Buy vintage millinery flowers ready to wear. Worldwide shipping is included in the final price!
14 Antique Floral Postcards with Textile Flowers & Silk Ribbons
56,00€2 Vintage silk aplique ✿✿ flowers ✿✿. French floral cards 1900
18,00€3 Vintage corsages of flowers – lot of fabric flowers – French floral cards 1900
23,00€3 Vintage silk aplique forget-me-not. French floral cards 1900
18,00€A Rare Nineteenth-Century Floral Dress Ornament
52,00€Antique Floral Corsage with Handmade Filet Lace – France, c. 1890–1910
46,00€Antique French Bridal Bouquet – c. 1880, Fabric Flowers
175,00€Antique French Bridal Bouquet in White and Gold – Victorian Fabric Flowers, c. 1890–1910
200,00€Antique French Bridal Set 1890s Crown+Boutonniere+Corsages
240,00€
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Antique & Vintage Mittens ands Gloves Antique & Vintage Crowns Antique Postcards“Wearing the Garden,” Millinery Flowers From 1850 to 1950.
Etymology of Millinery
The word millinery has its roots in Milan. The first milliners were 16th-century travelling haberdashers from that elegant Italian city—hence the name. More than simple hat makers, they carried with them ribbons, lace, trims, buttons, and every other delight a tailor or dressmaker might crave. (For the term’s origin and early meanings, see the Oxford English Dictionary entry.)
Among their wares were the exquisite silk blossoms that soon became famous throughout northern Italy.
So admired were these flowers that the Catholic Church reserved the finest silk creations to adorn its altars. Yet beauty travels, and as these Milanese traders moved across Europe, their craft blossomed too. The term millinery flowers came to evoke not only the artistry of Milan but a whole tradition of adornment. Crucially, artificial flower-making flourished from the mid-19th century as an ancillary to haute couture and elite milliners, exactly the period from which most of our antique and vintage millinery flowers survive.
Millinery Flowers hit France
By the eighteenth century, millinery flowers were firmly at home in France. Marie Antoinette—fashion setter and restless experimenter—favoured them, and her celebrated milliner Rose Bertin helped turn floral adornment into the language of courtly style and early haute couture. Recent scholarship on eighteenth-century France also traces how artificial flowers connected fashion with botanical knowledge and women’s craft networks, grounding the vogue in real workshops and hands.
From these Parisian roots, the trade in flowers for millinery spread quickly through Europe and into the wider world of the Victorian era. Shops and ateliers followed migration and steam routes; by 1840, advertisements already announce a milliner and dressmaker on Collins Street in Melbourne, proof that the craft had reached even the far edges of the British colonies. Our vintage millinery flowers echo that journey—Paris to London, Hamburg to New York, and on to Australia—where taste, technique and industry travelled together.
“Growing” Millinery Flowers
The production of millinery flowers was at first a household affair. All one needed was some cloth, a flower iron or two, and some starch. To this day purpose-made flower irons from the 19th and 20th centuries are still used in boutique millinery shops.
These irons are beautiful works of art in themselves, each one carefully crafted to resemble a different type of flower or leaf. The variety is astounding. Roses, tulips, violets, geraniums, coronets, and all of their accompanying leaves copied and produced in an equally diverse array of fabrics, from silk to muslin, to plain cotton. The natural shapes of all these flowers and leaves were first delicately sculpted out of clay and then cast into “irons”, usually of bronze.
To make the flowers, the irons had to be heated to just the right temperature too hot and you could burn the cloth, too cold and the cloth wouldn’t take shape. The cloth would then be starched to help it retain its shape and to prevent it from fraying when cut, and then it would be pressed into shape using the flower iron.
Once shaped, the flowers could be carefully trimmed and perhaps painted, adding another opportunity for artistic flair and beauty.
As demand for these flowers grew, along with machine technology, the 19th-century millinery flowers were increasingly made in large factories employing thousands of people. At their peak of popularity, Paris, always the heart of millinery flower production in Europe, had around 2,000 millinery flower factories hard at work supplying the demand.
To Wear a Garden
In 1860 Victorian England, an “artificial florist” promoted himself as the “head gardener” of the fashionable ladies of London. Floral designs were all the rage. Floral themes were so popular that fashion designers sought to emulate British gardens almost in their entirety.
Dresses not only featured floral prints but were also designed to incorporate other elements such as trellis work, complete with stylized “vine” patterns. The allegorical connection between the female body and flowers was whimsically played to sometimes extreme degrees. Upwards from the dress, the headdresses and hats of Victorian women could also be heavily adorned with millinery flowers to complete the desired effect. Victorian fashion was so intricately linked with garden aesthetics that changing gardening trends were mirrored in women’s attire.
During the middle of the 19th century, for example, the “geometric revival” in gardening that favored precisely laid out terraced flower beds, inspired a similar trend in Victorian millinery fashion.
Millinery flowers, from the very beginning, however, were not just a fashion trend. Their use went beyond decorating women’s gowns and hair, to housing decor. Millinery flowers were used to decorate any piece of furniture that seemed in need of a little bit of flair and of course for special occasions such as weddings and other formal events. Millinery flower bouquets were popular for table arrangements and were used extensively during the holiday periods of Easter and Christmas. Surviving antique flower bouquets also preserve examples of this wider use of artificial flowers as complete compositions rather than individual trims.
Floriography: The Language of “Sweet Things.”
Different flowers also conveyed meaning in and of themselves. Today we all know that yellow roses are a sign of friendship and red roses are for more romantic occasions, but in the Victorian era, “floriography” was a whole language. So complex did this language become that a John Ingram could publish an entire book on the subject called “Flora Symbolic” in 1869. In it, he called floriography the “science of the sweet things.”
While it is no doubt that Victorians loved flowers for their “sweet” beauty, it is equally true that floriography had more prosaic uses. Victorians loved secrets and had codes of etiquette for every aspect of life. It was a way of differentiating between the social classes and showing off to ones’ peers.
Flower language between the opposite sexes was a discrete means to communicate without causing a scandal. If a lady was presented with a “Tussie Mussie” bouquet of flowers, she could communicate her approval or disapproval simply by how she received them.
Holding them to her heart was a good sign, while if she held them upside down the suitor would have to try his luck elsewhere. Bluebells were considered a sign of “kindness” while rosemary was used at events of commemoration. Mrytle signified good luck and was often woven into the bouquets of brides. On the other side, flowers and plants generally could also be used to signal things not so “sweet.” The presence of rhododendron was a sign of “danger” while aloe represented “bitterness.”
Millinery Flowers in the 20th Century
By the turn of the 20th century, millinery flowers hit their peak in popularity. Factory manufacture of them made them accessible to every household. Gone were the days of women sitting in their homes carefully pressing them out one by one. However, changing fashion trends, particularly in hat making slowly started to eat away at the popular appetite for floral décor. Hats shrunk in size and women had less time to adorn their hair and dresses with frill. While floral patterns endured in home décor and for special events and holidays, the first half of the 20th century was too turbulent to spend much time “gardening” ladies’ outfits.
With the wars over, however, millinery flower work saw something of a resurgence in popularity, if only in the world of actual millinery. Particularly in haute couture, and again inspired by a Queen, this time Elizabeth of England, the use of millinery flowers to decorate ladies’ hats has boomed.
No female attendee of the Royal Ascot in England, or even the Kentucky Derby in America, would think of showing up without a fashionable hat, perhaps adorned with some millinery flowers.
Whether you plan on going to one of these fancy soirees or not, a little ornament of millinery flowers can always brighten up any occasion or room!
