Clothing from 1825-1850
The trend towards sexual dimorphism in dress reaches an absurd apex in this period. Men's fashion becomes a series of undecorated black tubes, like the smoke stacks of the The Industrial Revolution (an analogy they were even conscious of at the time), while women's dress continues to balloon out with ruffles, decorations and petticoats until women look like ambulatory wedding cakes.
Both men's and women's dress becomes more complex during this era due to the invention of the Sewing Machine, and the popular dissemination of pattern books and systems for garment cutting. Men's clothing construction, while outwardly simple, begins to acquire the internal padding, interfacings and complex structure that makes modern men's suits fall so smoothly even over an object as lumpy and mobile as the human form.
Elias Howe, the inventor of the first mass produced, practical sewing machine, originally demonstrated it's utility to a group of prospective investors by holding a sewing race between himself and his machine, and ten professional hand stitchers. He easily won, and the economic situation of stitchers (mostly female) declined as a consequence of the adoption of the invention. With a sewing machine, a stitcher could produce ten times the output as before, with greater quality, but the stitcher rarely could afford the machine, and with so many stitchers out of work, stitchers were easily replaceable. Industrialists would invest in the machines, hire the stitchers cheaply, and then swallow the profits that their increased output produced. With profits so high, soon competition between manufacturers of clothes got fierce, and so producers tried to "improve" their product by adding more sewing decoration, such as ruffles, pleats, and top stitching, to lure customers. The end result was that fashionable Women's dress became incredibly over decorated in the 19th Century.
Another result of this increased output in clothing manufacture was that poor people's clothing got better, and the rags of earlier eras were replaced by cheaply made mass manufactured work clothes. The middle classes were able to afford more than clean simple clothes, and began to actively indulge in fashion for it's own sake. 
"The Last of England" by Ford Maddox Brown, showing the dress of poor English people as they emigrate to Australia.
Fashionable women's dress grew more and more cumbersome and impractical during the 1830's and 1840's. The visual line of 1840's gowns, hats and headdress all point down, and the eyes of women depicted in fashion plates are demurely cast to the floor. The increasing size of the skirts, held out only with voluminous and usually unsanitary crinoline (horsehair canvas) petticoats, made the weight of the skirts oppressive, and movement awkward. Tight laced Corsets of a waist-cinching style, pinched the waist without providing the back supporting properties of corsets of other eras.
This is the time of the tortured and victimized Bronte heroines, not to mention the tortured and victimized Bronte Sisters themselves. The 1840's proved such a low point for women in Western history, that the worm finally turned, and women began to organize and agitate for the vote, dress reform, and the right to enter schools and professions closed to them.
