If we look back over the last 100 years of fashion, we can see how much has changed. The 1920s were famous for loose, square-cut flapper dresses and pinstripe suits with wide-legged trousers. The ’50s saw fitted shirts, poodle skirts, and the “greaser” in his jeans, T-shirt, and leather jacket. The ’70s brought us bell-bottoms. The ’80s lit up with neon, and the ’90s grunge craze had us all in flannels.
Just hold those images in your mind real quick as we make our way back to the 1890s. Victorian-era fashion was marked by corsets, bell-shaped skirts, and three-piece suits. Against that backdrop, in 1893, The Strand Magazine published predictions of what people would wear in the coming century. And, well, you just have to see it.
The magazine feature by W. Cade Gall was called “Future Dictates of Fashion.” Gall framed his piece as a fictional story about an old man mysteriously finding a book published in 1993 called The Past Dictates of Fashion.
Fashion, according to the made-up 1993 author of the made-up book, was governed by “immutable laws.” But according to Gall, those laws were unknown in 1893, when people thought of fashion as “a whim.” By the 1940s, however, fashion would assume “the dignity of a science.” It would even be taught in universities from the 1950s onward.
Whatever those immutable laws of fashion were supposed to be, they must have been wild to explain the hilariously wrong predictions of what people would wear in the 20th century.
You still have those 1920s fashion images in your head, right? Compare them to these drawings:
To add to the hilarity, here’s the commentary on the skirt length in the first drawing:
“The skirt, it is true, is short enough to alarm prim contemporary dames, and it is scarcely less assuring to find in the whole of the remaining plates only three periods when it seems to have got longer.”
Imagine if they’d seen the knee-length flapper dresses of the actual 1920s, followed by the miniskirts of the ’60s. The sheer horror.
The style sketches for each decade provide laugh after laugh. What in the Shakespearean Strawberry Shortcake–Bo Peep is happening here in the 1930s?
The 1950s weren’t much better. Apparently, there was a trend toward a court-jester look in the mid-’50s?
The ’70s got a couple of things closer-ish to reality, kind of. Those collars could hint at butterfly collars, perhaps? And that 1978 outfit almost looks like bell-bottoms. Can we imagine people showing up to the disco in these digs?
How about the ’80s? Do we see acid-washed jeans? Parachute pants? A preppy sweater tied around the shoulders, perhaps? Mmm, not exactly. More like The Wizard of Oz meets Alice in Wonderland.
If you look at what models wear on haute couture runways, you might see clothing that aligns somewhat with these sketches. But we certainly don’t see it in the daily wear of ordinary people.
Imagine showing the folks in 1893 today’s kids in hoodies and jeans. Or moms in yoga pants and cropped tees. It would blow their Victorian minds.
Of course, no one can predict the future, and Mr. Gall in 1893 didn’t have the benefit of seeing the drastic shifts in clothing that we’ve witnessed over the past several generations. It’s hard to look outside of our own experience and timeline and imagine something totally different. Could we predict the next century of fashion? Would we even dare to try?
Perhaps someone should, if only to provide some chuckles to our descendants 100 years from now.
