Television and movies warp our image of women who engaged in sex work historically (and probably in the present day, but I don't know much about that) - the stereotypical Victorian prostitute on film is a haggard and often drunken woman in a tattered décollété, often sleeveless dress and an excess of makeup, cackling in a doorway, or alternatively a pretty girl in a corset and anachronistically filmy underthings residing in a high-end brothel. The reality was, as usual, more nuanced: prostitutes were not immediately marked out from the women around them. While they were considered outside of good society, they were not necessarily as hypersexualized as we imagine them to have been.

The basis for this depiction has its roots in Victorian fiction and illustrations, where prostitutes were shown as having a kind of uniform of "showy finery inappropriate to their class, and flowing hair".^(1) Thomas Hardy's poem, The Ruined Maid, states some of this quite explicitly:

— "O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!

Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?

And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —

"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,

Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;

And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —

"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

(Read the whole of it here.)

It has to be noted that what was important to the Victorian reader was the fact that the prostitute was attracted to a style of clothing that she was not entitled to wear. Flowing hair was the province of little girls; teenagers started to wear their hair partially up or styled, and then wore a fully-up adult hairstyle when their parents felt they were eligible for courting. Etiquette books, advice in magazines, and fiction all made the point that dressing neatly within your means was preferable to wearing expensive clothing obviously unsuited to your surroundings. Inappropriate finery also played off the popular (and still extant) stereotype that women were frivolous and cared too much about dress, and the supposition that young women who worked long hours for dressmakers and milliners for low pay were seduced into prostitution because they so longed for the fancy garments they made and handled every day.

While I'm not sure about the long, loose hair, over-fancy dress was also associated with prostitutes outside of fiction. Commentators complained about the presence of these women, poorly imitating the upper middle classes in "dirty white muslin and greasy cheap blue silk," with cosmetics and without bonnets or shawls.^(2) Outside of respectable society, looking "fine" was more important than being "neat" - and of course catching the eye of men interested in their services was key, hence the lack of enveloping shawls and bonnets that hid the face from view at certain angles. In general, there was (had always been) a lot of concern about "telling the mistress from the maid" because of high-status clothing coming down in price, being purchased second-hand, or simply being bought new with money that "should have" been responsibly saved or spent on something more necessary; telling the lady from the prostitute was even more serious, because while it might be embarrassing to mistake a maid for her mistress, it would be disastrous for someone to be seen treating a prostitute as a lady and for a lady to be treated as a prostitute. And while for most the imitation of lady-hood would come off as a paltry failure, at least to an audience used to seeing women of the middle and upper classes, there certainly were more successful prostitutes who could imitate them to a much greater degree, leading to situations that seem unbearably fussy to us: for instance, in the 1883 novel Wilfred's Widow, the woman pretending to be Wilfred's widow turns out to have visited the opera without a male escort or group of friends, and even though she outwardly appears to be every inch the lady, her solitude is treated as highly suspicious.

That all being said, we have to remember that prostitution was not always a permanent occupation, and that "prostitute" isn't a simple category. Nineteenth-century physicians Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet and William Acton and the writer Bracebridge Hemyng, all of whom conducted research among these women, found that in Paris and London, prostitution would often be an occupation for a short period of time, after which they would marry live as respectable housewives - as with every other feminine job.^(3) Many prostitutes also only worked seasonally: in the fashion industry, there were periods when more workers were needed (at the beginning of the social season, for instance), and when they were let go in the fallow times they had to do something to bring money in. Many came to it following domestic service, or used it to supplement their income from tending bar, cleaning houses, doing laundry, or factory work.^(4) My point here is that while "tawdry finery" is a well-attested common type of dress for nineteenth century prostitutes, there would likely have been a range of clothes representing the range of backgrounds and lifestyles of the women involved.

As to "color" ... there's very little evidence of specific colors being specific to prostitutes' dress, and none that I'm aware of in the nineteenth century. Sumptuary legislation for respectable vs. disreputable women dates back to the Middle Ages, for the reasons I explained above: it was vital for people to be able to tell them apart so as not to treat street-walkers as matrons and vice versa. In 1351, London prostitutes were banned from wearing fur linings in general, and the 1419 English book of common law prohibited them from wearing fur hoods: they were supposed to wear unlined hoods of striped fabric, a standard that was widely adopted across the country. Early sixteenth-century legislation prohibited workers in the Southwark stews from wearing aprons.^(5) Prostitutes in medieval Arles and Avignon were not allowed to wear veils, and those in Pézenas were not allowed to wear gowns with trains; in Castelnaudry, they had to wear cord belts, and in Castres, they had to wear a man's hat and a red belt; in Beaucaire and Toulouse, a mark on their left arms; in Nîmes, one sleeve of their gowns had to be made of a fabric of another color.^(6) By the nineteenth century, this kind of sumptuary legislation was long gone. Stories that yellow stockings, red shawls worn low on the arm, or the color green indicated a prostitute are reenactorisms that spring from misunderstandings and potentially a confusion of fact and fiction.

There are a lot of images of prostitutes from this period. The Empty Purse, by James Collinson ca. 1857, is generally considered to depict a working girl, and you can see that she looks much like any other woman of the period. The works of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec also frequently depict prostitutes. I'd recommend checking out the book Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era, by Hollis Clayson, which contains a lot of reproductions of paintings and prints; many of them are nudes, which are beside the point, but the images of the women fully-dressed out-of-doors just look like ... women. They're dressed like any other ladies.

1. C. M. Jackson-Houlston, "The burial-place of the fashions: the representation of the dress of the poor in illustrated serial prose by Dickens and Hardy" (Textile History, vol. 33, 2002)

2. Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge University Press, 1982)

3. Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City (Cornell University Press, 1995)

4. George Rosen, "Disease, Debility, and Death" (The Victorian City: Images and Realities, vol. 2, reprinted 2001)

5. Ruth Mazo Carras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford University Press, 1996)

6. Leah Lydia Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (University Of Chicago Press, 1985)

One interesting account that answers your question, at least for London, at least for some time in the period c.1870, comes from the infamous work by "Walter", My Secret Life, which discusses the author's extensive experience with prostitutes in the Victorian period. The original work was printed in a very short run by an Amsterdam pornographer in 1888.

What makes this particular account interesting is that, while "Walter" has been considered a highly unreliable narrator, and possibly an out-and-out fantasist, in this instance it's possible to penetrate the author's usual maze of teasing references to identify some real people, significantly raising the likelihood that the interaction actually occurred - see here for the step-by-step, which is worthy of attention.

Anyway, on to the description:

Going along L* * c * * t * r Square one evening I saw a shortish female in front of me. She had short petticoats (worn then), Balmoral boots, a small foot, and shapely calf. — The movement of haunches and legs told me she had the class of form I loved; I can tell by the pose of the foot, and the swing of the bum, what sort of thighs and rump are moving underneath petticoats — I passed and looked at her. She had a quite young, modest face, white and pink complexion, dark eyes, and looked healthy, fresh and enticing. I stopped, turned, and she passed me. She is modest I thought. — Bah! what does modesty do here by itself at eight o’clock p.m.? —So I accosted her, wondering at her steady bum swing which looked twenty-one at least, whilst her face looked but seventeen or thereabouts...