The Victorian bustle was not a single garment but a sequence of three structurally distinct understructures, each producing its own recognizable silhouette. According to the costumier behind the Historical Sewing chronology of the 1870s and 1880s, the era divides into the First Bustle Era (roughly 1868–1876), the Natural Form Era (1877–1882), and the Second Bustle Era (1883–1889), and a dress from 1871 looks, in her words, like "a distant relative" of one from 1880. Understanding those phases means looking beneath the silk: the outer shape was always a consequence of wires, hoops, pads, and woven horsehair beneath.
The Rise of the Bustle: From Crinoline to Early Form (c. 1860s-1876)
The bustle began as a redistribution of the crinoline rather than its replacement. As the Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (2010) explains, the domed crinoline cage of the early 1860s first grew in circumference and then began to flatten at the front; from the late 1860s, bustle structures were used to hold skirts out at the back instead. By the early 1870s, these supports—known in French as tournures—were in general use. Their construction was strikingly varied: metal, cane, or whalebone hoops, or woven horsehair flounces, supplied the projected volume. The defining silhouette of the First Bustle Era was therefore a skirt carried outward and upward at the rear, its fullness concentrated low behind while the front of the body flattened.
The Natural Form Era: A Brief Interlude (c. 1877-1882)
Between 1877 and 1882, the wired contraption was, as the Historical Sewing account puts it, "left hanging in the closet" and replaced with a small pad resembling a woman's natural curves—hence the era's name. The silhouette changed accordingly. Overskirts drew tighter around the foundation skirt, complicated draped poufs appeared at the back, and bodices tightened and lengthened into the cuirass shape, a bodice that mimicked the long line of the corset. The Princess Dress, cut in full-length princess seams without a waistline seam, emerged from the same taste for unbroken vertical lines that emphasized height. Charles Frederick Worth, the Englishman whose House of Worth pioneered made-to-order Parisian couture, is identified as a proponent of this natural-form styling, though the surviving accounts do not detail how directly he shaped the undergarments themselves.
The Exaggerated Second Bustle: Engineering Volume (c. 1883-1889)
The bustle returned in 1883 in a far more exaggerated form and lasted until 1889, when, as the Historical Sewing chronology records, women "had had enough" of a rear that looked disproportionally huge relative to the rest of the body, and the bustle was discarded nearly overnight. The Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion confirms this second life, noting that bustles reappeared "in a more exaggerated form from the early 1880s," designed to puff up the back of a dress or skirt into a pronounced horizontal projection.
Construction continued to draw on the established repertoire—padded cushions and wire frames being the two methods the general encyclopedic definition of the bustle recognizes—and inventive makers kept patenting improvements: a 1902 American patent filing, published in 1903, described a "ventilated bustle and hip-form," showing that the engineering of padded rear volume persisted even after the great era had passed.
