People love to harken back to a simpler, more elegant time. I seem to recall that the real Victorians  thought ancient Greece was cool. The haze of nostalgia always seems to obscure things like slavery, or in the case of the Victorian era, hellish child labor..  I suppose a fanciful reworking like steampunk allows for tweaking out those historical miscues.

It's always interesting to see how these things take off and become a whole little cultural mini-phenomenon like the "Gothic Lolita" craze in Japan. Anything that revives elegant fashions is nice though I doubt most women would be willing to go back to the panty girdle, much less tightly laced corsets except for more 'recreational' use.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken