Rational Costume Society – Wikipedia

Nineteenth-century British group

1897 commercial in The Graphic for Elliman’s Common Embrocation (manufactured in Slough), exhibiting a comparatively early instance of an extraordinary non-sea-bathing Western girl showing skirtless in public (sporting “rationals” or “knickerbockers” or “bloomers” for bicycle-riding). The entire outfit (prime and backside) was often called a “bicycle suit”.

The Rational Costume Society was an organisation based in 1881 in London, a part of the motion for Victorian dress reform. It described its goal thus:

The Rational Costume Society protests towards the introduction of any vogue in gown that both deforms the determine, impedes the actions of the physique, or in any means tends to injure the well being. It protests towards the sporting of tightly-fitting corsets; of high-heeled shoes; of heavily-weighted skirts, as rendering wholesome train nearly unattainable; and of all tie down cloaks or different clothes impeding on the actions of the arms. It protests towards crinolines or crinolettes of any type as ugly and deforming… [It] requires all to be dressed healthily, comfortably, and superbly, to hunt what conduces to beginning, consolation and sweetness in our gown as an obligation to ourselves and one another.^[1]

Within the catalogue of its inaugural exhibition, it listed the attributes of “good” gown as:

1. Freedom of Motion.
2. Absence of stress over any a part of the physique.
3. No more weight than is critical for heat, and each weight and heat evenly distributed.
4. Grace and sweetness mixed with consolation and comfort.
5. Not departing too conspicuously from the extraordinary gown of the time.^[2]
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Main members of the Society have been Lady Harberton (who created the divided skirt), Mary Eliza Haweis and Constance Wilde (Irish writer). Oscar Wilde helped unfold the phrase by publishing the essay “The Philosophy of Dress” by which he pressured the essential relationship between clothes and one’s soul.^[3] Lady cyclists, similar to members of the Lady Cyclists’ Association, have been eager advocates of ladies’s proper to decorate appropriately for the exercise, as a part of a perception that biking supplied ladies a chance to flee overly restrictive societal norms.^[4]

In 1889, a member of the Rational Costume Society, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, staged a coup at a gathering of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Newcastle upon Tyne, when she organized an impromptu addition to the programme with regards to rational gown. Her speech was reported by newspapers throughout Britain and the notion of rational gown was the largest information from the assembly.^[5]