Fashion In The Time Of Jane Austen (8 page)

The Graham Children
(Hogarth, 1742) look beautiful but constrained in miniature versions of adult clothes – even the infant is wearing stays.

Master Henry Hoare as
The Young Gardener
(C. Wilkin after Sir Joshua Reynolds,
c
. 1789). Proving the virtue of the frock as a practical garment, he also wears shoes with latchets.

Boy in a Black Hat
(Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1786). Viscount Althrop in one of the first outfits specifically for children, rather than for infants or scaled-down adult clothes.

Older boys were reluctant to give up the comfort of trousers for the more restrictive breeches and from the skeleton suit came the trousers and short jacket combination that, with a plain linen collar added in about 1820 became the Eton suit. A more comfortable and active childhood did nothing to encourage young men to don the stuffy breeches and stockings of their fathers, and just as the young men of the jazz age would do a century later, they set their own styles.

There were fewer changes for girls. They were not emancipated from their infant frocks into adulthood through an equivalent to ‘breeching’ because they were never expected to be emancipated at all – not even by Rousseau. He had almost completely neglected women in his philosophies, and they were the only group for whom he did not advocate freedom. It was lamentably clear to Jane that even though the world was changing with unprecedented rapidity, it was doing so without women. As she acknowledges in
Emma
, schools for girls were little more than places ‘where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity’. Education was almost entirely geared towards teaching girls ‘accomplishments’ such as dancing or playing the harp that would display their prettiness and grace to the greatest advantage.

Black Monday
, or
The Departure for School
(by John Jones after W. R. Bigg, 1790). The little boy in his skeleton suit is less than pleased at the prospect of a new term, although his older brother in his Eton Suit appears more stoical.

Morning employments. Needlework was an important forum for self-expression for young ladies frequently denied an adequate education.

Fashion plate from a ladies’ pocket book for 1795 showing the similarity between the women’s slim muslin gowns and the child’s frock. Both ladies wear the towering plumes so popular in the 1790s; the lady on the right wears a Mameluke cap like that which Jane borrowed in 1799.

Muslin gowns,
c
. 1800–10 with cream embroidery of roses and foliage, and
c
. 1820 with all-over leaf pattern and gathered empire line bust. With gowns so sheer underwear really was a necessity!

With its low neck-line, small puffed sleeves and high waist with sash, the infant frock persisted with girls into later childhood and quite literally became the model for women’s gowns during the first decade of the nineteenth century with the bodice
à l’enfant
with its rounded neckline with a running drawstring
en coulisse
. Sashes were an important accessory to young girls and in
Mansfield Park
Fanny Price fears that her cousins ‘could not but hold her cheap when they found she had but two sashes and had never learned French.’ The sweet prettiness and simplicity of these fresh, mainly white muslin gowns embodied the spirit of youthful freedom, but only if that freedom asked nothing more than to walk awhile gathering posies.

The one freedom women did gain was release from their corsets. Because of the natural ideal of allowing the body to display its given shape, caricatures usually portray women of the turn of the century as without underwear. The tight lacing of the eighteenth century giving a small natural waistline was gone, but stays did not disappear entirely for long when it was realised that some natural shapes are more desirable than others. Instead, stays were looser or concentrated higher at the artificial waistline below the bosom.

At this point stays still had shoulder straps, and in September 1813 Jane was ‘really glad to hear that they are not to be worn so much off the shoulders as they were’, and was pleased to note that ‘the stays now are not made to force the bosom up at all; – that was a very unbecoming, unnatural fashion.’ She may well have been referring to a ‘divorce’ – a punning name for a new corset that kept the breasts separate and according to
The Mirror of the Graces
in 1811 ‘made a sort of fleshy shelf, disgusting to the beholder’.

Whilst gowns had the extra weight of a train at the back they retained more modesty, but when the train became less fashionable there could be problems with the buttocks being visible or – horror of horrors – with the delicate fabric becoming caught between them! The answer was the ‘invisible petticoat’, which was a tube of flesh-coloured knitted stockinette worn tight around the legs. It restricted walking to tiny steps but allowed the gown to fall smoothly without any unsightly shadows of what lay beneath.

The Stays
(‘The Progress of the Toilet’, Gillray,
c
. 1810). ‘Her bosom, which Nature planted at the bottom of her chest, is pushed up by means of wadding and whalebone to a station so near her chin that in a very full subject that feature is sometimes lost between the invading mounds.’ (The
Morning Herald
,
c
. 1790s
.
)

There was a move to introduce drawers but despite the obvious practicality, this was vehemently resisted because they were associated with women of low virtue, prostitutes or dancers who had been obliged to wear flesh-coloured silk knit tights since the days of Louis XV. Riding habits offered more freedom, and after a few nasty accidents revealing more than anyone cared to see, the wisdom of wearing legging-like tights was accepted as an extra precaution when riding.