Fashion In The Time Of Jane Austen (6 page)

White muslin dresses, 1795. Muslins were wonderfully modern, and not only in the ideas they represented; the practicality of soft washable fabrics that would drape beautifully without an underlying structure was revolutionary. White was the colour of antiquity and the hallmark of elegance; moreover, it was more easily dressed and accessorised than other colours.

Women had been left on the sidelines as their world was changed around them. As Jane Austen’s works make painfully clear, there was only one real prospect for a woman to lead a full and happy life and that was by making a successful marriage, but with so many men lost to the Napoleonic wars decent marriage prospects were scarce. With scant hope of a tantalising proposal, it is no wonder that so many young women identified with the poetic ‘blighted being’, falling in love with the drama of love unrequited. A life of fragility hovering on the brink of dire illness epitomised the romantic ideal and sentimentality became the vogue with young ladies schooled in how to swoon or dissolve into tears in a suitably elegant and charming way.

Heroines like Emily in
The Mysteries of Udolpho
spent an inordinate amount of time wearing a white veil whilst being chased through romantic ruinous European landscapes by villainous relatives and unworthy suitors. In
Northanger Abbey
Catherine Morland and Eleanor Tilney are obsessed by the novel and Miss Tilney always wears white like Emily. In keeping with her semiparody of the gothic novel form, white – especially white muslin – plays a pivotal role in the nascent relationship between Catherine and Henry Tilney, who is marked as sensitive and gallant by his understanding of muslins.

The simple democratic muslin had become the mainstay of fashion, and with the triumph of industrialisation, was affordable to everyone. Where once this was thought an advantage, by 1813 it was lamented that ‘as to dress, no distinction exists between mistress and maid except that one wears a cap’. The gentry took a very dim view of lower-class women attempting to copy their fashions, as in
Mansfield Park
where the housekeeper is commended as she ‘turned away two housemaids for wearing white gowns’.

Jane Elizabeth Countess of Oxford
(after John Hoppner, 1797). Being suited to the heart-fluttering, largely imaginary passions of innocent young girls, white was the colour of choice for the heroines of novels such as
The Mysteries of Udolpho
by one of Jane’s contemporary authors, Ann Radcliffe.

The Gallery of Fashion
, 1795. Edmund tells Fanny in
Mansfield Park,
‘a woman can never be too fine whilst she is all in white. No, I see no finery about you; nothing but what is perfectly proper. Your gown seems very pretty. I like these glossy spots. Has not Miss Crawford a gown something the same?’

Portrait of George ‘Beau’ Brummell (Robert Dighton, 1805). George Beau Brummell used subtlety to frame his ego with an arrogant insouciance, which was doggedly emulated by his followers – including his ‘fat friend’ the Prince Regent.

J
ANE MAKES
little comment about men’s apparel, but in the understated elegance she writes for Mr Darcy it is easy to see the hallmark of Beau Brummell. It is testament to the power of a prodigious personality that Beau Brummell, through his connection with the Regent, was able to influence such a profound change in dress almost single-handed. The genus of the idea – the English country gentleman’s cut-away riding coat, tight pantaloons, tall boots and tall hat – had been batted back and forth from England to France for years but it was Beau Brummell who made it the
only
acceptable way for a fashionable gentleman to dress. Under his direction, the
style à l’anglaise
was drawn away from the discordant statement of the Revolution and into modernity, creating the ensemble that would be the basis of the male wardrobe for the next hundred years.

The Regency gentleman was no stranger to colour: combinations of black, white and sage green; purple, white and yellow; or blue, crimson and canary were all thought to be in good taste even with the addition of accessories in other colours. Beau Brummell encouraged a more subtle palette of a well-tailored dark cloth jacket, plain light waistcoat, tightly fitted light leg wear and freshly laundered starched linen. These hallmarks of sobriety were defined by taste and self-assured style rather than the rich overstated trappings of hereditary status.

Lord Byron wrote of George Beau Brummell as being the second most important man in Europe after Napoleon – placing himself as a modest third! This cannot have been very pleasing to the poor old Regent who reputedly felt himself a rather disappointing portly second in the fashion stakes, and compensated for his lack of personal glamour by constantly tweaking the details of the uniforms belonging to his regiments. Beau Brummell had been in the Prince of Wales’ Regiment the 10th Hussars from 1794 to 1798, and being part of this most glamorous regiment can only have compounded his already fastidious approach to dress.

Applying classical principles of line and proportion along with subtle tonal shades, the silhouette was defined by its tailoring. Classical statues showed men tall, lean limbed, broad shouldered and heroic. They also often showed them unclothed, so naturally a trouser to define a strong well-turned leg would be bias cut and skin-tight in a light neutral shade almost the colour of flesh. For those with less than heroic proportions, the art of the tailor sculpted them anew from cloth, padding puny shoulders and arms, puffing out sunken chests and corseting well-fed stomachs. Even a scraggy or twisted leg could be made more ‘poetic’ by judicious padding but, as the cavalry officer who wrote
The Whole Art of Dress
advised, ‘in which cases a slight degree of stuffing is absolutely requisite, but the greatest care and circumspection should be used.’

Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (by Sir Thomas Lawrence
c
. 1810).Although Beau Brummell introduced a subtle palette, it was often worn with a sense of drama, as befitting the young journalist and co-founder of the
Edinburgh Review
shortly after he was called to the London bar.

Hamburger Journal der Moden und Eleganz
, 1802. About Tom Lefroy with whom she had a flirtation, Jane wrote to Cassandra, ‘he has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove – it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light.’

The dandy was not the decorated fop of the eighteenth century, but exemplary of modern man informed by classicism and the heroic model set by Nelson and Wellington. Cut and fit were everything, creating a codified language for those in the know. Brummell’s credo was, ‘If John Bull turns to look after you, you are not well dressed’. Wealth was whispered in the skill of the tailor, not the precious fabrics, and class was implied by the hauteur given by a correctly tied cravat that held the head high causing movement to be limited and precise. In his biography of Brummell, Captain Jesse recalls:

Brummell as a Young Man
(engraved by J. Cooke). Tying the perfect cravat could take hours, and many attempts, each starched neckcloth discarded if it did not tie correctly the first time. Captain Jesse saw Brummell’s valet ‘coming downstairs one day with a quantity of tumbled neckcloths under his arm, and being interrogated on the subject, [he] solemnly replied “Oh, they are our failures.”’

The collar which was always fixed to his shirt, was so large that, before being folded down, it completely hid his head and face, and the white neckcloth was at least a foot in height. The first
coup d’archet
was made with the shirt collar, which he folded down to its proper size; and Brummell then standing before the glass, with his chin poked up to the ceiling, by the gentle and gradual declension of his lower jaw, creased the cravat to reasonable dimensions, the form of each succeeding crease being perfected with the shirt which he had just discarded.