Then there was the American modern dancer Loie Fuller, who made her name in the 1890s with her flowing “serpentine dance.” She twirled swaths of silk through changing colors of electric light, allowing her to appear at one moment like a flickering flame, at another like a lily, at another like a splashing fountain. She was not just a gifted dancer but a prolific inventor: she held the patent for the lighting mechanism that enabled her stage transformations.
Such spectacles were not without their risks. As one account in Scientific American recalls,
The actors were decked with glittering crowns, and, to add to their brilliancy, they were so made that a chaplet of electric sparks encircled the wearer’s head… But “sensation,” pleasing enough doubtless to spectators, painfully verified the truth of the Shakespearian maxim touching the uneasiness of the head wears a crown, for one of the performers was grievously injured by the passage of the current through his or her head, instead of through the star-spangled ornament.
Just as theatrical were the electric fashions of high society. The Gilded Age did not only glitter: it threw off sparks. “Electric light” proved to be an irresistibly current theme for costume balls. The most elaborate example might be the gown worn by the wife of one South Dakota electricity magnate. It was fully wired, from head to heel; when she stepped onto a copper plate, she lit up from the bulbs on her skirt to her incandescent crown. More famous, however, is Grace Vanderbilt’s electricity-inspired gown, worn to the 1883 Vanderbilt Ball. Tinsel lightning bolts zig down the bodice; at the ball, she carried a working electrical torch.
In the same year, with characteristic techno-optimism, The Electrical World announced that women’s bustles would soon be enlarged, to create room for batteries:
It is becoming more and more fashionable for ladies to wear electric jewelry, and room for it must be found in some portion of the costume… Any color can be got out of glass, for a tiny peep of light the smallest battery is necessary. A dashing demi-mondaine can thus make a pennyworth of glass eclipse a duchess’ diamonds or rubies. The correct thing now is to wear a star or brooch, illuminated by electricity, upon the left shoulder, instead of the diadems at first worn at fancy balls.
While there’s no sign this prediction came true, by 1897, one could buy electric tie lights “in any color or clear crystal, also in opal, which appears like a ‘ball of fire.’” At the press of a button, it gave “enough light to read by.”