By the 1720s, the robe volante or the robe battante, known in England as a sack, that made its first tentative appearance around 1716 was the dominant everyday gown, replacing the mantua that had been worn since the 1680s. In France, the mantua went out of vogue entirely. In February 1726, the Mercure de France observed that:

“It is only young, marriageable girls who are in stays, with the mantua and petticoat of the same fabric.  All the women are in corsets [less heavily boned stays], and in robes volantes, without a belt, with very full paniers” (Fig. 3/ Mercure de France, 405-406).

At the end of the decade, the publication declared that these gowns were “all the rage and one hardly sees any other dress” (quoted in Ribeiro 37). In England, however, the mantua, which had also been worn as an informal dress when first introduced in the 1670s, became fossilized into court wear that reached its peak of elaboration in the midcentury, when it was worn over wide, square hoops.

Another informal ensemble, borrowed from the practical dress of working-class women and comprising a jacket bodice, or casaquin (Fig. 10), and petticoat, also entered the wardrobe of fashionable women during the 1720s. However, unlike the robe volante that was worn both indoors and out in urban settings, this two-piece costume was restricted to “the privacy of the home or for country pursuits,” and it was not until the last quarter of the eighteenth century that it was widely adopted for everyday stylish attire (Ribeiro 33).

For formal wear, French women continued to wear the grand habit with its heavily boned bodice, petticoat, and long train, now with the addition of the ubiquitous panier. François Stiémart’s 1725 portrait of Queen Marie Leczysnka, wife of Louis XV, in a grand habit reprises an earlier portrait of the Duchesse de Bourgogne, even to the jewels adorning the bodice (Fig. 11). The design of the silk, however, with its large-scale symmetrical composition, densely woven with gold metallic thread that sets off the coral-colored, green, and ivory details of the stylized floral and foliate motifs, is typical of the 1720s (Rothstein 40-41). At the time, the areas of diaper patterning and fillings that also characterize these silks prompted a comparison to contemporary lace. In 1729, Mrs. Delany, the gifted embroiderer and prolific correspondent, who often commented on her own or others’ clothes (particularly the more lavish), described a French silk for which she had paid the high price of L17 a yard to be made up into a dress to wear at court; the ground was “dark grass green, brocaded in a running pattern like lace of white intermixt with festoons of flowers in faint colours” (quoted in Ribeiro 41). Lace-pattern designs also appeared in monochromatic damasks (Fig. 12).

Women’s undergarments included the T-shaped, white linen chemise, a boned corset, and, most importantly, the hoop petticoat, or panier.  Introduced in 1709 in England and in the following decade in France, the hoop was worn by all fashionable women and, according to the Mercure de France in March of 1729, even servant women went to market in their paniers (Mercure de France 611). Although its shape changed between the 1720s and the 1780s, when it was replaced by a crescent pad, the panier created the distinctive female silhouette associated with the eighteenth-century female silhouette (Fig. 13).

As it increased in popularity and volume, the hoop petticoat continued to draw the ire of social commentators regarding its indecency, its incommodiousness, and its tendency to blur class distinctions and promote social climbing. In a 1724 play by Marc-Antoine Legrand entitled Les paniers ou la vielle précieuse, “the precious old lady” Melissa, a petty bourgeoise, deludes herself that her aristocratic husband-to-be is not interested in her money. Preparing for her wedding, she asks, “Furthermore, when I am adorned in a beautiful fashionable panier, will I not have the air of a princess?” (quoted in Bruna 104). A lengthy treatise published in 1727, entitled Satyre sur les cerceaux, paniers, criardes, et manteaux volans des femmes et sur leurs autres ajustemens (Satire on Ladies’ Hoops, Paniers, Linen Petticoats, Flying Mantuas and Other Adjustments) takes aim at the hoop’s ability to hide physical defects (bodies that are either too fat or too thin) and pregnancies as well as the costs (to husbands) that it incurred in the amount of material needed to cover its great expanse (Bruna 105). Despite these frequent attacks, at the end of the decade, the Mercure de France declared that, although paniers were bigger than ever, caused difficulties for those who wore them, and inconvenienced and shocked others, women were not willing to give them up (Mercure de France, 611).

Under the swaying hoop petticoat, women’s ankles and feet were now tantalizingly visible. In de Troy’s The Garter, a young woman refuses the offer of a young man to help her reattach her garter while allowing him full view of her stockinged lower calf and foot, delicately shod with a backless slipper, or mule (Fig. 8). Both mules and shoes of the 1720s feature narrow pointed toes and high heels (Fig. 14). The fragile dress silks that were used to confect women’s footwear made them unsuitable for prolonged outdoor wear and matching clogs were sometimes worn indoors, or when leaving or entering a house to be helped into or from a carriage (Fig. 15).

Working-class and country women, who were regularly exposed to inclement weather and unpaved streets, wore pattens, a type of overshoe with leather latchets and a wood sole supported on a large iron ring. However, a pair in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum with “pointed toes to fit a fashionable woman’s shoe and a depression at the back where a small heel could sit” and velvet-covered latchets “suggests that the pattens were worn by someone of considerable wealth” (Fig. 16).

Although women of the court and aristocracy were most often in the public eye during the eighteenth century, other women—notably actresses and dancers—were also well known and admired. Marie Sallé, a dancer who performed in both Paris and London, gained attention and praise for her grace and the expressive interpretations of her stage roles as well as for her daring attempts to reform the cumbersome traditional costumes that limited choreography for female dancers and were often historically inaccurate (Figs. 1, 2).  The daughter of an itinerant fairground tumbler, Sallé began her career in 1718 at the age of 11 in an opéra comique, La Princesse [de] Carisme, at the St. Laurent fair in Paris, as part of her uncle’s troupe that also performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London (Andros; McCleave 1). Over the next few years, Sallé and her brother, with whom she danced throughout her career, continued to tour in fairs and, in 1721, she made her debut at the Paris Opera in Les Fêtes Venitiennes (Andros). At that time, she also studied under Françoise Prévost, a leading ballerina at the Opera, and she continued to appeared on both sides of the Channel. In the 1740s, Sallé returned to performing at the foires and occasionally appeared before the French court in her late years (McCleave 1). Throughout her career, Sallé enjoyed friendships with men of letters, including Voltaire. A pastel portrait of Sallé by Maurice-Quentin de la Tour (Fig. 3) dating to 1741 shows her à la salonnière fashionably dressed in a pink silk robe à la française trimmed with self-fabric, a white lace cap tied with matching ribbons under her chin, and deep, double-layered engageantes.

A 1732 portrait of Sallé (Fig. 4) by Nicolas Lancret (later engraved) depicts her in an outdoor setting near a circular, colonnaded temple with a statue of Terpsichore and other ballerinas and young boys playing wind instruments. Rather than the two-piece gown-and-petticoat ensemble, Sallé wears a one-piece dress with a corseted bodice, as do the dancers behind her. The full skirt, adorned with swagged flounces and pink silk bows and supported by a pannier, follows the fashionable silhouette, yet the hem is short enough to display her delicate ankles and heeled shoes. Although Sallé’s great rival, Marie-Anne de Cupis de Camargo (1710-1770), is generally credited with being the first to shorten her skirt in order to show off her mastery of complex footwork, she was not the only leading dancer to adopt this style that allowed for great freedom of leg movement (Cooper 35). In another Lancret portrait (Fig. 5), Sallé’s foot is a focal point of the painting. The ballerina sits in a landscape wearing a salmon-colored silk open robe with its skirts pulled well back, revealing the expanse of her petticoat with a brown-and-gold swirling floral and foliate pattern. Her left arms rests on a balustrade, while her elevated and well-turned out right leg and foot are prominently visible.

One of Sallé’s triumphs was as Galatea in Pygmalion, a ballet which she choreographed and which was first presented at Covent Garden on January 14, 1734 (Andros). In April, the Mercure de France published a description of Pygmalion in the form of a letter from London, where the ballet had been highly successful with audiences, that evokes Sallé’s emotional, gestural style as the sculpture coming to life:

“the statue… gradually emerges from its insensibility; she expresses astonishment at her new existence and at all the objects that surround her. Pygmalion… holds out his hand for her to step from her position; she tests the ground, as it were, and gradually steps into the most elegant poses that a sculptor could desire. Pygmalion dances in front of her as if to teach her to dance. She repeats after him with the simplest as well as the most difficult and complicated steps.” (quoted in Goff)

In this decade, the most noticeable change in men’s three-piece suits was the increasing fullness of the coat skirts, with the extra side width arranged in pleats (Fig. 1 / Waugh/Men 52; Cunnington 43, 45).  In March 1729, the Mercure de France reported that tailors were using large amounts of fabrics for coats and that the side pleats were “very ample, numbering five or six.” The magazine also indicated that in order to augment this volume, tailors stiffened the pleats with interlinings of horsehair, flannel, or paper (or pasteboard) to “add grace, and, as is said, to create the panier”—thereby making a direct comparison with the hoop petticoat (Mercure de France 619).  The collarless coat continued to fasten down the center front with buttons, while the already wide sleeve cuffs (closed or open at the back) extended up towards the elbow (Figs. 2, 3; Figs. 8, 9 in womenswear).

As in previous decades, the coat, waistcoat, and breeches might match, or the waistcoat might provide a contrast in color and/or pattern (Figs. 2, 3). Although most often used for women’s dresses, men wore banyans and, in some cases, suits of lace-pattern silks. In his portrait by Joseph Vivien dating to about 1725, Clemens August of Bavaria (Fig. 4) wears an extravagant blue-and-white lace-pattern silk banyan with a matching blue silk lining that closely resembles an extant morning gown in the collection of the Costume Institute (Fig. 5). Nicolas de Largillière’s 1724 portrait of Konrad Detlef (Fig. 6), later Count of Dehn, shows him in a resplendent silver-brocaded lace-pattern silk coat and waistcoat, luxurious lace-trimmed cravat (Fig. 7-8) and sleeve ruffles, and a heavily powdered full-bottomed wig.

The use of such elaborate silks for men’s suits for daywear began to decline in this decade. Aileen Ribeiro notes that by about 1720, “large floral patterns were increasingly limited to the waistcoat” and that “woven silks with small stylized floral designs were specifically woven for men’s suits”—a type of design that remained in vogue into the 1760s (Ribeiro 20). For court, however, richly woven or embroidered coats and waistcoats were still obligatory as markers of wealth and status (Fig. 9).

The principal undergarment for men remained the full-cut white linen shirt, sometimes trimmed with lace at the neck and cuffs (Figs. 4, 10). However, during this period, the cravat that had been worn since the late seventeenth century was replaced by the stock, “a made-up neckcloth fastening at the back” (Ribeiro 28). The ardent young suitors in de Troy’s paintings wear this newly fashionable neckwear (Figs. 8, 9 in womenswear) that could be “a piece of muslin or lace gathered onto a stiffened band… or it was simply the band itself fastening with a brooch or pin” (Ribeiro 28).

Men’s footwear also changed during the 1720s: the heavy, square-toed shoes of the early eighteenth century gave way to a more rounded form, and shoe buckles of various shapes including small squares or oblongs increased in size from the middle of the decade (Ribeiro 30) (Figs. 8, 9 in womenswear). At the same time, men’s stockings, formerly worn rolled up over the breeches’ knee-band, were now worn under the knee-band, creating a more streamlined shape to the leg (Figs. 8, 9 in womenswear). In May 1726, the Mercure de France declared that a large number of young men no longer wore this old-fashioned style and, instead, had adopted a buckled garter attached to the breeches to secure the stockings (Mercure de France 950).

Throughout the eighteenth century, men (and women) who could afford to had their clothes custom made. While second-hand markets had long flourished in Europe and remained an important source for middle- and lower-class consumers, ready-made garments—limited in availability—were nonetheless another avenue for the acquisition of dress, particularly for men. In March 1723, a purveyor of ready-made suits, located near Covent Garden, notified potential clients of the range of materials and prices—corresponding to two sizes: “good Drugget, Sagathie and Duroy Suits, made well and fashionable, for the first size Man at 3L 10s a Suit, and the larger size at 4L and Camlet Suits for 4L and 4L 10S a Suit” (Post Man, March 5, 1723 in Extracts from Notices, n. p.). Dressing gowns that required little or no fitting were also available ready-made. In December 1726, the proprietor(s) of “the Gown Warehouse, In Bakers Coffee-House, in Exchange-Alley” listed their:

“fresh stock of Men’s Gowns; where all Merchants or Gentlemen may be furnish’t with any Quantity, and Gowns fit for any Country; with the most complete Sort of Banjan Gowns, made after the newest Fashion, of rich double Ground Brocades, Paduasoys, Venetian, Damasks, strip’d and flower’d Lustrings, Rosatte’s, Turkey Mantua’s, Thread Sattins, Silk Plots, Scotch Plods, strip’d and flower’d Callimanco’s.” (Daily Journal, December 27, 1726 in Extracts from Notices, n.p.)

However, that was not reflected in childrenswear of the first half of the century. In the 1720s, traditions for childrenswear were not unlike those at the start of the century.

Infants were swaddled, as was the long-held European tradition (Tortora and Marcketti). Swaddling was the practice of tightly binding an infants’ limbs, so as to immobilize them (Callahan). The Victoria and Albert Museum possesses a finely embroidered swaddling band dated circa 1700-1750 (Fig. 1). Its elaborate floral embroidery indicates that this was a fashionable “outer swaddling band” (Victoria and Albert Museum).

In the early eighteenth century, babies typically outgrew the swaddling phase between two and four months (Callahan). They were then dressed in “slips” or “long clothes” (Callahan). These were ensembles with a fitted bodice and a very long, full skirt (Fig. 2) (Nunn 99). Babies also wore tight-fitting caps on their heads.

Once a child was becoming mobile, they transitioned into “short clothes” (Callahan). These ensembles allowed for greater mobility because skirts were cut at the ankle (Callahan). Bodices opened at the back and were boned or otherwise stiffened (Callahan). At this phase, toddlers typically had “leading strings” attached to the back of their bodice (Magidson). Leading strings were streamers of fabric used to protect young children from falling or wandering off (“Childhood”).