Victorian Strangeness: The bizarre tale of the ladies who limped
ALAMY
With the honourable exception of Lady Gaga’s frock of meat, it was the most thunderingly daft episode in the entire history of fashion, says author Jeremy Clay. In the well-heeled streets of London, something peculiar was afoot. In Edinburgh too, things were askew. Before long, the phenomenon had worked its way across the land, passed from town to town like a contagion, leaving hobbling knots of sufferers wherever it went. But in an age of ailments, from potter’s rot to chimney sweep’s scrotum, there were no physical grounds for the spreading infirmity. It preyed on the young, the capricious, the suggestible and the status-obsessed. Or, to put it another way, the fashionable. They called it the Alexandra Limp and i… Continue Reading (3 minute read)