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Home > Social History > 1901 > Fashion

Introduction

1901


The 1901 census took place in the year that Queen Victoria died and the Boer War was claiming thousands of lives. However, a new modern era was dawning with the arrival of the motor car, the first purpose-built cinema and the establishment of the Fingerprint Investigation Bureau.

Enumerators gathered information on UK residents for the night of 31 March. The question on employment status from 1891 was altered slightly so that instead of asking whether someone was ‘Employer, Employee or Neither’, the 1901 census asked people to state whether they were ‘Employer, Worker or Own Account’. There was also a new question on home-working to help calculate the contribution women made to the formal and the informal economy.

The other information that had been collected in earlier censuses remained unchanged.
Welsh language schedules were provided for Welsh speakers in Monmouthshire and Wales, and a special circular was drawn up in Yiddish and German for the recently-arrived Jewish population in London and Manchester, explaining how to fill in schedules.

Fashion

Women wore huge hats and trimmed with feathers and flowers, or straw boaters. © Getty Images

Most clothes were still made at home or by dressmakers, but ready-to-wear garments were increasingly available. Department stores expanded, as did shops with multiple branches, such as Hepworth’s for menswear.

Women’s silhouettes emphasised height and sinuous curves. Hats were huge, trimmed with feathers and flowers, bodices frothed with lace and chiffon over the bosom, and mermaid-cut skirts swept to the ground. Ladies often relied on parasols to balance their strange curved stance.

Strict codes dictated styles, although times were changing. For men, lounge suits were increasingly popular, but tailed morning coats still constituted “proper” daywear.

Girls continued to wear layers of petticoats under dresses pulled in by belts and little boys wore suits with thick stockings and sturdy shoes.

Rebecca Arnold

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