So I'm quite aware that fashion evolving with time is a result of certain trends emerging and gradually getting exaggerated or contradicted. Some structural garments appear in order to ameliorate a silhouette, hence why the crinoline cage appeared in 1856; due to the difficulty of maintaining the fashionable silhouette of the time which required a full skirt.
The shape of the bustle is rather extraordinary, I've observed how it formed with time from 1856 all the way to 1876, as well as its revival in the 1880s. I even have a framed fashion plate that depicts the fashion of August 1872, which had some early bustle era styles.
My question is, what influenced this peculiar dramatic shift of the silhouette from a bell shape to focus around the buttock area? I remember seeing once an article that I unfortunately couldn't read, it had a photograph of a fashion plate from the 1880s next to an illustration of an African woman with a large buttocks. Unfortunately I couldn't find it to link it here, but could that influence be true? If I'm not mistaken, I also believe England was colonizing African soil at the time; so could the influence on the shift of the silhouette possibly be derived from this?
Thanks for reading!
I don't know the specific article you saw, but I do know the theory: some people have claimed that Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who went to Europe to be displayed as "the Hottentot Venus" due to her steatopygia, was the inspiration for the bustle - making the garment an example of disturbing imperialism and appropriation. I once wrote an answer on this in another sub, which points out that the dates simply do not work to make this at all plausible. Baartman came to Great Britain in 1810, and died in France in 1815; certain aspects of bustleness turned up in the late 1830s, but the pronounced and structured bustle started to appear in late 1869, and was fashionable until 1876, then existed in an altered form from 1883 to 1888. The English people who actually saw Baartman as a child would have been grandparents by the time the bustle came into fashion, and it's unlikely that they remembered her, particularly with enough interest to influence fashion. Later nineteenth-century texts really refer only to her brain - many parts of her body were, horrifyingly, preserved after her death for scientific study - as a surgeon in the 1860s compared it to that of a European, another woman from Africa, and a primate to come up with some predictably racist results. It's not until 1874 that I find a reference that explicitly makes a comparison between her and the contemporary fashion for bustles, well after the fact of their development.
There's not really a dramatic shift from crinoline to bustle. As I described in the earlier answer:
1856-1860: dome-shaped skirt, slightly more thrust in the back
1860-1863: dome flattening into more of a cone
1863-1867: cone has more thrust in back, creating a distinct oval footprint
1867-1869: cone shrinks to a modest size while retaining the overall shape
1870-1872: bustle protuberance added to the back of the cone-shaped hoop
1872-1875: bottom of cone shrinks in to become more like a cylinder
Back emphasis was being added through the 1860s. By 1866, peplums that were longer in the back, sash effects, and other back decorations were fashionable. By 1868, overskirts that were longer at the back or slightly puffed up were. By 1869, the puffing was much more pronounced and could be supported by a pad or horsehair tournure - then eventually a crinoline specifically shaped for it.
The real inspiration for this was fashion of the 1770s and 1780s, which was much more easily available to high-end fashion designers than memories or descriptions of a woman forced to display herself for examination in the 1810s, because artwork/prints of the period showing this clothing was more abundant. The draped-up skirts and padded backsides of the late eighteenth century show clear influence on the development of the bustle - especially considering that a fascination with eighteenth-century fashion had been ongoing in the 1850s and 1860s, with sleeve ruffles, open-fronted skirts, floral prints and brocades, and Rococo Revival furniture.