“A Wizard of Silks and Tulle”: Charles Worth and the Queer Origins of Couture

Charles Worth, founder of the modern couture system of fashion production, scandalized his contemporaries with his incursion into the sphere of women’s dress. The satirical, hostile journalistic accounts of Worth, from his rise to fame in the 1860s through his death in 1895, suggest that “the great man-milliner” escalated Victorian anxieties about gender and value. Simultaneously, the memoirs of Worth’s fans reveal the genesis of a species of cross-gender relationship between designer and clients that is chaste but enamored, controlling but also collaborative. Reading across these opposing perspectives, I argue that Worth embodies a queer Victorian masculinity based not in sexual preference or effeminacy but in social and material relations to women, and that the opulence of his work transcends the boundary between fashion and art.