Cassidy Percoco - Regency Women’s Dress: Techniques and Patterns 1800-1830

Regency Womens Dress

Cassidy Percoco

The Regency period proper began in 1811, with the appointment of the future King George IV, the Prince of Wales, as Prince Regent; it ended in 1820, when he came to the throne. However, the term Regency period or the more accurate long Regency is often used to refer to the later 1790s and the first three decades of the nineteenth century. The dress of this period was characterized by raised waistlines, narrower skirts, and historical influences on fashion; outside of dress, it was knitted together with the upheavals in French politics, the early Romantic movement in poetry and literature, and its similarity in manners and mores as contrasted with those of the Victorian era.

The history of the dress of this period is not well known, often even among fashion historians. It is stereotyped as very high waistlines, white muslin and bonnets but there was a significant amount of fluctuation and change. For historians and curators, it is important to be able to date garments and portraits in museum collections accurately, in order to keep records well and to determine whether or not the given provenance for an object is likely to be correct. For those who make re-creations of historical dress for film or reenactment, accuracy is less vital but an entertaining aspect of the pastime.

The patterns in this book span the first three decades of the nineteenth century, and have been drawn from garments in smaller museums in New York state. Previous collections of patterns that have included this era, such as Norah Waughs The Cut of Womens Clothes and Janet Arnolds Patterns of Fashion I, cover a longer period of time and therefore can devote less space to each sub-period: Regency Womens Dress, containing 26 patterns, is able to show a far greater amount of variation within these decades. The garments, being mainly of American origin, provide a much-needed resource for American academics, who have previously only worked with patterns of British origin. While some aspects of construction and style are near-universal for most Western countries during this time period, there are certain stylistic divergences between Britain and France, in which American women tended to side with their French cousins.

On the patterns, each block in the grid is equivalent to 1in (2.5cm) on the original. The method of scaling up patterns for sewing use preferred by the author is to use the grid as a guide and draw out the individual pieces on a sheet of newsprint or oversized paper, measuring up, down, and over from a set of points. Alternatively the patterns can be enlarged on a photocopier.

During the early nineteenth century, morning was the time between breakfast (usually held sometime between 8am and 10am) and dinner (between 4pm and 7pm): while at home in the morning, a woman would wear a morning dress (robe du matin) or undress (nglige) of an inexpensive fabric like a cotton print or linen, generally with long sleeves, a higher neckline, and a concealing cap. If she were to go out walking or to pay calls, she would put on walking or visiting dress something of a more expensive fabric, with more embellishment, with a hat or bonnet. If riding, she would wear a riding habit (