Fashion In The Time Of Jane Austen (5 page)

‘Spencer’ (
Ackermann’s Repository,
1817). For an English winter – indeed, many days in an English summer – a muslin gown would have been too cold and the Spencer was readily taken up for warmth, as Jane notes in June 1808: ‘My kerseymere Spencer is quite the comfort of our Evening walks.’

From the late 1790s, for daywear, redingotes, pelisses, and riding habits, sleeves for both men and women were very long, fitted to the wrist and covering the back of the hand to the top of the thumb. For evening ‘full dress’ the short puffed sleeve reigned supreme until 1807 when
La Belle Assemblée
announced: ‘the long sleeve is very generally introduced in evening dress but is ever composed of the clearest materials; sometimes of lace, patent or spider-net, and embroidered book muslin.’ Even so, the accepted formal short sleeve was so established that in 1814 Jane wrote:

I wear my gauze gown today long sleeves & all; I shall see how they succeed, but as yet I have no reason to suppose long sleeves are allowable. Mrs. Tilson has long sleeves too, & she assured me that they are worn in the evening by many. I was glad to hear this.

She wrote in another letter later the same year from London, ‘long sleeves appear universal, even as Dress.’

Jane Austen’s pelisse,
c
. 1814. Made in twill weave silk with a repeat design of oak leaves, it would suggest that she was quite tall and slender at approximately 5 feet 7 inches, with a 30–32-inch bust, making her a modern UK size 6 or US size 2.

The Spencer became the most fashionable solution for keeping warm, remaining in style until the second decade of the nineteenth century. It was named after Lord Spencer who when he singed his coat tails whilst warming himself in front of the fire removed the tails and wore the coat without! It translated to women’s wear, coming into fashion in the 1790s as a short fitted jacket only as long as the bodice, usually with long fitted sleeves and high collar. Typically made of woollen cloth, or possibly silkor velvet, it was almost always a strong colour, in contrast to the white skirt of the gown beneath, and had the added advantage of complementing the lines of the gown.

Another development of the late 1790s was the pelisse. Like a coat, it was an over garment that could be added for warmth on cold days, cut with a high waist and skirt to follow the line of the gown it was worn with. It had the potential for glamour as Fanny Price found in
Mansfield Park
when, during a visit to Portsmouth, judgment was passed on hers – ‘she neither played on the pianoforte nor wore fine pelisses’ – and she was found less than socially desirable.

The pelisse came into its own as gowns narrowed after the turn of the century partly because it complemented the leaner line, and partly because the thin muslin gowns with scant underwear were leaving ladies positively chilled. The pelisse was a welcome outer layer for warmth and being a heavier fabric – velvet or wool in the colder months, and sarsenet or silks in summer – it provided a new scope for decoration.

In romantic reverie – Mrs Scott Moncrieff (by Sir Henry Raeburn, c. 1814).

O
NCE THE VIOLENT
upheavals of the Revolutionary era had been banished to memory, concepts of nation began to change in favour of a more sensitive relationship with history. Both the French and Industrial revolutions had precipitated a headlong dash into a ‘better’ future against a growing dissatisfaction with the present. For the first time tradition began to be appreciated as something other than simply the lot of the unfashionable or uninitiated. Both England and France turned to the past for inspiration, first in literature, then dress, furnishings and architecture, in a romance with history that would last well into the Victorian era.

The rise of the novel led by Sir Walter Scott offered Scotland as a muse and as a way of contemplating rebellion and revolution at a safe distance. A version of ‘trouses’ or ‘trews’ had been worn for centuries by Highlanders, especially for riding. They were worn by the Scottish nobles of the Jacobite Rising in 1745 when they tried to restore the Stuarts to the throne, and after the defeat at Culloden by Charles Edward Stuart the ‘Young Pretender’ as he made his sad retreat, sailing to France in ‘a short coat of coarse, black frieze, tartan trews, and over them a belted plaid’. The Jacobites had been all but forgotten apart from their sartorial impact, which led to a ban on wearing tartan, lasting thirty-five years.

The old rebel Scotland also provided common ground in 1800 when Schiller’s
Maria Stuart
fired imaginations with the tale of the brave, passionate and tragic Queen who had also lost her head. Ruffs and slashed sleeves appeared on both sides of the channel, and by 1820 had become so popular for day wear they were encroaching upon the evening. Aside from the odd ruff that was flung back from the décolletage in the style of Elizabeth I, generally the ruff brought necklines higher. Slashed sleeves were also of a suitable length to accommodate more detail, allowing for ruffs to appear at the wrists, and historical flourishes combined to create a new modesty after Waterloo.

It was as though after the turmoil of the war years there had to be a period of mourning to assess just what had been lost, and led by the literature of the age things took on a decidedly Gothic melancholy. Lord Byron and many of the other Romantic poets took on an air of the ‘blighted being’ overtly displaying their sensitivity as an ethereal mark of ‘otherness’.

Early nineteenth-century redingote of figured cream silk and a cream silk dress. Pale and interesting could also be pale and perfectly luxurious with lavish decorations of silk gauze with floral work and loop cord braiding with thread-covered beads.

Le Journal des Dames et des Modes Costumes Parisiens
, 1818. The black velvet hat gives a delightful historical hint of Mary Queen of Scots to a striking red evening gown.

Le Journal des Dames et des Modes Costumes Parisiens
, 1821. Taking the Tudor vogue to the extreme, this gown of white tulle with matching bonnet has ruffs at collar, shoulder, wrist and hem.

Ladies were so committed to figure-revealing styles that little was worn with their scanty muslin gowns even in winter, giving rise to an increase in the incidence of consumption, so doctors thought, who dubbed it the ‘muslin disease’. Consumption or tuberculosis was rife, affecting all classes; it drained vitality from the soul and roses from the cheeks leaving its victims frail and wan. One folkloric belief was that the consumptive was forced to spend all night at fairy revels leaving them weak by day, barely able to rise from an elegantly proportioned daybed whilst gradually fading away to the other side. If a lady wasn’t fortunate enough to suffer from such a glamorous illness, she could feign going ‘into decline’. The desirable fragile consumptive look was simulated by drinking vinegar and dropping belladonna into their eyes, creating a deathly pallor punctuated only by wild dark eyes.
La Belle Assemblée
wrote in 1806: ‘wrap them in elegant robes of light impalpable ether’, and where once white was the sheer and semi-nude drapery of a Grecian statue, Gothic white was an ethereal shroud of multilayered muslin and moonlight.

The Fair Spirit
, beautiful and delicate in ethereal white, visits Lord Byron, far more substantial but no less romantic in voluminous cloak, Hussar boots, with his signature open collar, considered very risqué in the day of the starched neckcloth.