Style Rosie is a dedicated follower of historic fashion trends
Former Clifton High School pupil Rosie Harte is a social media sensation for her short films about fashion history, and has a book coming out next year even though she’s still at university. She talks to Eugene Byrne about crinolines and corsets
ROSIE Harte is 21 years old, and despite her youth – or maybe because of it – she is a social media sensation, clocking up huge numbers, sometimes in the millions, for her little films about fashion history.
She’s still studying for a BA in art history at the University of Kent, but her first book will be coming out not long after she graduates. The Royal Wardrobe will be telling the story of the British royal family through their clothes, from King Henry VII to the present day. She already has the interest of museum curators who see in her someone who can help them connect with younger generations.
Go to her website www.rosieharte.com and there are a few videos between five and 15 minutes long looking at various historical clothing themes – “What happened to debutantes?”, “How did Regency fashion start?”, “Did men wear corsets too?” (spoiler: yes) and “How bad did the Tudors smell?” (spoiler: not as bad as you think …)
Go to @theroyalwardrobe on TikTok to find many more (much, much shorter) videos looking at everything from various British and European royals to historic skincare and makeup and why wearing green in Victorian times was really bad for you.
Rosie is Bristolian, a former
Clifton High School pupil, and she was put on her present path by the Bristol Old Vic.
“I was in the Young Company (the Old Vic’s youth theatre) growing up and was part of their Made In Bristol programme when I finished school and worked with their heritage team in the building going through their archive collection.
“We put on a performance based around some of the history of the Old Vic and stuff we found in the archives, and then incorporated that into teaching the Young Company as well, and I discovered that I was really interested in archive work and history and started volunteering with the heritage team there.”
This all came to a sudden halt because of Covid and lockdown. While it caused a temporary disruption to normal life for most of us, it set her off on a whole new path.
“Before that I was posting all sorts of nonsense (on social media) but the first time I did anything to do with history was when the Colston statue was toppled into the Harbour. Having grown up and gone to school in Bristol – it was in the school curriculum, everything he did and the debate around him, I got really annoyed about all the misinformation that was flying around so I made a video about the history and the debate in Bristol.
“It did quite well so I just sort of kept going and just before Christmas of 2020 there was one video I’d made on a whim about Elizabeth I and it went insanely viral. Last time I checked it had had around seven million views. I can’t wrap my brain around it.”
These little films are sometimes less than a minute long, but for anyone tempted to think they’re insubstantial, most will tell even the most hardened history enthusiast something they didn’t already know. They are all the product of careful research.
“When I started doing this, my content would line up with whatever I was researching at the time, either for my own enjoyment or for university. But I’ve started recently to reach out to museums, and together we’ll pick pieces from their collection that they want to talk about. I’ve worked with the Victoria and Albert Museum and Sotheby’s as well. I treat it as I would if I were sitting down to write an article or essay. I take it very seriously and want to make sure I have all my sources right.”
So Rosie, if we were to give you the keys to the time machine, which period would you most want to go back to and dress up in?
“I love the 18th century! It’s the most extravagant of the lot. I love how structured all the clothes are. It’s right before you get to the point where people are making clothes in a commercial way as we see clothes now. Everything is still pinned together rather than coming as a dress that’s all in one piece. I think it would be fun to get into some of these and see how liveable they are.”
No, she says, she is not one of those people who walks around in the clothes of any period other than now.
“There are so many people in the historical fashion community who wear these clothes all the time … people who just generally live in period clothing. I’d love to do that, and I’ve been able to try re-creations on a couple of times, but I don’t have the skills to make the clothes.
“And I don’t know how much my work and my university would appreciate me turning up in full-on Victorian dress - so not quite now, I don’t think.”
The period she’d least want to find herself in is that of the Tudors: “They had some very strange fashion choices.
“They had some pretty gigantic skirts that can’t have been easy to move around in. But also big foreheads were the main beauty standard, and women were plucking their hairlines all the way back, and their eyebrows and even their eyelashes. That’s not something I’d like to do anytime soon.”
Much of her work is focussed on women’s clothes, though she does deal with male fashion, too. And the thing we’re all usually supposed to think about women’s clothes in former times is that they were uncomfortable and oppressive.
Rosie Harte, along with a number of more recent fashion historians, doesn’t quite see it that way.
“In the mainstream mindset, there’s this idea of the progression of fashion going from something that’s super-conservative to how we now have all these freedoms.
I love the 18th century! It’s the most extravagant of the lot. I love how structured all the clothes are. Rosie Harte
That’s a problematic way of viewing history.
“You have to be careful talking about women’s relationship with fashion in the past, because if you trivialise it, or if you take away their agency by making it look like they’re being forced to wear these clothes you take away what little agency a lot of these women had. In a lot of cases the only things that women genuinely owned was their clothes.
“Women had to live in these clothes, and the big one when you talk about oppressive fashion is how women from all walks of life wore corsets. I was recently reading the inventories of the things Jack the Ripper’s victims had the items they had when their bodies were found, and even these women had corsets, boned corsets, and we see them as emblematic of the most hard done-by women in that period.
“The reason is that corsets played a really practical function, and if they were made properly, which most were, they were there to be a functional garment, which would hold everything up and keep the weight of skirts off women’s hips.
“They had to be liveable - otherwise women wouldn’t have worn them!”
Parochial as we are, we have to ask her if there is any fashion innovation, anything no matter how small, that Bristol might be able to claim.
“There’s not really a fashion trend that you can pinpoint, although when I think of Bristol and fashion history I always think of the story of the barmaid who jumped off the Suspension Bridge - Sarah Anne Henley – and her crinoline skirt acted as a parachute.
“It was this urban legend that was even circulating at the time is interesting, because at the time it was so common to read in newspapers about women being killed because of their crinolines.
“Because of the way they were constructed it keeps air in so they were very flammable. There was a story around the same time of an Austrian archduchess who met a rather grisly end because she tried to hide a cigarette behind a crinoline.”
This was Archduchess Mathilda of Austria, who was due to become Queen of Italy before her tragic immolation. But you can open any newspaper from any part of the country from the period when crinolines were in fashion to read of women being injured or killed when crinolines burned, usually as a result of standing too close to the fireplace.
So the Sarah-Ann Henley story is a nice one because just for once, it’s the tale of a woman being saved by a crinoline rather than being killed by one.
For the future, she plans to study a while longer and has applied for masters degrees, but her partnership with museums, particularly the V&A, is set to continue “to see how we can get and keep more young people genuinely engaged in culture and heritage and museums.
“I’ve had a lot of opportunities that I don’t think people at my stage tend to have, and I’m very grateful for it.”