Fashion In The Time Of Jane Austen Read Online Free PDF

surprising that all the girls – and women – liked a man in uniform because most regiments in fact selected their recruits for their tall slim stature and youthful good looks. Some colonels actually found reason to discharge their veteran officers despite their obvious value in the melee because they wanted to replace them with younger more attractive men to improve the look of their regiment and therefore its prestige. Even so, Jane’s loyalty remained with her brothers and William Price, who was ‘complete in his lieutenant’s uniform, looking and moving all the taller, firmer, and more graceful for it’ in Mansfield Park .
    Most found military glamour to be the height of chic; the towering shako hats, the gleaming gold braid, and flashing sword sent a clear message of indomitable strength. Many ladies in support of their officer beaux wore a feminised version of their uniforms with hussar jackets, pelisses, and Spencers with braid and frogging, whilst for civilian gentlemen there was an interchange of fashion from military to civilian dress and back. Pantaloons and Hessians became hugely popular at least partially because they were part of the heroic military image. Pantaloons were officially sanctioned for military campaigns in 1803, but even before that officers wore them at home – ‘very proud of ourselves when at outquarters, we could thus dress, as it looked so like service’.
    The Regency ‘Buck’ or ‘Blood’ so beloved of Pierce Egan was the bold, loud contrast to the waspish dandy. To the Buck, dress was only an adjunct to winning, whether racing horses, betting, or cards. They had also adapted the English country gentleman’s look but their colours were brighter, their cut less artful, and their waistcoats were patterned. Their boots were allowed to get dirty and they would never dream of wearing the dress shoes and stirrup pantaloons that dandy Londoners had adopted for half dress.
    The new style of male dressing certainly had its detractors – in 1803 the General Evening Post reports of a ‘Brighton Blood’ starting his day by ‘endeavouring to give [himself] a slovenly appearance’. Jane was also less than enamoured: although Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park is something of a Buck his costume remains with the gentlemanly norm, but it is strident and odious John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey whom she characterises as:
    …a stout young man, of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form seemed fearful of being too handsome, unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be easy.

    Military inspired styles were very popular, like this French Carriage Dress ( La Belle Assemblée , March 1818) adorned by military style braid ‘frogging’, the braid made into knots and loops to be used as fastenings.

    Gentleman’s Garrick greatcoat. Lady Lyttelton writes of the Barouche Club gentry in a letter in 1810: ‘a set of hopeless young men who think of no earthly thing but how to make themselves like coachmen … have formed themselves into a club, inventing new slang words, adding new capes to their great-coats and learning to suck a quid of tobacco and chew a wisp of straw …’

ROUSSEAU AND FASHION AU NATUREL

    Sarah Barrett Moulin: Pinkie (Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1794). Although her muslin gown – very similar to Jane Austen’s in The Rice Portrait (page 11) – is very much a girl’s dress, it heralds the changes imminent in women’s fashions.
    R OUSSEAU’S PHILOSOPHIES had a particularly profound effect upon the lives of children. Prior to the publication of Emile in 1762, which extolled the child’s right to freedom, childhood was considered to be at best an inconvenient preface to adulthood, and at worst an uncivilised state that had to be strictly controlled to avoid the inherent risks of original sin. Children were first tightly swaddled, then dressed identically in