Dress

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The extravagant silhouette of this day dress with bishop sleeves and pointed boned waist demonstrates the evolution from the nearly amorphous first cotton dresses of the century to the grandest crinoline-supported crystal palaces of the 1860s. It is a dress fit for a heroine in a novel by one of the Brontë sisters--shaped, expressive, tempestuous, and beguiling. And tightly, tightly corsetted on a summer's day.

The Costume Institute

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Costume Institute's collection of more than thirty-three thousand objects represents seven centuries of fashionable dress and accessories for men, women, and children, from the fifteenth century to the present.

Metropolitan Museum of Art