ELABORATE HALLOWEEN COSTUME TIPS FROM A 19TH-CENTURY GUIDE TO FANCY DRESS

Looking for a Halloween costume? Here’s a 19th-century guide to dressing for fancy balls, with costumes for witches, carrier pigeons, glowworms, and air.

Allison Meier

Costume for “the Witch” from Fancy dresses described : or, What to wear at fancy balls (1887) (via Internet Archive)

In March of 1883, Alva Vanderbilt threw one of the most lavish parties of the Gilded Age. Alva herself came as a Venetian princess, and a number of men went as Louis XVI, perhaps oblivious to the fact that the king lost his head due to such excess. Yet other New York Society members on her exclusive guest list dreamed up more eccentric garb.

Alice Vanderbilt wore an “Electric Light” dress that incorporated a working light bulb, and Lila O. Vanderbilt was outfitted as a hornet. Then there was Miss Kate Fearing Strong. Not only was Strong dressed as a cat, with a ribbon tied around her neck reading “Puss,” she was dressed with cats. As Ephemeral New York writes, Strong’s dress was “complete with an actual (dead) white feline as a head piece and a gown sewn with the body parts of real kitties,” and notes that the New York Times reported that the “overskirt was made entirely of white cats’ tails sewed on a dark background.”

Miss Kate Fearing Strong in her cat dress (1883) (courtesy Museum of the City of New York)

The 1883 ball was the social event of the year, and propelled Alva Vanderbilt to the heights of the city’s elite. Still, it was far from the sole fancy dress ball of the Gilded Age, and certainly not the only one where fine ladies were adorning their luxurious dresses with dead animals. To help attendees think of new and novel costume ideas in which to strut mansions on Fifth Avenue and across the Atlantic in London, Ardern Holt authored Fancy dresses described : or, What to wear at fancy balls.

The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Museum states on their blog that the book was so popular it went through multiple printings between the 1880s and 1890s. Holt also wrote a complementing publication called Gentlemen’s Fancy Dress: How to Choose it. The Internet Archive hosts a digitized version of Fancy dresses described from the collections of the University of California Libraries.

Holt opens the volume with the question: “But, what are we to wear?” Suggested options, with detailed directions on crafting the costumes, include historical figures like Catherine de Medici and Marie Stuart, mythical goddesses such as Diana, and fictional characters like Red Riding-Hood. However, there are just as many costumes that are, to use a more modern word, a bit conceptual. Windmill, glowworm, carrier pigeon, mist, postage, twilight, mushrooms, cherry pie, and air are a few that Holt’s book proposes. Some reflect the 19th-century interest in science (“Salt Water and Fresh Water” for a duo of sisters) and the fetishizing of the “exotic” in foreign nations (“Tunis Orange Girl” and “Egyptian Queen”).

Below are selections from Fancy dresses described, with many more for your Halloween costume inspiration online at the Internet Archive. As Holt writes, “It behoves those who really desire to look well to study what is individually becoming to themselves, and then to bring to bear some little care in the carrying out of the dresses they select, if they wish their costumes to be really a success.”………………………

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