Accessories are often small and can be very decorative, but they also have a practical function. These clothing extensions work the entire body from head to toe. Some, like buttons, have been with us unchanged for thousands of years. Others, like the phone box, appeared almost yesterday. Some were indispensable to the elite, but many were carried, manipulated, admired and enjoyed by the masses.
Since categorizing accessories is tricky – is the belt holding up your jeans an accessory? What about your sunglasses or jewelry? – we will define a clothing accessory as something that a person carries or wears that complements their clothing.
Accessories are the Cinderella of the wardrobe story, too often forgotten while their more beautiful sisters go to the ball. But in their time these objects did influential things and related to much broader ideas. Picking up an accessory reveals aspects of the story in exciting new ways.
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Their raw materials show us global trade and sometimes global exploitation. Some accessories bore the seal of the empire or were used to commemorate political ideas, such as the patch box that featured the famous anti-slavery design “Am I not a man and a brother”.
Enterprising manufacturers used the wide circulation of other items as an opportunity for mass advertising. The accessory, though small in size, also shaped gender roles and expectations, and new items – such as powder compact – show that these change over time.
To modern eyes, they are sometimes mystifying, but these once common objects have fascinating and important stories to tell.
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Going medieval: how the chatelaine evoked the past for the Victorians
Beautiful and practical, the chatelaine was designed to hang from the wearer’s waist. There were a number of chains, each holding something useful or useless: things like sewing tools could be hung intertwined with trinkets. A woman wearing a chatelaine would feel its weight and hear it moving with it.
Although the concept was centuries old, in the second half of the 1800s it grew in mass-produced popularity and featured things that were useful for everyday Victorian life: pencil drives, notepads, eyeglass cases, or perhaps magnifying glasses.
This new model of an old accessory was also given a historical name: “chatelaine”. Evoking the medieval lady of the castle holding the keys, it celebrated a centuries-old practice of women’s domestic skills and management. This accessory faced the present by looking at the past.
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Dressing dangerously: why the Edwardians feared hatpins
Hat pins became extremely long in the Edwardian period. A length of up to 30 cm was needed to lay a wide “photo” hat over its owner’s equally wide hair, a fashionable style that included hair pieces (poles) and filling.
The potential danger of hat pins, especially on public transport or on crowded streets, was clear. Sometimes they caused accidental damage, but they could also be used intentionally as weapons. In 1908, Phyllis Thompson was arrested in Bootle, near Liverpool. Scolded by a policeman for being drunk and disorderly, she then jabbed him in the thigh with her hat pin.
Fear of the danger of the hat was much greater in the United States than in Britain, and there efforts were made to legislate against these taller accessories. It was also where the hat needle was seen as an ever-ready self-defense weapon for women, to be quickly pulled out of a hat and inserted into an assailant’s arm, leg, or eye.
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The birth of bling: men and women embrace the sparkle with faux gemstones
Jewelry made with fire glass stones (called “paste”) is as popular today as it was in the 18th century. The British-made shoe buckles were then designed as a glossy fashion statement for men, with “caliber cut” glass. This means that all the “stones” are shaped to fit well together in standard mounts. Gemstones are handled differently, with their natural shape determining the cut and mounting to reduce wastage.
The Alsatian jeweler Georg Friedrich Strass pioneered the imitation of diamond pastes in his Paris workshop in the 1730s. He used a variety of chemical elements as well as metallic bases to enhance and diversify color and brilliance.
After its invention, glamorous accessories made from artificial gemstones became affordable for the masses. This is where bling began, in the mid-18th century. And these buttons tell us that she was enjoyed by both women and men.
4
Connected with a feeling: the Victorian craze for buttons
Button hooks were ubiquitous in the Victorian world, helping men – and especially women – get in and out of their tightly fitted, high-buttoned clothes. They came in a variety of sizes and materials: large ones of silver and black, for example, were used for boots, gaitas and spittoons (buttoned shields worn by adults and children); while smaller examples—made of various metals, Scottish agate, bone, and guilloché enamel—were used for buttons on narrow bodies or gloves.
Through these items, we can imagine the physical sensations of being wrapped in loose clothing, and the ritual of dressing and undressing before the age of Velcro and zippers. They come from a past where dressing properly and comfortably meant being able to feel the pressure of clothes on every part of your body – a person in Victorian Britain would have felt comfortable in clothes that we would consider as unacceptably restrictive today. Comfort is as much psychological as physical.
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East meets West: 20th-century Western designers drew inspiration from across the seas
Since the 18th century, there has been a fascination in the West with objects from the East, and in the early 20th century European and American designers borrowed from African and Asian images and techniques to create new trends in modernist styles. the west. The decorative arts, ornaments and fashions they created were filled with the glamor of what was then seen as exotic.
Back then, a sense of exoticism might help sell a mass-produced good, but the cultural borrowing was often deep. A surviving example of a belt buckle from the 1920s, for example, is in the form of Chinese characters of an ancient script incomprehensible to modern readers and may have been copied for their appearance alone, or perhaps even invented. It may have been made in a small workshop specializing in artisanal creation in plastics: from a world where machine and handwork were less separate than today.
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Facing the future: compactness at the heart of socially acceptable cosmetics
Compacts appeared in the early 20th century, part of a revolution in women’s style that saw cosmetics become not only acceptable, but socially necessary. Until then, wearing makeup suggested immorality and was widely frowned upon.
It took what was once illegal and made it desirable. Its mobile nature celebrated women who were increasingly active outside the home, at leisure or at work. Being essentially a small dressing table, the compactness produced a further behavioral change, allowing women to apply their cosmetics not only on the go, but also in public.
Cordula van Wyhe is senior lecturer in art history and Susan Vincent is a research fellow at the Center for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, both at the University of York.
This article was first published in the July 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
