Victoriana is a term used to refer to

material culture Material culture is the aspect of social reality grounded in the objects and architecture that surround people. It includes the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects as well as the behaviors, norms, and rituals that the objects creat ...

related to the Victorian period (1837–1901). It often refers to decorative objects, but can also describe a variety of artifacts from the era including graphic design, publications, photography, machinery, architecture, fashion, and Victorian collections of natural specimens. The term can also refer to Victorian-inspired designs, nostalgic representations, or references to Victorian-era aesthetics or culture appropriated for use in new contexts The term "Victoriana" was coined in 1918, just before a wave of interest in Victorian objects and artifacts began in the 1920s. Another increased period of collecting of Victoriana emerged in the 1950s. In 1951, the Festival of Britain commemorated the centenary of the Victorian era's first world's fair, the 1851

Great Exhibition The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, also known as the Great Exhibition or the Crystal Palace Exhibition (in reference to the temporary The Crystal Palace, structure in which it was held), was an International Exhib ...

held at the Crystal Palace. In the 1960s and 1970s, the eclectic character of Victorian era wood type inspired graphic designers like Seymour Chwast and

Push Pin Studios Push Pin Studios is a graphic design and illustration studio founded by the influential graphic designers Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in New York City in 1954. The firm's work, and distinctive illustration style, featuring "bulgy" three-dim ...

. Items such as Stevengraphs were popular collectable items during the revival of interest in Victoriana in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, promoted an interest in Victoriana by emphasizing " Victorian family values" as part of a roadmap to cultural, moral, and economic improvement.

Popular culture

In science fiction circles (especially in genres like

steampunk Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction that incorporates retrofuturistic technology and aesthetics inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery. Steampunk works are often set in an alternative history of the Victorian era or ...

), Victoriana is used loosely to describe mock-Victorian worlds, where visual references to the machinery of the Industrial Revolution are incorporated into urban, romanticized pastiches with fantastic creatures and imagined mechanical contraptions. * Victorian decorative arts * Victorian fashion *

Neo-Victorian Neo-Victorianism is an aesthetic movement that features an overt nostalgia for the Victorian period, generally in the context of the broader hipster subculture of the 1990s-2010s. It is also likened to other "neos" (e.g. neoconservatism, neoli ...

* Gothic fashion * Vintage clothing *

-ana -ana (variant: -iana) is a Latin-origin suffix that is used in English to convert nouns—usually proper names—into mass nouns, most commonly in order to refer to a collection of things, facts, stories, memorabilia, and anything else, that rela ...

Popular culture

References

Further reading