Victorian style fashion, label for a good taste ethics

Victorian style fashion is the label for good taste ethics and bonne manières. And as Queen Victoria did so famously during her reign when she exaggerated values of austerity, rigour and sobriety in favour of a life centered on love and devotion, so designers who engage in this style are contradictory and romantic, sweet and impetuous , exaggerated and austere, generous and sober, Gothic and joyful.

Victorian style fashion: Queen Victoria is a style icon

“Never let feelings of despair and alteration leaked on your face, do not let any emotion becomes readable or on your face or in your ways” – Regina Vittoria

Impeccable details of a style that makes a novel’s heroine by Emily Bronte its icon and ambassador. As feminine as a woman from this historical period. Contradictory and fragile, but never uncertain. And so the Victorian style is about volume and detail, abundance and sophistication, exaggeration and rigour. The Victorian style has never been as fashionable as it is now, because it’s about feelings and it speaks so strongly and directly to women. It is able to do this with exactly the right lexemes from a period of history when women first began to study so they could hold a conversation, and learn French so they could travel. Those women were still devoted to the family, but not to the point of being crushed and losing their independence and their soul.

“If social forms, clothes, aesthetic judgments, all the style in which man expresses himself, are transformed continuously through fashion, then fashion, that is the new fashion, belongs only to the upper classes. As soon as the lower classes begin to take possession of the boundaries imposed by the upper classes and breaking the unity of their belonging to each other so symbolized, the upper classes are turning to this fad to another, with which again differ from the masses and the game can start again” – George Simmel

The unmistakable and unavoidable features of Victorian style fashion

Fabrics and details. Puff sleeves. Flakes in satin or velvet adorned with brooches and cameos. Stiff collars that define apparently austere clothes, but which become incredibly tame, and high neck shirt under heavy sweaters, always in the syle of Alexander McQueen’s irreverent versions. The extreme lightness made of lace, ruffles, alternated with volatile heaviness made of velvet and damask shiny-black. Victorian fashion-styles all come together under one heading, and are instantly recognisable

Alberta Ferretti, for her Fall Winter 2015 \ 2016 collection, offers lace woolen clothes alternating with tone on tone embroidery and transparent elements. Gucci’s bows. His shirts and the retro attitude retro and the poetry of his clothing.

Small rounded bags such as Miss Sicily by dolce&gabbana, and shoes that resemble English redingotes of those times. Cuffs layered with ruffled organza, tulle trimmings and velvet bows with jewel applications. It’s Chanel haute couture, but is also an expression of beauty less docile than romantic, lighter than Gothic.

The Victorian style finds its sublimation in Alexander McQueen. The designer who is not afraid to be sad, to make mistakes, not to look at others and especially not to seek approval or consent.

“I’m not afraid people won’t like me” and these few clothes, only a few pieces of his incredible production, are perfect for today’s woman who is not afraid to appear fragile, but strong at the same time.