“Penitential and Self-Mortifying”: Mourning Crape in Fashion
In 2014, while preparing for the fashion exhibition “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire” organized by the Costume Institute (CI) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the author, who was then the CI’s head conservator, encountered a question. Was the material being displayed toxic? This question arose upon discovering that nineteenth-century periodicals cautioned against wearing mourning crape, which is a crispy, crinkled, and dull black silk fabric worn in the first stages of Victorian mourning. According to these sources, mourning crape was poisonous. Seeking answers, the author would soon find out that, indeed, there was something to those warnings after all. In fact, an investigation into Victorian mourning crape reveals the incongruous story of a wretched and dangerous fabric that rose to the height of luxurious fashion. This article recounts this tale by exploring the history and materiality of English mourning crape to provide insight into both the macabre meaning of the fabric and the dreadful experience of wearing it.
There is poison in crape; it sometimes produces eruptions and disease; there is poison in bad air; there is ruin to the eyes in the exhalations and in the diagonal lines of the dark and heavy veil.
In the nineteenth century, mourning crape symbolized death. While English custom dictated that widows fully obliterate their body and face by draping themselves in yards of crape for up to two years, even the fabric’s mere presence as a strip tied onto an arm, a hat, or a doorknob, communicated non-verbally to the observer that the shadow of death had visited. While it was a necessary and serious tool for enacting mourning, there were multiple valences as to how the fabric was perceived. Fashionable in Europe and North America, crape was detested and yet much sought after, generating an ambivalent discourse about its expense, inferior quality, and psychosomatic impacts, while generating hard profits for the manufacturers, mourning shops, and importers, who leveraged the fact that death always happens. Both English and American sources such as novels, periodicals, and etiquette books declared crape an absolute necessity while also denigrating it as a hideous material that caused a difficult financial burden, self-mortification, [End Page 125] and harmful aesthetic, mental, and health effects. Disaffection with crape followed themes, including the disproportionate encumbrance mourning etiquette placed onto women, the expense and poor quality of the fabric, and the physical and psychosomatic effects of the fabric on both the wearer and beholder. These imbricated issues eventually caused a shift in how mourning was perceived and enacted, with the result that by the end of the century, a crape-shrouded widow was no longer the fashionable ideal.
TRANSATLANTIC MOURNING STYLE
The English were the consummate practitioners of wearing appropriate mourning and thus provided the example that other countries sought to emulate (Sherwood 192). The entrenchment of mourning etiquette in England reached its apotheosis in the second half of the nineteenth century, influenced primarily by Queen Victoria, who had adopted mourning dress for the remaining forty years of her life after her husband, Prince Albert, died of typhoid in 1861. Her overt sartorial sign of loyalty was an example copied by many of her middle-class subjects and had widespread impact beyond the borders of Great Britain, especially in North America. Textile and fashion historian Lou Taylor, who in 1983 wrote what is still considered the definitive history on mourning dress, declared that “the importance of the royal influence on Victorian mourning etiquette was supreme,” likening Victoria’s “cult of mourning” to the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” since few subjects were bold enough to speak out openly against mourning’s codified practices (Taylor 122). These customs enacted fiscal and physical hardships through coerced—or sometimes eagerly adopted—sartorial strategies focused on creating a “dead, black, lusterless look” (Sherwood 193). Crape was the primary material used to initiate the visual metamorphosis from a figure untouched by death to one whom sorrow had visited.
Writing on mourning etiquette, the American socialite Mrs. John Sherwood guided her audience to look at the customs of “the English, from whom we borrow our fashion in funeral matters” (189). Her handbook, Manners and Social Usages, published in 1884, was an answer to the incoherence of accepted etiquette systems caused by “the newness of our country [which] is perpetually renewed by the sudden making of fortunes, and by the absence of a hereditary, reigning set. There is no aristocracy here which has the right and title to set the fashions” (2). She recognized that the performance of appropriate mourning produced anxieties about the required length of time, the most tasteful fabrics to wear, the proper number of trimmings, attendance at social events, and more, and so sought to give guidance to alleviate these worries. The answer was to follow the English, or at least to aspire to.
The English firm Courtaulds, which had several silk mills in Essex, made the highest quality and most sought-after mourning crape. The fabric was exported to Europe and North America under the names “Courtaulds crape,” [End Page 126] “English crape,” or its French name, “crêpe anglaise,” thus reifying that the best way to enact mourning was to follow the English. Emulating the English style of mourning dress was a goal that others could aspire to, but aspiration does not always equal action and thus American-style mourning allowed for more vagaries in how mourning was approached. Sherwood proclaimed that “nothing in our country is more undecided in the public mind than the etiquette of mourning. It has not yet received that hereditary and positive character which makes the slightest departure from received custom so reprehensible in England” (200). She further underscored the haphazard American adoption of mourning practices, especially in comparison with English mourning, noting that “widows’ caps are not as universally worn as in England” (202). As the century progressed, anxieties and confusion persisted, with Godey’s telling their readers in 1891 that “we are so frequently asked to give some hints about mourning” that they would dedicate their recurring feature “The Fashions” to providing answers. By this time, there was recognition that mourning in North America and Europe was not as rigid as it continued to be in England, although Godey’s still stressed that the period during which a widow should wear deep mourning was two years. Mrs. Sherwood concurred that “in this country a widow’s first mourning dresses are covered almost entirely with crape” (60). However, by the last decade of the nineteenth century, there were finally allowances for people to “make their own rules” for mourning other relatives, such as cousins, in-laws, or friends, including the option to forego crape (190). This equivocation meant that by the end of the nineteenth century, Americans had begun to adopt “French models” of mourning attire, which were “far lighter than the heavy English mourning formerly worn” (“The Fashions”).
A WOMAN’S BURDEN
In the United States, the anxiety about mourning attire came to the fore during the Civil War (1861–65), when the massive loss of male life increased the number of women who had lost loved ones. While it seems that major fashion periodicals would have covered mourning attire thoroughly during the war owing to the impacts of the drastic loss of life, their intended mission was to divert readers from the horrors they might have been facing (Kent 560). As a result, both Peterson’s Magazine and Godey’s Lady’s Book, which were the foremost publications geared toward women, published fewer than ten articles combined on the topic from 1861 to 1865. When they did address mourning, the magazines focused on how the state of mourning should demonstrate fidelity, piousness, and respect and emphasized that glossy and other seductive fashions were unacceptable for a chaste woman (562). An unspoken but important assumption about the entire premise of mourning dress was that a woman who found herself without her husband’s protection was dangerous. She was single, available, and sexually experienced, and thus potentially threatened the stability of society. By shrouding herself [End Page 127] in deep mourning, and especially crape, she deflected the male gaze while viscerally repulsing his touch (fig. 1).
Deep mourning ensemble covered in crape with accompanying crape veil, 1870–72, American, silk, Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Martha Woodward Weber, 1930, 2009.300.633a–c. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There were degrees of mourning attire, dependent upon the proximity of the deceased, with each degree discernable by the kinds, colours, and amounts of fabrics and trimmings. While both men and women engaged in mourning rituals, such as wearing mourning dress and withdrawing from social activities, it was customary for men to have a lighter burden, typically wearing only accents of crape on their clothing and re-entering society [End Page 128] earlier than a woman would. Women, and particularly widows, were the most heavily encumbered by the sartorial requirements of mourning (Taylor 136). Whereas a widow would be required to wear deep mourning for two years, a man could leave mourning after only a year (Sherwood 204). This gendered difference was noted in the American press, including non-fashion periodicals. In 1870, the New England Farmer, and Horticultural Register chided in an article entitled “Foolish Customs” that, “men may wear a badge of mourning for a time and then resume light clothes and yellow gloves if they will. A man may do this while his wife continues to mourn for his friend and decorously swelters under her crape” (34). This statement reveals how a man’s mourning period was shorter and lighter, requiring only a “badge” of crape, while a woman was required to perform complementary mourning for a period longer than her husband’s whenever one of his friends or relatives died.
For women, wearing mourning dress might have had less to do with the way one felt, and more about society’s expectations. Sartorial requirements for mourning crape were arbitrary, burdensome, and not always reflective of the actual state of a woman’s bereavement. As Sherwood explains, mourning garments could be “a shield to the real mourner, and they are often a curtain of respectability to the person who should be a mourner but is not” (201). For those women who truly mourned their husbands, entrenched notions of propriety with regards to how their mourning attire, and especially crape, should be worn could still chafe. “As if our grief were measured by the depth of our crape veils,” lamented a reader to Ladies Home Journal’s advice columnist Aunt Patience. This thought was echoed by another advice giver, Mrs. Mallon, who criticized the sartorial requirements as not really having anything to do with what a person might truly feel: “And yet this tender devotion degenerates sometimes in a morbid feeling that cannot but be strongly objected to. . . . not a bit more devotion and love for the dead is shown by the width of crape folds” (20).
Regardless of how much a woman was devastated by the loss of her husband, she “should be taught that society will not respect her unless she pays to the memory of the man whose name she bears” (Sherwood 201). Women were required to perform mourning in order to meet expectations of propriety and decorum, and it was only through this process that they were able to affirm their standing within their community. Mrs. Sherwood again has something to say about this, stating:
It is deemed almost a sin for a woman to go into the street, to drive, or to walk, for two years, without a deep crape veil over her face. It is a common remark of the censorious that a person who lightens her mourning before that time “did not care much for the deceased”; and many people hold the fact that a widow or an orphan wears her crape for two years to be greatly to her credit.
(198) [End Page 129]
American writers recognized and mocked this sacrifice and especially criticized women who embraced the “trappings of woe” (Mallon 20) to become visual objects of pity and loss through their public suffering. A Quaker journal, the Friend’s Intelligencer, strongly stated, “The dress is hideous. Nothing more thoroughly sepulchral can be imagined than a woman swathed, from head to foot, in folds of thick, black gloomy crape. . . . No man could endure such a dress for a day . . . but many women assume it almost eagerly and enter upon a slow period of martyrdom” (“Our Remembrance of the Dead”). Further underscoring gendered differences, this passage baldly claims that men would never adhere to such foolishness women do, demonstrating the complicated reception of deep mourning dress worn by women. The “sepulchral” woman was a dreaded sight that society both mocked and mandated.
Intricately linked to martyrdom, in both American and British sources, was the comparison of mourning attire to sati, the Hindu practice of self-immolation by widows upon the death of their husbands. This comparison today seems absurd since deep mourning as a temporary sartorial custom is drastically less permanent or life-altering than sati. Even so, the comparison situates the conception of deep mourning practice as an honorific act that sublimates a woman’s identity to that of her husband, asserting that without him, she is nothing. A widow shrouded in crape became a “living sati” who denied her own identity, appearance, and social life to fulfill the role expected of her by society (Gilmartin 149). This act was not always negatively perceived; for example, an 1872 Harper’s Bazaar article laid out arguments for and against deep mourning and the role crape played: “To crown the whole, we hear them talk of the suttee of the widow’s veil—that kind of shelter behind which she retires to hug her grief alone” (“Mourning”). The act of sartorial sati, then, both reinforced a woman’s “credit” in society and allowed her to experience her grief in a private and protected space. The assumption of the crape veil reveals complex notions, wherein a widow—who already had limited options in terms of reconciling her newfound independence with society’s expectations—could perform a self-imposed penance of sartorial death that earned her community’s respect. Perhaps at a time when all felt lost, the agential act of wearing crape gave one a modicum of rightness. The widow was to be pitied but could be redeemed through performing mourning to perfection.
MOURNING DRESS AND FASHION
Although mourning dress, and crape especially, had many unattractive qualities, it could also be very fashionable and appealing. In fact, Godey’s editors considered mourning attire to be so aligned with fashion that they declared, “we have . . . little to say upon the subject” since mourning dresses were not made differently except for the addition of crape for deep or first mourning (“Fashions”). Lou Taylor claims that “by the 1860s and 1870s, elegant mourning dress was a firmly established fact in the United States of America as [End Page 130] well as in Europe,” with fashions copied from fashion plates in Godey’s (132). The cut, fabric, and sometimes even the mourning clothes themselves came directly from Paris and London (32). A mourning dress could be so fashionable that it regrettably “could not be put away and kept for a future date because within a few years it would be hopelessly out of date” (132). Even women wearing “artistic” or “aesthetic” dress stayed true to the cut and style of their clothing while adopting black hues and long crape veils (Shonfield 67). Indeed, American and European mourning clothes throughout the nineteenth century hewed so closely to the fashionable silhouette that mourning attire was used as a device to create a timeline of fashionable silhouettes for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2014’s exhibition “Death Becomes Her.” The redaction of colour visually clarified the transitions in fashionable line and proportion, creating a material chronology of fashion’s shifting shape (fig. 2).
Two ensembles in the Costume Institute’s timeline of mourning fashion in the exhibition “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire” (October 15, 2014–February 1, 2015). Photograph by Sarah Scaturro.
[End Page 131]
While one might think that the primary difference between mourning and non-mourning attire was the colour black, that was not always the case. Godey’s told their readers that “a mourning dress differs from an ordinary one only in the color, and alas! Not often in that, for black, spite of all that been said to the contrary remains the first choice with most persons” (“Fashions”). Indeed, black was such a fashionable colour in Europe and North America during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the silhouette of mourning clothes aligned with normal fashion garments so closely, that a researcher today might have a challenging time distinguishing whether a historic black dress they were studying was actually a mourning garment. A checklist of distinguishing features would include dull black woollen and mixed fibre cloth such as bombazine or Henrietta, matte-surfaced beads, and slight trimming, while also noting the absence of lace, and shiny and highly embellished surfaces. Since neither colour nor line can necessarily differentiate a mourning gown, there really is only one element in a garment that can confirm unequivocally that it was for mourning, and that is black crape.
ENGLISH MOURNING CRAPE
Crape’s use as a mourning fabric began by the second half of the sixteenth century, when crape manufactured in Bologna, Italy, was considered the highest quality (Taylor 206). The French also manufactured crape during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it was the Huguenot population that fled to Britain that brought the first inklings of crape manufacturing knowledge to England after 1685 (207–11). Throughout the eighteenth century, silk manufacturers attempted to match Bolognese crape but made little progress until the Huguenot family of Courtaulds hit upon success by the early 1800s (212–16). The manufacturing of mourning crape was notoriously secretive, with every firm having its own methods, machinery, and recipes.
The fabric was made in a multi-step process. First, the fibre was thrown into a high-twist yarn using inexpensive waste silk, which was then woven into a plain-woven gauze-like fabric. The woven fabric was put through an angling machine, which stretched the weft direction askew of the warp, a critical step since silk itself cannot naturally stretch well. Placing the fabric on the bias allowed the fabric to stretch and not break during the next step, which was the crimping stage that gave the fabric its recognizable texture (fig. 3). The last steps were dyeing the fabric black, and then treating and coating it with a variety of chemicals that gave it a dead hue and crispy feel. While every manufacturer had its own method to create crape, and the process evolved over the nineteenth century, it is believed that Courtaulds’ equipment and approach to the biasing step created a better-quality fabric (Coleman 88–91).
English textile manufacturers infiltrated European and American markets by preying upon the social anxiety of wealthy clientele, touting the [End Page 132] supremacy of their fabrics as the most necessary for mourning (Taylor 194–95). Courtaulds was one of the largest and most prestigious manufacturers of crape and exported large quantities to France (accounting for twenty-four per cent of Courtaulds’ sales) and the United States (accounting for five per cent of the company’s sales) (Coleman 140). Between 1843 and 1877, Courtaulds’ capital and profits nearly quadrupled (135), and by 1885, it was making “virtually nothing but mourning crape in sundry widths and qualities” (111).
Detail of crape-covered mourning ensemble, 1870–72, American, silk, Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Martha Woodward Weber, 1930, 2009.300.633a–c. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Unlike manufacturers that relied upon the development of seasonal novelties—a practice that exposed them to the risk of fashion’s caprices—crape was a reliable product, since death always took place. Crape also had the advantage of taking lower quality silk and transforming it into a product that [End Page 133] sold at twice the cost of other silk products (Taylor 292). Courtaulds’ boom years from 1835 to 1885 align exactly with the peak of “Victorian passion for mourning etiquette,” although their profits could in part be explained by the falling price of raw silk from China (Taylor 219, Coleman 139). Crape made in England was so prestigious and expensive that it became the standard against which all other crapes were measured.
MOURNING CRAPE’S EXPENSIVE MATERIALITY
Mourning crape was both ruinous and easily ruined. The expense of crape was cited in the press as a reason to moderate its use, since those who could not afford crape were pressured to purchase copious quantities during a time of despair. A widow who had just lost her husband might also have lost her sole source of income, and yet she was expected to wear dull black garments covered in crape for at least the first year after his death. As an example of price, the 1877 spring/summer mail order catalogue for the department store Lord & Taylor sold normal silk ensembles made to the buyer’s measurements beginning at $40 USD, and outside garments like saques and cloaks for less than $20, with “English trimming” and “veiling” crapes costing from $2.50 to $9 a yard (11, 21, and 25). While some crape yardage might not seem expensive in comparison to full ensembles, deep mourning prescribed a woman cover her pre-existing (or newly bought) black gown completely in crape, use the fabric as self-trimming, and then purchase additional crape for her nearly floor-length veils (called “weepers”), thus requiring an accumulated amount of fabric that was at minimum several yards for just one ensemble. This meant that just the crape alone could cost around $27, not including the actual dress. Ladies’ Home Journal instructed that “the real widow’s veil should reach to the edge of the skirt, back and front and be finished by a hem a quarter of a yard wide” (Mallon 20). The requirement for a deep hem thus added even more cost. An 1895 cap and veil combination by Wanamaker’s department store held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection has a veil measuring seven feet in length by three feet in width, with the standard deep hem, exemplifying the costly expense for crape that deep mourning required (fig. 4).
Because of crape’s expense, it is almost certain that only a minority of women could afford garments that had surfaces completely covered in desirable English-manufactured brand-name crape from firms like Courtaulds. Less wealthy women had to make do with some sort of arrangement that included dull black clothing and as much off-brand and discounted crape trimming as they could afford (Taylor 150). For example, a widow could shop at Jackson’s, a mourning goods store located on New York City’s Broadway Avenue, which sold defective Courtaulds crapes at a price “cheaper than they ever have been before” because they were “crapes slightly imperfect in crimp” (“Rich Mourning Goods”). Consumers could also look to crapes manufactured outside of England, such as French-produced crape, which [End Page 134] was “well-known” to be cheaper although not as high quality as English crape (“Crape Smuggler”).
Deep mourning accessory set (cap with attached veil), Wanamaker’s (American), ca. 1895, silk, Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Rodman A. Heeren, 1965, 2009.300.2051a, b. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Adding to the expense of imported crape in America were tariffs of anywhere from fifty to sixty per cent depending on its classification status. While tariffs and classifications of crape shifted slightly over the second half of the nineteenth century, consistently high tariffs contributed to mourning crape’s expense in large part because of its base material of silk. By 1899, crapes assessed by customs collectors could be classified as “woven fabrics in piece” and charged a fifty per cent tariff, or potentially be classified as “veilings,” in which case they were charged at sixty per cent (“Decision on Silk Crape Duties”). An unsuccessful appeal in 1865 by New York firm Becar, Napier, [End Page 135] and Company to reduce the tariff that had been levied on a crape shipment from Liverpool from sixty per cent to fifty per cent tried to classify mourning crape not as a “piece silk” but as an entirely different manufactured product as it was known “in the trade” (“Commercial Regulations”). Although a futile attempt, their proposed reclassification of crape as a “manufactured” product discrete from a simple length of silk fabric reveals the perception of crape as a material with a unique ontological status that differed from typical fashion fabrics. This effort to redefine crape’s essential qualities points toward the material’s complicated manufacturing and its symbolic resonance as matter that superseded an identity as a mere piece of dress silk.
Paradoxically, the entire manufacturing process “upcycled” a low-quality waste fibre into a fabric that was deemed both necessary and—if made in England by the firm Courtaulds—a luxury. Upcycling is a modern term that fashion scholars use to indicate the process of taking something of inferior (low-fashionable) value and remaking it into something of more (high-fashionable) value. Illogically, the metamorphosis that silk underwent in the production of crape was contingent not on making waste silk more appetizing; rather, it made it aesthetically and sensorially less palatable, which in turn made it more desirable since it so perfectly satisfied the harsh sartorial dictates of mourning.
The manufacturing of mourning crape processed the fibre in such a way that it became even further removed from the inherent materiality of silk that makes it such a desirable and luxurious fibre to begin with. Unlike staple fibres such as cotton or wool, which are shorter and thus must be spun into a longer yarn to be woven, silk is a filament that is unspooled from the intact Bombyx mori moth cocoon (with silkworm chrysalis still inside) in a process called reeling that aims to preserve the extremely long length of the fibre. “Waste” silk, which was the starting point for mourning crape, is silk that comprises shorter staple fibres since it was either processed after the moth had emerged from the cocoon (thus shattering the longer filament into shorter staple lengths) or was the by-product of other silk fibre or fabric processing. At a microscopic level, silk has a smooth morphological structure that facilitates its ability to reflect light, in contrast with other natural fibres that have more dimensional morphological features. Thus, the silk fibre’s inherently smooth surface and long length manifest its potential to be spun into thin yarns that have few fibrous ends poking out. These are features that are still exploited by textile manufacturers today to create lustrous, slick, and smooth fabrics that feel and look exquisite. Conversely, the process to make mourning crape deliberately obfuscated the inherent material characteristics (smoothness, shininess, thinness) of the fibre, instead making a product that was harsh, crispy, and dull. Thus, the upcycling of silk waste into mourning crape paradoxically manifested a fibre that had been culturally resonant with sensuous luxuriousness into something that was repulsive to touch, cementing its unexpected ontological shift. [End Page 136]
If crape was so expensive, why did households not store and reuse it when needed? While it would have made fiscal sense to store crape when not in use, manufacturers and mourning stores stressed the superstition that it was unlucky to keep crape in the house when not in mourning (Taylor 126, Coleman 130). The pressure placed on customers reflected the push by crape manufacturers to increase sales through exploiting the affective and emotive qualities of crape as an unlucky fabric linked to death. There is one other reason that crape might not have been stored and reused: it was extremely fragile.
Exacerbating crape’s expense was its poor resilience. While a prudent mourner might have sought lower-priced crape, eventually that decision would have been even more financially ruinous since the fabric quickly spotted with moisture, faded with light, tore with handling, and completely lost its hand and texture when wet (fig. 5). Additionally, the perpetually changing fashionable silhouettes during the nineteenth century meant that reusing crape would require the refashioning of assemblages and trimmings as time passed. This could not be an easy task with a fragile material that easily fell apart and became ruined.
Condition detail of tear in crape fabric. Photograph by Sarah Scaturro.
Crape’s fragility was well known. The Lord & Taylor catalogue offered a service to have crape veils and trimmings “renovated and color renewed” (25). An advertiser in Godey’s trumpeted the quality of their crape as compared to crape by other manufacturers that “after it is has become wet is absolutely ruined. It is limp, out of shape, disgusting to look at, and quite beyond the power of restoration” (“Mourning Goods”). Godey’s also cautioned widows that “veils, bordered with a wide fold of crape on each end . . . are [End Page 137] very perishable, and soon look defaced—a thing to be guarded against in mourning, for shabby black is an abomination and had better be left off altogether” (“The Fashions”). The term “rusty” was applied to the “perishable material” that “has been worn and lost its color [and] makes anyone look sadly poverty-stricken. It can be freshened and done over; but it is in the beginning an expensive material to buy and must always be worn with care” (“New York Fashions”). In essence, crape was deemed to be an expensive necessity that was yet burdensome and disposable. American etiquette expert Mrs. John Sherwood perfectly summed up all of crape’s negative qualities, calling it “a most costly and disagreeable material, easily ruined by the dampness and dust—a sort of penitential and self-mortifying dress, and very ugly and very expensive” (190).
THE AFFECT AND EFFECT OF MOURNING CRAPE
Will never quite knew how it was that he saved himself from falling down at her feet. . . . He used to say that the horrible hue and surface of her crape dress was most likely the sufficient controlling force.
Dear Dodo, do throw off that cap. I am sure your dress must make you feel ill.
Referenced in the popular media and even in literature, such as in George Eliot’s masterpiece, Middlemarch, in which the fabric functions as a character device lending weight to Dorothea Brooke’s pious self-mortification, there is no doubt that mourning crape was provocative. Its material, visual, and conceptual disagreeability generated emotional and visceral responses in both the wearer and beholder—to look at someone wearing mourning crape was almost as bad as having to wear it. Just as a fabric has two sides, crape dichotomously rebuffed physical contact by beholders as a sartorial shield protecting the wearer during a period of vulnerable bereavement, while also physically and emotionally constraining the wearer within a harshly gloomy carapace.
Crape had a stifling effect on those wearing the material and a disquieting one on those beholding it. A focused message for women was that their sartorial state of deep mourning depressed those around them. They were encouraged to “not be a damper to the joyfulness of everybody else. . . . Do not carry with you the trappings of woe” (Mallon 20). Mrs. Sherwood, always opinionated, echoed the message, espousing that a woman could certainly wear deep mourning if it helped her, but there would be consequences: [End Page 138]
Of course, no one can say that a woman should not wear mourning all her life if she chooses, but it is a serious question whether in so doing she does not injure the welfare and happiness of the living. Children, as we have said, are often strangely affected by this shrouding of their mothers, and men always dislike it.
Indeed, it was crape’s “horrible hue and surface” that provided the “controlling force” that kept Will Ladislaw from throwing himself at the feet of a mourning Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. An article called the “Selfishness of Mourning” makes clear the problems of mourning: “However, many sensitive or nervous people and invalids are given an unpleasant and unwholesome shock by the awful black attire; and to pass it, or sit next to a voluminous mass of stifling crape, is to receive a chill like the damp of the grave” (Crandall 378). For a widow seeking to honour her husband, uphold decorum, protect her children and loved ones, and somehow perform mourning just “right” in the eyes of society, these admonitions of the external trauma evoked by seeing a crape-shrouded human figure must have engendered further anxiety.
Thus, crape did not just mean something; it did something. Crape had affective qualities, entrapping the wearer through its scratchy hand, murky sheerness, noxious smell, and deadened look. Fashion and the body cannot be separated—to wear crape was an embodied experience that foregrounded its agential character. While symbolically it functioned on several planes—as a surrogate for a husband’s protection; as an emblem of obedience, devotion, and chastity; and as an indicator of wealth and decorum—its inherent character impacted the psychic and physical health of the woman wearing it. How must it have felt for a woman to wear this hideously ugly and uncomfortable fabric every single day for two years? What would her eyes have seen as they strained to look through the crimped duskiness of her veil? What kind of air would she have inhaled as her breath warmed the stifling crape fabric, sucking it inward toward her mouth? What anxiety would she have felt as she calculated the need to replace yet another expensive crape veil that was too quickly ruined? How would her spirit have shown resilience despite her shadowy figure causing people to pull away from her as an emblem of death?
THE TOXICITY OF MOURNING CRAPE
Crape’s affective qualities surely aroused an apprehension about the effects of mourning’s requirements. But there was one more devastating facet to crape that further ratcheted up its wretched undesirability: warnings about crape’s physical toxicity abounded. Ladies’ Home Journal advised its readers to air their [End Page 139] mourning dresses in a shady place every two weeks since “crape always will have a peculiar scent, no experiments having yet removed it,” and also told them that “in these days of physical culture we are wisely taught that our first duty is to care for health and it is suicide for a delicate woman to wear very deep mourning during warm weather” (Mallon 20). Indexing the many troubles with mourning crape, an advertisement in an 1878 issue of Harper’s Bazaar offered to remove arsenic and disagreeable odours and refurbish rusty crape so that it not only looked new but could withstand dampness and even sea air. There was no denying crape’s noxious and encompassing health effects—the fabric agitated skin, created a miasmic environment, strained the eyes, and passed on contaminants with every breath.
Warnings against the mental and physical toxicity of crape were so widespread that it had a direct effect on mourning fashions, which gradually lightened during the last quarter of the century with a switch from crape to other veiling and sheer materials. Harper’s Bazaar told its readers in 1877 that they could finally pursue other options since “so many cases of skin disease were the result of heavy crape falling over the face, that custom has at last pronounced the once indispensable widow’s veil no longer a necessity” (“New York Fashions”). Less than ten years later, the magazine urged women to forego completely wearing a crape veil over their head “for health’s sake”:
A deep veil is worn at the back of the bonnet, but not over the head or face like the widow’s veil, which covers the entire person when down. This fashion is very much objected to by doctors, who think many diseases of the eye come by this means, and advise for common use thin nun’s-veiling instead of crape, which sheds its pernicious dye into the sensitive nostrils, producing catarrhal disease as well as blindness and cataract of the eye. It is a thousand pities that fashion dictates the crape veil, but so it is. It is the very banner of woe, and no one has the courage to go without it. We can only suggest to mourners wearing it that they should pin a small veil of black tulle over the eyes and nose, and throw back the heavy crape as often as possible, for health’s sake.
By 1891, Ladies’ Home Journal finally let widows know that “according to physicians and advanced American notions, she need wear but little and that not long. Slaves of fashion do wear crape a year, but many sensible women who are in fashionable society wear a crape veil over their face only months, then omit it” (“For Those in Mourning”).
Crape manufacturers were alert to its poor reputation, launching an offensive that included creating waterproof versions and changing formulations [End Page 140] to limit toxicity and odour. In an article entitled “The Revival of Crape,” Harper’s Bazaar touted the fabric’s fashionable revival since “the best crape is now colored by purely vegetable dyes that are inodorous and not injurious to health” (815). The editors also claimed they could confirm crape’s safety since manufacturers had tested their own products and found their material to be benign, at least when compared to “any other heavy black material that is worn over the face and keeps out air and sunlight” (“New York Fashions”).
Did mourning crape really include chemicals such as arsenic? The plethora of cautions that abound in period sources provided a clear line of inquiry for the author during preparation for the “Death Becomes Her” exhibition. Answering this question had the potential not only to inform the study of fashion history but also to advise caretakers of historical costume collections about potential dangers when handling the material for storage, research, and display. Thus, using objects from the Costume Institute’s collection, the author designed and carried out a study to answer the question of what kinds of chemicals mourning crape contained.
The author selected nine objects from the Costume Institute’s collection containing mourning crape from 1870 to 1900. Criteria included the typicality of the kind of object likely to be worn during mourning and the presence of material available for analysis. (These objects were 2009.300.2051a, b; 2009.300.633a, b; C.I.39.49.1a, b; C.I.39.80.1; C.I.47.53.3; C.I.39.80.2; C.I.40.184.12; 1984.285.1; 2009.300.5093.) The items consisted of two bonnets, four veils, one cap with attached veil, and two crape-covered ensembles. The analytical approach combined non-destructive and destructive analysis, beginning first with a visual assessment of condition. Examination revealed that all mourning crapes were in fragile but fair condition, meaning they were able to withstand careful and supportive mounting and handling without tearing or breaking. Most objects had extant damages, including tears, snags, and weave distortions. All objects were embrittled and shedding silk fibres with movement, indicating an aged and unstable state.
Destructive analysis involved taking small (< 2 mm) samples of fibre (if shedding fibres were unable to be gathered) and analyzing them through a polarizing light microscope. Analysis of the morphology of the fibres through polarized light microscopy at 40× revealed silk filaments with significant accretions of the finishing solutions applied to harden and dull the surface (fig. 6). These coatings had a haptic effect as they made the silk fibres scratchier, coarser, and heavier to wear, in complete opposition to the smooth, airy silkiness usually conjured by thoughts of silk. These accretions also gave a hint that there might be something to all the cautions against wearing mourning crape.
While analysis through a polarized light microscope could confirm that the fibres were silk and that accretions coated them, it could not actually shed light on whether there was poison in the fabric. To find this out, a [End Page 141] technique that could determine the elemental character of the dyes and chemicals used in the production of mourning crape was necessary. In art conservation, portable, hand-held X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis is a standard non-destructive technique that detects surface-level elemental composition. Since portable XRF equipment is expensive and used specifically for identifying inorganic materials rather than organic, the Costume Institute conservation lab did not own any. However, the CI conservators were fortunate to collaborate with colleagues in the Department of Scientific Research at the Met using their equipment to test several locations in each of the objects.
Microscopic view of silk crape fiber at 40×, crossed polars, 530 nm. Micrograph by Glenn Petersen.
The process of analyzing objects with XRF spectrometry involves placing the hand-held device close to the surface of the material sample. The device shoots out high energy radiation to excite atoms and then measures the amount of x-ray fluorescence the atoms emit as they return to their resting state. The emitted radiation is then analyzed, generating a “fingerprint” spectrum of the elements that are present in the sample; the obtained spectra are then applied against known examples to confirm results. The entire process is non-destructive and does not inherently change the sample being analyzed, although it can determine only the elements present, not their quantities.
The results of the XRF analysis were alarming. All objects contained lead, iron, and copper, and some also had mercury, bromine, and palladium (Leona). Additionally, of the nine, one contained arsenic (fig. 4). Iron and possibly copper, lead, and bromine might be expected given the mordants [End Page 142] used for dyeing darker colours such as black in the nineteenth century. However, the addition of mercury, palladium, and arsenic is an unexpected finding in fashion garments. While there is a slight chance that mercury and arsenic were added to the objects after they entered the collection (museums occasionally applied these chemicals as pesticides to organic objects in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries), it is likely, given the prevalence of historical sources, that the presence of these elements resulted from the complicated and confidential dyeing and finishing processes used to make mourning crape. Therefore, the results from the XRF analysis support the conclusion that mourning crape could, indeed, be toxic.
The presence of inorganic toxic chemicals used in the production of mourning crape almost certainly affected those workers who made and handled the fabric, and likely those who wore it. Sustained exposure of skin—the body’s largest organ—and orifices to a vast extent of a highly processed and chemical-laden material such as crape for a period of up to the two years required for mourning had potential health ramifications such as dermatitis venenata (skin contact allergies and rashes), weeping eyes, congestion, and respiratory distress, as well as neurological and psychological problems caused by long-term systemic exposure (Rossol).
Ultimately, women compelled to wear a fabric with suspected and now proven toxicity and an assuredly unpleasant smell, look, and feel for months and even years, were bound to suffer from detrimental physiological effects. The psychological weight of shrouding oneself in a poisonous and repellent fabric during a time of mourning must have been unbearable. Thus, crape’s noxious danger was the finishing blow for a fabric that already had an image problem because of its expense, poor value, and association with death.
CONCLUSION
Mourning attire’s harsh requirements for widows symbolized how a wife’s sexuality, livelihood, and very identity were subsumed within her husband’s (Taylor, Jalland). The crape veil was the literal and metaphorical shroud with which a woman signified a new stage in her life, sublimating her previous self as a wife into that of a widow who was decorous, grievous, and chaste. Crape’s very materiality, with its dull black colour, unattractive crispy texture, and odoriferous toxicity, discouraged looking and touching, simultaneously reminding both a widow and her onlookers that she had experienced death and so was undergoing a transformational and “penitential and self-mortifying” (Sherwood 190) process to redeem her reputation. Crape’s burdensome expense was compounded by its precarious materiality, which caused it to wear out easily. Eclipsing all these woes was the very insidiousness of the material itself—an upcycled product that made a once [End Page 143] delightfully luxurious fibre into a shadowy, encapsulating, and, as analysis has shown, poisonous shroud.
Mourning crape was a contested character that singularly produced an affective entanglement between itself, the wearer, and the viewer. It was impossible to divorce how crape must have felt to wear from the emotions it conjured when seen and its physical manifestations within the widow’s body itself. Its “dead black, lustreless look” (190) echoed the suffering and sorrow of a widow’s spirit while evoking pity and disquiet in the viewer. All the while, it perniciously shed poison onto the wearer’s skin, infiltrated her nasal passages, and clung to her tears.
sarah scaturro is the Eric and Jane Nord Chief Conservator at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Previously she was the head conservator of the Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art and textile conservator and assistant curator of fashion at the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She is completing her doctoral dissertation at Bard Graduate Center on the history of fashion conservation during the twentieth century.
