Fashion in Jane Austen's World

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…

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…

 Women’s Fashion was not the only one to make a considerable shift in the Austen’s times, masculine style also underwent a change due to the work of George Bryan “Beau” Brummell. Brummell, portrayed in the above caricature by Robert Dighton, influential figure in the shift of men’s fashion due to hie persona as a self-made “dandy.” Dandy is a term used to describe a man who “studies above everything to dress elegantly and fashionably,” and was coined around 1780 (Nigro and Phillips). In the above picture, Brummel is sporting common clothing for the regency period, ornate white shirt…

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…

Accessories were a vital part of the Regency wardrobe as they not only were a symbol of status but were the main source of diversifying the wardrobe. The above image of a woman wrapped in a red shawl with an orange feathered bonnet displays two of the three main Regency accessories. The four main accessories of the period were shawls, bonnets, and gloves. There are others such as parasols and fans, but these four are the main components of a fashionable lady in Jane Austen’s time.

As many women had only a handful of dresses, accessories were used to vary outfits and a cheaper method…