Dress

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gargantuan sizes and swelled diameters enabled by crinolines in the late 1850s and 1860s resulted in some dresses of Crystal Palace simplification. Others dresses took the grandiose scale as an extravagant, flamboyant fate, providing eye-popping color and pattern. A colorful leaf motif combined with this silhouette makes for no wallflower, but rather the confident style of the Second Empire in France and the Civil War years in the United States.

The Costume Institute

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Costume Institute's collection of more than thirty-three thousand objects represents seven centuries of fashionable dress and accessories for men, women, and children, from the fifteenth century to the present.

Metropolitan Museum of Art