1875 | Everyday Life
Everyday Life
Craftsman-poet-wallpaper designer William Morris of 1866 Morris chair fame reestablishes his company under his own name at London March 31. He will open a shop in Oxford Street in 1877 and in the next 8 years will make Morris & Company one of Britain's most fashionable and commercially successful interior designers and manufacturers of textiles, furniture, stained glass, and tiles, producing them in his own workshops and making them available through his shop.
Alabama-born New York belle Alva Ertskin Smith, 22, is married April 20 to William Kissam Vanderbilt, 26-year-old grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, now 80 (see 1883).
Hoopskirts go out of fashion in America after nearly half a century as bustles come in to supplant them (although not all women have worn hoopskirts and nobody has ever worn them all the time). The caged crinoline whose invention is credited to Charles Frederick Worth has had a bell-shaped framework formed from a series of horizontal hoops and suspended from the waist to support the weight of overskirts, but the hoops have become so large as to require at least 25 yards of material for a single dress, and the weight of so much fabric has so taxed the strength of a young woman with the 18-inch waist mandated by fashion that she has often worn supporting pads to relieve her back by throwing some of the weight onto the backs of her hips. The gathers of the skirt have gradually been pushed forward, and the "back pannier," which has bunched the skirt over the rear of the hoops, has evolved into the bustle.