Prior to the bustle springing into being dresses where thrown over a crinoline cage covered in an underskirt. The underskirt was a thing a simple utility: it provided support and a barrier between the cage and the expensive outer fabric. Princess Alexandra, when crossing a brook — so the story goes — pinned the hem of the outer fabric (difficult to clean when soiled) several inches above her hem line, exposing some of the underskirt (no shame there as she had a quite expensive underskirt) and the pinning up brought into being an aesthetic of two complimentary skirts.
It slowly became imitated, then elaborated, and finally evolved beyond its parent event; material was hiked up, slowing over the fashion seasons, moving to the back where tie mutated into bows and other rear furniture was added. The aesthetic required a visual balance so ladies hair became braided and raise, and increased in visual mass, and in turn hats became smaller, higher and more concentrated with bird, bows and flowers enough to balance out the silhouette.
All because the Princess of Wales protected her hem from a little walk out in the grounds.
Colour too moved. The heaviness of colours of the 1860s with the heavy, dark shades (a simple lack of chemical innovations and limited dyes, and of course the dark mourning promoted by Victoria) made everyone so throughly sick of the sombre that the 1870s saw a hunger for light fabrics, with muted day tints: fadé as the Fashion Journals of Paris called them. The 1870s also saw the manufacture of machine made trimmings sold by the yard enabling women with home machines to decorate their dresses as insanely as they wished.
It was a very pretty period, as Miss Findlay, below, will attest.
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