Exhibit:

Fashion in Jane Austen's World

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Part of Group:

Austen: Annotated and Adapted Thiel College F'24

To better understand the world of Jane Austen's works, we need to understand the society she is writing in. Even though she does not often describe what her characters are dressed in, when she does bring up fashion, it is often notable in terms of character personality, social status, or plot. Regency fashion is notable in its distinct rejection of the former era of fashion as it had neoclassical influence, simplicity, and natural beauty. 

Images in this Exhibit

Proper Undergarments Equal Proper Dress

Despite the simplistic silhouette favored in Jane Austen’s time, there were still layers of undergarments to make the look successful as depicted above in Gillray’s Progress of the Toilet. The first panel, “The Stays,” depicts a maid helping her mistress into her stays, over her chamise, and stockings. The second panel, “The Wig” displays the mistress in her petticoat and dressing gown, or in “undress” while the maid prepares her wig. The final panel, “Dress Complete,” has the mistress fully dressed in “full dress” or evening wear with her maid holding her shawl and fan (Davidson...
The Daily Wear of Ladies

 

In Jane Austen’s time, there was a very distinct fashion of women that displayed both class and elegance through fabric, color, and variability. In William Beechey’s “Portrait of a Women,” he displays what would have been the ideal fashionable women of status in Jane Austen’s time period. The women painted is wearing a muslin white gown with golden-yellow accents, a silver sash highlighting the era’s signature empire waist, a red shawl draped across her arms, and a yellow parasol perched in her lap. Her complexion is pale, and beauty is natural with her hair in pin-curls and up...
The Changing of Children's Clothes

Children’s clothes went through a dramatic change in Jane Austen’s time as changing ideas on childhood and childrearing in England. In Johann Zoffany’s The Lavie Children, there are multiple children displayed playing in different kids of dress that where common in the early 1770s. The seven children are separated into three categories of childhood: infant, child, and adolescent and divided by gender in their clothes. The boys are each wearing breeches that tie off at the knee, with a button-down vest and coat, but the younger boys on the board are both dressed in a solid color...