this time, the crinoline-as well as the corset-become emblematic of a feminine vindication that is not succubus but independent, that of a cohort of women who do not renounce vexations and the display of their heightened sensuality as a means of self-assertion and unscrupulous rebellion.
[đź“·MEGA; dior.com]
