Swedish Dress Reform Association
- View a machine-translated version of the Swedish article.
- Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
- Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 209 articles in the main category, and specifying
|topic=
will aid in categorization. - Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
- You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is
Content in this edit is translated from the existing Swedish Wikipedia article at [[:sv:Svenska drägtreformföreningen]]; see its history for attribution.
- You may also add the template
{{Translated|sv|Svenska drägtreformföreningen}}
to the talk page. - For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Reform_Dress_by_Kristine_Dahl.jpg/220px-Reform_Dress_by_Kristine_Dahl.jpg)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2d/Kabinettsfotografi._Portr%C3%A4tt_av_kvinna_ikl%C3%A4dd_reformdr%C3%A4kt_-_Nordiska_Museet_-_NMA.0053251.jpg/170px-Kabinettsfotografi._Portr%C3%A4tt_av_kvinna_ikl%C3%A4dd_reformdr%C3%A4kt_-_Nordiska_Museet_-_NMA.0053251.jpg)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/71/Kabinettsfotografi._Portr%C3%A4tt_av_kvinna_ikl%C3%A4dd_reformdr%C3%A4kt_-_Nordiska_Museet_-_NMA.0053252.jpg/170px-Kabinettsfotografi._Portr%C3%A4tt_av_kvinna_ikl%C3%A4dd_reformdr%C3%A4kt_-_Nordiska_Museet_-_NMA.0053252.jpg)
Swedish Dress Reform Association (Swedish: Svenska drägtreformföreningen) was a Swedish women's association, active from 1886 to 1903.[1] It was a part of the Victorian dress reform, and worked to reform women's dress toward a more healthy and comfortable style, including abolishing the corset. The movement attracted a lot of attention and achieved some success during its duration, such as making corsets unfashionable among school girls.
History
Foundation
The views of the Victorian dress reform were made known in Sweden by the book Dress and Health, which was translated to Swedish under the name Reformdrägten (likely by Oscara von Sydow) with an introduction by Curt Wallis and Hanna Winge. In February 1885, Anne Charlotte Leffler held a speech on the subject in the women's club Nya Idun, and asked Hanna Winge to design a Swedish reform dress; when this was done, Leffler became the first woman in Sweden to wear a reform dress. This created publicity, and in April 1886, a group of women founded the Svenska drägtreformföreningen with the purpose of introducing and adapting the Victorian dress reform movement's ideas in Sweden.
Many famous contemporary Swedish women were members of the Svenska drägtreformföreningen. Among the members were Anna Hierta-Retzius and Ellen Key, who acted as its first, temporary chairperson upon its foundation, until a permanent one could be elected.
Activity
The society was active in changing public opinion toward a more healthy dress style for women by public lectures, articles and publications. It was given wide support by Scandinavian medical doctors, and Curt Wallis, Karolina Widerström and Lorentz Dietrichson all wrote supporting articles which denounced particularly tight lace corseting as unhealthy. In 1889, Queen Sophia invited the chairperson to an official audience and invited her to display the reform dresses designed by Augusta Lundin at Ulriksdal Palace, and afterward gave the society her formal support, which was publicized as a great success.
Impact
While no separate dress reform society was established in the other Nordic nations of Denmark, Finland and Norway, the women's movement in these countries was influenced by the Swedish dress reform society and was also active on the issue.
The reform dress of the society was manufactured by Friends of Handicraft and by the studio of Augusta Lundin, who dressed her gofers in the reform dress. The reform dress in itself never managed to become popular, although a few radical women such as Calla Curman, Sonja Kovalevsky, Alfhild Agrell and Anna Boberg wore the reform dress in public. However, the society did achieve some success in regard to the use of corsets on girls. In the 1890s, it was reported that the use of corsets within Swedish girl' schools had diminished markedly, as it was no longer regarded proper for a school girl to wear a corset.[2]
Dissolution
In 1890, the association became a part of the Fredrika Bremer Association. It was considered a natural step for Swedish women's associations at the time to organize under the FBA, but it sorted as a separate entity under the FBA and continued to function independently. After 1896, however, the progressively more simple and comfortable fashions, the introduction of sportswear during cycling and the decrease in tight-laced corsets made the activity of the society diminish. In 1903, it was dissolved.
Chairperson
- 1886-1889: Kerstin Bohman
- 1889-1892: Marie-Louise Berg
- 1892-1896: Gurli Linder