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Home » How to get dressed, 18th Century style

How to get dressed, 18th Century style

The New Neo Posted on by

I have no idea why YouTube had a notion I’d like this, but they were certainly correct. I was fascinated by it, and am looking forward to watching the entire series, which covers many many eras of clothing:

I noticed that a great many of the comments were people saying they envied her the big pockets. Example:

See, how the hell was it so common to have pockets on a dress in the 1800’s but nowadays, it’s like you found Narnia?

I love pockets, too, and I try to buy clothes with them because they’re good for resting my arms and protect me from stirring up my chronic arm problems.

I could not help but watch this one, too. If the subject matter offends your delicate sensibilities, be soothed by the fact that this is a very PG treatment of something an awful lot of people have wondered about. After watching it, I can honestly say that it increased my admiration for the clever ways in which humankind has dealt with many knotty design problems. It also solves the mystery of the curiously split silk knickers that had belonged to some ancestor of mine. As a child, I’d found the curious undergarments in an attic trunk and been perplexed by them:

This one features material that’s just so beautiful:

There are plenty more where those came from.



Comments

How to get dressed, 18th Century style — 8 Comments

  1. Lovely costumes, and I admire the chutzpah of the lady doing the hygiene demo.
    One big problem of “period drama” costumes for the actresses (and earlier reenacters) is that most people, including the costume designers, didn’t know the secret of the split knickers. I’m glad to see that they are getting clued in on that.
    One thing the chamber-pot lady didn’t tell you is that a BIG reason for split-knicks (or omitting them altogether) is that the big skirts were used for modesty when squatting along the roadside, even as late as the 19th century in America (read that quite a few years ago in an autobiographical account of a poor stranded female ).
    Some guys prefer kilts for camping trips for a similar reason, as well as being cooler than trousers (which were only worn in northern climates for millennia).
    I could go on and on about this, as our family is bigly into costuming, drama, Renaissance Faires, etc.
    Two of our kids even got married in costume, one Ren and one Victorian.

  3. Did the re-enactment thing long ago… there is other stuff NOT shown there… not to mention we tend to focus on the rich few, and so, inflate the importance of them to everyone, including them over time

    oh, and if you really study fashion, you will find that there was no oppressive period where men imposed these clothes on women, what you had was periods like today, where women defined things for their own sphere, and the general of it was generally enforced over time.

    you will find over and over through history of such fashions that women adopted what men first did, in an endless chasing the tail kind of thing.

    long nails? male emperors and higher functionaries of china (i do not believe the eunuchs that ran things had such displays of station). only the emperor could wear one color.. 🙂

    high heels? oh, the torturous thing women curse men for, but that became popular for women AND men.. why? cause everyone emptied their piss and crap into the street – tossing it out the window, and it became quite offensive to wander around stepping in it. not to mention rains… this was also the reason for the invention of parfume, but the poor evil vikings and north men of Europe, they invented soap

    later years had interesting things… like shoes so fitting they required special tools for women to get the eye around one of the many many buttons… as they went up past the ankle… preventing an very racy peek at an ankle

    the italians wore something similar to a burka… (a black thing that came around from the back and covered her in her privacy to keep eyes from seeing the person).. you can still see the tiny windows and the blank walls where guys and gals would meet…

    ah to stand before george seurats sunday in the park (or enjoy the play sunday in the park with george, which i liked)..

    the bustle allowed the movement to be seen apart from the source of said movement… but by that time, hoop skirts were relegated to the cotillions and debutante balls..

    oh, and this was another reaosn the ladies often hung out together… they didnt have to get so dressed up for each other!!!

    but it wasnt as they teach today… you only have to read Baudelaire to see that.. Tableaux Parisiens: “Baudelaire is critical of the clean and geometrically laid out streets of Paris which alienate the unsung anti-heroes of Paris who serve as inspiration for the poet: the beggars, the blind, the industrial worker, the gambler, the prostitute, the old and the victim of imperialism. These characters whom Baudelaire once praised as the backbone of Paris are now eulogized in his nostalgic poems. For Baudelaire, the city has been transformed into an anthill of identical bourgeois that reflect the new identical structures that litter a Paris he once called home but can now no longer recognize.”

    the clothes changed cause the work changed…
    women went from being supported and living in leisure if wealthy, to having purpose changing society, working and having to import replacements for not being fecund enough (replacements whose ideals are quite different)..

  4. Once on a historic house tour I got very interested in the bathrooming situation, as of course, there were no bathrooms in the old days. This tour guide was obliging.

    Seems the reason for the ladies retiring to the parlor and the gents retiring to smoke in the study after dinner –was so they could pee! The ladies would take turns lifting their skirts and sitting on a privy chair. I guess there was a chamber pot in the study for the dudes, next to the spittoon. I’m still shocked.

    While we’re on vintage underwear, I once found an odd garment from the 1920’s called a dress shield, it was just a cotton rectangle with stretchy girdle fabric leg loops on each side. Apparently the dreaded VPL (visible panty line) is not a new thing!

    In the same pile, there were armpit shields to protect clothing from sweat stains and thick hip pads to give skinny hips the illusion of an hourglass figure, I think from the ’40’s.

  5. I was a little startled when the lady noted that the fishtail bustle “folds up like a harmonca” as harmonicas aren’t noted for folding. Perhaps she meant a concertina, or an accordion. Well, they’re all free-reed arophones, so it all works out in the end.

  7. I wear period dress when I do an author event, and it is surprisingly comfortable, even to the corset. (Yes, have to wear a corset, to give the proper appearance to late Victorian and Edwardian outfits.) And yes – I get asked if I am hot in all that, and no, usually not. My Edwardian-era shirtwaists are all of light cotton, and the skirts in a lightweight wool mix.

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