Farthingale

A farthingale is a structure of hoops or padded rolls worn under a skirt in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to hold it out.

The Spanish farthingale was a cone-shaped underskirt with hoops of cane or whalebone; the French or wheel farthingale, popular around 1600, held the skirt out horizontally at the hips before it fell straight down. A padded roll, the bum roll, was a simpler version. It is the ancestor of the pannier and the crinoline.