![]() She ran around the stage in a column of fire before a fireman was able to put it out. Instead of an angelic beauty floating across the stage, Livry became a hellish nightmare cloaked in flames. But before her entrance, her skirts got too close to a gaslight and her costume caught fire. ![]() It had a corset bodice and a fluffy skirt that ended around her calves. In 1862, at a dress rehearsal for an opera, dancing superstar Emma Livry wore a costume that evoked the ethereality of the ideal feminine ballerina. The most vulnerable to death by fire may have been ballet dancers, who often wore tarlatan and gauze costumes and who danced close to gaslight every time they were on stage. That’s roughly equivalent to the amount of women murdered in the US in 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Matthews David wrote that in 1860, British medical journal the Lancet estimated that 3,000 women in one year died by fire. These dresses, combined with candles and gaslight in a world before electricity, led to a multitude of women being taken by the flame. Photo: Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images “Four Dancers in the Foyer” by Edgar Degas, late-19th to early-20th century. So if you have a very flimsy, flowing something that mixes well with air, it will burn quite readily,” says Martin Bide, a professor in the textiles, fashion merchandising, and design department at the University of Rhode Island. But one will catch light way more quickly than the other. “If you imagine a sheet of newspaper and a hunk of wood, essentially, chemically, they are the same. ![]() These dresses were meant to give the illusion that women were dreamy, romantic figures, but that also meant they had air flowing around and through them. Part of what made these dresses so flammable was the same thing that made them so beautiful. Machines also mass-produced theses delicate fabrics for the first time, which gave women of every social class access to them, making death by fire a widespread phenomenon. (Think ball gowns made of ballerina tutus and bridal veils.) In gaslight, these diaphanous dresses glowed white, reinforcing gender norms of soft, gentle women and contrasting with the dirt and machinery of the Industrial Revolution, Alison Matthews David wrote in her book Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present. Bobbinet, cotton muslin, gauze, and tarlatan were all open-weave fabrics that helped create the light, flowy, celestial gowns that were popular in the mid-1800s. First, they were made of highly flammable fabric. “Your girlfriend beside you is a ball of fire, and you’re now a ball of fire, and boom boom boom boom boom boom boom, they’re all balls of fire.”Ī perfect set of circumstances combined to make these dresses particularly combustible. “It’s not a build-up like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re smoking, let me tamp that out.’ It’s like, ‘Ahh!’ Your girlfriend beside you is a ball of fire, and you’re now a ball of fire, and boom boom boom boom boom boom boom, they’re all balls of fire,” says Deirdre Kelly, author of Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection. Their dresses were so dangerously flammable that if they caught fire, it would spread in an instant, sometimes leading to groups of women dying at the same time. In the mid-19th century, women wearing the style of the day would burst into flames if their dress caught fire - and I do mean burst. But they all died the same way: The dresses they were wearing caught fire and killed them. All of these women lived differently - from actual royalty to anonymous nobodies. A mother entertaining her children in her home. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.Ī teenage duchess who hid her cigarette from her parents. The archives will remain available here for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years.
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