Artistic Dress was the Victorian sartorial practice through which individuals communicated their identification with artistic circles, life, and philosophies that challenged the boundaries of mainstream ideals. While it is a category that is acknowledged in current fashion histories, Artistic Dress has had limited and at times conflicting treatment, often conflated with other terms like Aesthetic Dress and Dress Reform without clarity or differentiation between them. To define Artistic Dress more clearly, this paper examines the threat it posed to Victorian fashion norms not through the radical redesign of garments, but the more insidious practice of styling normative dress to create an individualistic, transgressive look. It presents a new analysis that re-evaluates key examples, and offers new cases, to conclude that Artistic Dress was rooted in the practice of artists and models styling themselves and their clothes to express artistic fantasies for both creative production and everyday life. Such practices can still perhaps be recognised by us today in sartorial subcultures such as punk, goth, and even cosplay. As such, this paper concludes with a glance to these contemporary fashion interventions, as well as those embracing new technology, to consider whether Artistic Dress is still a useful term for such boundary-threatening practices today.