Overview
A bustle is a small cage, wire spring, or stuffed pad tied at the back of the waist to support the swagged drapery and trained skirts of late-Victorian dress. It concentrated the earlier crinoline’s fullness into a projecting shelf behind.
How it is worn
It is tied on over the petticoat so the overskirt can be looped, ruched, and drawn up into elaborate rear drapery, sometimes so pronounced that a tea tray could rest on it. The style came and went twice, most extreme around 1885.
History
The bustle followed the collapse of the crinoline about 1870, softened in the later 1870s, then returned as a hard shelf in the mid-1880s before vanishing by 1890 as skirts slimmed. It marks the last great structural underpinning of Western women’s fashion.