Fashion In The Time Of Jane Austen (2 page)

A very rare fashion plate from a dressmaker’s journal of 1817, giving an embroidery pattern as well as fashions for the upcoming season that would be recreated to order for customers.

Before the Revolution Eliza had enjoyed an illustrious lifestyle in France with the Comte, and frequently wrote to tell her cousins of visiting Marie Antoinette at Trianon, including full details of the queen’s gowns. Jane enjoyed her keen and witty observations, later using Eliza as inspiration for her novel
Lady Susan
. Marie Antoinette had a major role in changing fashion away from the tightly corseted ornate gowns with vast skirts over pannier hoops, which she reputedly loathed wearing, to the simpler
style à l’anglaise
. Rousseau’s love affair with the English political system also encouraged the adoption of English fashions, as their studied casualness was regarded as elegantly democratic.

‘Morning Dresses’ (
The Gallery of Fashion
, April 1797). Heideloff was a miniaturist in Paris before the Terror and his beautiful illustrations for
The Gallery of Fashion
revolutionised the fashion press.

Having been forced to flee from the Terror, many of Paris’ finest modistes and their clients arrived in London and quickly it became the new fashion capital. Amongst them was Nicolaus Wilhelm Von Heideloff who founded
The Gallery of Fashion
in 1794; its beautiful illustrations were inspirational and the fashion press soon took over as the premier conduit for fashion intelligence, encouraging a faster turnover of more diverse styles. Prior to that, fashions were rather charmingly delivered from Paris to the Courts of Europe by
les grands courriers de la mode
, life-size mannequin messengers dressed in every detail of the latest fashions, which would be tried on and taken apart so that patterns could be taken from them.

Women who participated in London society or who visited the fashionable centres were prevailed upon to relay every scrap of detail about the outfits of the most fashionable ladies they had seen. Like Mrs Gardiner in
Pride and Prejudice
, whose first duty upon arriving at the Bennet household was to ‘distribute her presents and describe the latest fashions’, they were undoubtedly pleased to do so with a sense of one-upmanship – but probably only after they had already commissioned their own dressmakers to start work!

Jane Austen herself regularly included fashion news in her letters when she was in Bath or London: ‘I am amused by the present style of female dress; – the coloured petticoats with braces over the white Spencers & enormous Bonnets upon the full stretch, are quite entertaining. It seems to me a more marked change than one has lately seen.’

With improved awareness of fashion it was increasingly important for young ladies to be fashionable as well as beautiful and well dressed. This important period marked the transition away from the old wide hooped silhouette, which remained reserved strictly for wearing at Court, to the modern vertical silhouette. For some years gowns were becoming narrower, with a rising waistline, and simpler, often taking inspiration from the masculine redingote or greatcoat. A puff of muslin known as a ‘Buffon’ gave modesty to the décolletage and brought interest upwards to the face, which was framed prettily by a coiffure of natural curls and topped by a large picture hat.

‘Court Dress’ (
The Gallery of Fashion
, July 1798). A gold overdress is worn over a spangled-satin petticoat. ‘Full dress’ was the most formal, the most ornate, and had the lowest décolletage. It was also the correct wear for attending Court, where it was worn with a headdress of upright ostrich to feathers, and before the Regent took the throne in 1820, old eighteenth-century hoop.

Mr and Mrs Hallett
(after Thomas Gainsborough, 1785). Although Mr Hallett is not as fashionable as his wife, with her Buffon and picture hat she gives a beautiful depiction of the softer
style à l’anglaise
.

Jane was making her debut at the Basingstoke assemblies in 1792 just as fashions were becoming more changeable and responsive to what was going on in the world. Already an accomplished writer, having just completed
A History of England by a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian
, she was probably still more aware of other people’s fashions than her own.

Journal des Dames
(1790). Inspired by the English redingote, the dress of lavender grey silk is worn over a white muslin petticoat with a Buffon and blue scarf crossed and tied as a sash.

Although film adaptations of Jane’s books usually set the costumes in the 1800s, her initial drafts of the novels that later became
Pride and Prejudice
,
Sense and Sensibility
, and
Northanger Abbey
were written between 1795 and 1798 and would have been set in the clothes of the day, if only in her imagination.

Jane has been criticised for writing little about the tremendous events that marked her era, but it was considered unseemly for ladies to discuss such matters. Yet, they arrived nonetheless, translated into garments and muslins that defined the era were born of the French Revolution, the neoclassical details were inspired by the political desire to emulate the democratic republics of the ancient world, and the military flourishes a response to the protracted period of war in which proportionately more British servicemen died than during the First World War. Fashion’s dramatic response was to make women reed-slender, their waistlines clinging to their bosoms as though for comfort, their silhouette sleek and etiolated, whilst male fashions took on the lean and statuesque lines of a Grecian hero or Olympiad.

Jane’s era was defined by the people who were willing to take their voice and speak out, and those who would use their ideas and talents to make a life for themselves as she herself did. Jane’s works seem very conventional from a twenty-first-century perspective, as do the fashions, but taking the timeframe of Jane’s major writing period from 1791 to her death in 1817, this book will show that it is a unique moment in fashion unequalled in its daring nudity, cropped hair and masculine styling until the jazz age nearly a century later.

Evening full dress (
La Belle Assemblée
, January 1810). Fashions became undeniably sexy, foretelling those that would appear at the time of the First World War.

Engraving of the Rice Portrait (Ozias Humphrey,
c
. 1792–3), thought to be of a young Jane Austen, once held within the Austen-Knight family collection.