1770s fashion simplified the earlier decades styles for both womenswear and menswear, leading to new fashions that exemplified the ‘casual’ aesthetic that had taken hold.

The 1770s marked a transition in men’s and women’s dress, particularly for daywear. The growing popularity of what had previously been considered informal styles along with the increasing use of wool, cotton, and plain, lightweight silks changed the look of masculine and feminine attire towards greater simplicity. For men, the overall line of the three-piece suit became slimmer with the coat skirts cut well away from the center front, tight-fitting sleeves, and narrow tails. For women, the robe à la française with its characteristic box pleats falling from the back shoulders to the hem gave way to the robe à l’anglaise with a fitted bodice, the robe à la polonaise, and the caraco, or jacket bodice, and petticoat combination.

Womenswear

Briefly popular in the mid-1770s was the robe à la piétmontaise (Fig. 13). Illustrated in the Galerie des Modes in 1778, which situated its origin “at the theatre of Lyon during the sojourn of Her Royal Highness Madame Clotilde of France, Princess of Piedmont [sister of Louis XVI], in 1775” (quoted in DeGregorio/Cora Ginsburg 25), this hybrid dress was:

“an idiosyncratic mediation between the body-conscious robe à l’anglaise… and the fluid robe à la française.” (DeGregorio 25)

In an example of this style made from a Chinese export silk, the skirt can be pulled up into swags à la polonaise with two silk ribbon loops that attach to covered buttons at the back waist (Fig. 14). Many surviving robes à l’anglaise also have inner tapes or loops to achieve the same effect.

Samples from the pattern book of the Spitalfields (London) firm Batchelor, Ham and Perigal from these years illustrate the vogue for small, stylized sprigs combined with stripes (see Rothstein, plates 305-310). The Chinese silk used to fabricate the robe à la Piétmontaise “mimick[s] contemporary French taffetas called mexicaines” (DeGregorio 26) (Figs. 13 & 14). Nonetheless, given the inherent value of expensive textiles, silk gowns were regularly re-made in the eighteenth century; the crimson red lace-patterned silk damask of the robe à l’anglaise in the collection of the Costume Institute dates to the 1720s (Figs. 4-5).

In the last quarter of the century, men and women across the socio-economic spectrum in Britain and France increasingly incorporated plain and printed cotton and linen garments and accessories into their wardrobes. Following the lifting of the bans in Britain (1774) and France (1759) that had prohibited both the importation of Indian cottons as well as domestic production since the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, manufacturers in both countries offered a range of these textiles that targeted upper-, middle- and working-class consumers (Fig. 21). Barbara Johnson’s album of fabric swatches documenting her wardrobe purchases over seven decades attests to the larger shift from silk to cotton and linen in the last decades of the century. In the 1770s, she purchased a blue-and-white checked cotton to make up a Brunswick (a traveling costume comprising a thigh-length hooded jacket with tight wrist-length sleeves and a decorative ruffle at the elbow); “yellow spotted linnen” and “purple and white” linen for two gowns; and floral chintzes (cottons) for two additional gowns. While the checked cotton was woven, the linens and chintzes were block printed and all were undoubtedly of British manufacture (Rothstein/Barbara Johnson’s Album of Fashion and Fabrics, n.p.). A 1778 plate from the Galerie des Modes showing a young woman in a cotton robe à la Polonaise with a blue-and-white vermicelli pattern and matching petticoat with floral-patterned bands (likely of French manufacture) illustrates the use of this fabric for the new, informal styles (Fig. 22). For affluent consumers, expensive Indian hand-painted-and-dyed cottons were still in demand, as seen in the caraco and petticoat from the Victoria & Albert Museum (Fig. 12). However, the wearer of a rare surviving robe à la française and matching petticoat, dating to about 1775, selected a high-end block-printed French cotton for her gown that accommodates wide panniers, making it suitable for a formal event (Cora Ginsburg 2019, 2-5) (Fig. 23).

The increasing height of women’s coiffures in the mid-to-late 1760s reached extravagant proportions in the following decade. Recorded in both portraits and innumerable caricatures, these towering tonsorial creations involved the use of a pad, false hair, pomatum, and powder (Fig. 29). In Fanny Burney’s 1778 epistolary novel Evelina, the eponymous heroine, a beautiful young girl of sixteen who has lived a sheltered life in the countryside, is introduced to the complexities of London society with its many possibilities for faux pas. On her first visit to the English capital, she describes to her guardian the various transformations that “Londonize” her, including her strange new hairstyle:

“I have just had my hair dressed. You can’t think how oddly my head feels; full of powder and black pins, and a great cushion on the top of it. I believe you would hardly know me, for my face looks quite different to what it did before my hair was dressed. When I shall be able to make use of a comb for myself, I cannot tell, for my hair is so much entangled, frizled they call it, that I fear it will be very difficult.” (Burney 27-28)

To this mass of hair, the coiffeur added all manner of artificial flowers, fruits, foliage, and other decorations known as a “pouf.” The rage for novelty that increasingly characterized fashion during the last quarter of the century is evident in the names of these themed concoctions (Fig. 30). The coiffure “à l’Indépendance ou le Triomphe de la liberté” that celebrated the destruction of a Royal Navy vessel by the French frigate at the Battle of Ushant on July 27, 1778, shortly after France signed a “treaty of alliance with the United States,” featured a fully rigged model ship atop the wearer’s head (Campbell 160) (Fig. 31). Not surprisingly, British caricatures made plain that the origin of these flamboyant structures—and the mishaps that could ensue from their impracticality—was France; however, they were, in fact, satirized on both sides of the Channel (Fig. 32).

During one of Evelina’s outings to Drury Lane theatre, the foppish Mr. Lovel,

“confess[es] that he “seldom listen[s] to the players: one has so much to do, in looking about, and finding out one’s acquaintance, that, really, one has no time to mind the stage” and that, in fact, he has no idea what play he has come to see since “one merely comes to meet one’s friends, and shew that one’s alive.” (Burney 80)

Another incident in the novel reveals that dressing for the theatre was dictated, in part, by where one sat. Evelina’s unexpected excursion to the opera with her middle-class cousins reveals their unfamiliarity with this etiquette and her snobbish surprise at their ignorance that “the pit at the opera required the same [formal] dress as in the boxes” (Burney 85). Seated in the upper reaches of the cheaper gallery and attired in a formal gown and conspicuous coiffure rather than the informal hats worn by her female relatives, Evelina subsequently acknowledges that she was “a little uneasy at finding that my dress, so different from that of the company to which I belonged, attracted general notice and observation” (Burney 89). In fact, one of her many suitors, Sir Clement Willoughby, recognizes her “high and distant as [she] was from him” by her head-dress (Burney 92).

During the warm summer months, parks—like St. James’s in London and the Tuileries in Paris—and pleasure gardens were popular meeting grounds (Fig. 36). London’s many gardens attracted visitors from all classes, who enjoyed their natural attractions as well as entertainments such as concerts and nightly illuminations (Wroth/The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century) (Fig. 37). During her first week in that city, Evelina, her host, Mrs. Mirvan, and her daughter, Miss Mirvan, join the many promenaders in the Mall in St. James’s Park (Fig. 37).

Although the “long straight walk, of dirty gravel” hardly lives up to Evelina’s expectations, she observes that “every body looked gay, and seemed pleased, and the ladies were so much dressed, that Miss Mirvan and I could do nothing but look at them. Mrs. Mirvan met several of her friends. No wonder, for I never saw so many people assembled together before… all the world seemed to be there.” (Burney 26-27)

After an outing to Ranelagh—“some inchanted castle, or fairy palace”—Evelina comments on the “crowded” room of the Rotunda, the garden’s main architectural attraction and the procurement of a box, “which is the name given to the arched recesses which are appropriated for tea parties,” by Sir Clement Willoughby (Burney 37, 58) (Fig. 38). Some of Mrs. Mirvan’s female acquaintances invite her to “take a round” with them, that is, to circumnavigate the large central stove (Burney 58). Whether seated or strolling in these outdoor venues, men and women “of quality” put themselves on display for their own benefit and that of others.

Fashion Icon: Marie Antoinette, Queen of France (1755-1793)

In her desire to be the most à la mode woman in France—a status that was completely at odds with the piety and modesty expected of the king’s wife—Marie Antoinette was aided and abetted by her savvy milliner-enabler, the renowned Rose Bertin, who parlayed her close relationship with the queen into a highly successful enterprise that catered to French and international aristocratic clients (Chrisman-Campbell 25-31) (Fig. 2). By the early 1780s, Bertin was dismissively referred to as Marie Antoinette’s “Minister of Fashion” and “Minister of Trinkets” and, in 1787, the year that Marie Antoinette determined to cut back on her astronomical wardrobe expenditures, she was dubbed “Madame Deficit” (Weber 123, 183).

In the mid-1770s, Marie Antoinette’s extravagant adoption of the “pouf” demonstrated the young queen’s interest in and success at setting current fashions (Fig. 3). As historian Caroline Weber has noted, the queen’s partiality for the “pouf” further popularized these outsized coiffures whose “topical messages… allowed her to play at politics and look fashionable” (Weber 107). While many Parisian women copied the queen’s “self-promoting coiffures,” her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, was unimpressed (Weber 106). In his Mémoires Secrets, Bachaumont recounted in 1775 that,

“The Queen sent the Empress her mother her portrait shewing her new style of dress, that is to say, her head ornamented with many high feathers. It is said that this august sovereign returned it to her saying that there must be some mistake as she had received a portrait, not of the Queen of France, but of an actress.” (quoted in Waugh/Women 120)

Marie Antoinette wholeheartedly adopted informal styles such as the the lévite (which she wore during her first pregnancy in 1778), the robe à l’anglaise, the redingote (a coat-dress with a large turned-down collar and lapels inspired by menswear; Fig. 4), and the robe à la turque (Ribeiro 228). The Gazette des Atours, an album with swatches of the queen’s dress fabrics dating to 1782, includes numerous examples of plain, striped, and small-patterned taffetas (Fig. 5) that were used to make all of these gowns as well as the formal grand habit and dresses to be worn with a “grand panier” or a “petit panier” (Gazette des Atours de Marie Antoinette, n. p.).

Undoubtedly the informal gown most closely associated with Marie Antoinette and her rejection of formal court dress is the chemise, that came to be known as the chemise à la reine and that she may have initially worn “during her second pregnancy in 1781” (Chrisman-Campbell 172, 180). In 1783, the queen’s favorite portraitist, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who had already recorded Marie Antoinette in the grand habit in 1778 and 1780, depicted the royal consort in this shockingly simple one-piece white muslin gown (Fig. 1). The backlash against this image of the increasingly unpopular queen, against whom the tide of public opinion had resolutely turned, resulted in the withdrawal of the painting from the Salon of 1784 and its replacement by a more acceptable portrayal of Marie Antoinette by the same artist in a lace-trimmed blue silk robe à l’anglaise. (Fig. 6). Not only was it deemed unseemly for the queen to be represented in such an informal gown that she was known to wear for her playacting bucolic lifestyle at the Petit Trianon, her private retreat on the grounds of Versailles, her choice of cotton, rather than Lyonnais silk, was castigated as a deliberate and offensive repudiation of this French luxury commodity. However, many women—including those of the elite classes— wore white cotton chemises in the 1780s and this unadorned garment would become the fashionable gown of the turn of the nineteenth century.

Menswear

Men’s footwear during this decade reflected the trend towards informality and the influence of riding attire. While buckled shoes continued to be worn—and would have been obligatory for formal and court wear—Werther’s choice of boots as part of his Anglo-inspired ensemble indicates the acceptance of country wear for town, at least during the day (Figs. 1-3).

CHILDREN’S WEAR

(BY SUMMER LEE)

Leading into the eighteenth century, new philosophies emerging from the Age of Enlightenment were changing attitudes about childhood (Nunn 98). For example, in his 1693 publication, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke challenged long-held beliefs about best practices for child-rearing. A slightly later child development theorist was Jean Jacques Rousseau. Locke and Rousseau both put forward general principles about children’s dress. However, it was not until the 1760s that their ideas were clearly reflected in children’s wear (Paoletti).

Swaddling was a very long-held European tradition where an infant’s limbs are immobilized in tight cloth wrappings (Callahan). However, Locke and Rousseau believed that swaddling infants was bad for their health and physical strength (Paoletti). While the tradition was continued throughout the first half of the century, it was beginning to decline in England and American by the 1770s (Nunn 99).

Babies were then dressed in “slips” or “long clothes” until they began to crawl (Fig. 1) (Callahan). These were ensembles with very long, full skirts that extended beyond the feet (Nunn 99). Babies also wore tight-fitting caps on their heads.

Once a child was becoming mobile, they transitioned into “short clothes” (Callahan). Unlike long clothes, these ensembles ended at the ankles, allowing for greater freedom of movement (Callahan). Short gowns traditionally featured back-opening, stiffened bodices and “leading strings” at the back (Magidson). Leading strings were streamers of fabric used to protect young children from falling or wandering off (“Childhood”)

Locke and Rousseau advocated that young children receive more regular hygiene. They also believed that dressing children in many layers of heavy fabrics was bad for their health. For those reasons, linen and cotton fabrics were preferred for babies and very young children because they were lightweight and easily washable (Paoletti).

In the previous decade, a new style for young children emerged: a white frock worn with a colored sash around the waist. This style was worn by very young children of both sexes. The most common sash colors were pink and blue, although they were not used to indicate gender. A colored underslip may have also been worn, which would show through the translucent white top material (Paoletti). While this style originated with very small children, it quickly became more pervasive. By the 1770s, girls were continuing to wear this style into their older years (Callahan). An American double portrait from 1773 depicts two young siblings: a girl in the novel frock dress style, and a boy in a masculine-looking skirted ensemble (Fig. 2). 

When boys were deemed mature enough, they underwent a rite of passage known as “breeching” (Reinier). Breeching referred to the first time a boy wore bifurcated breeches or trousers, symbolizing his entrance into manhood. In the 1770s, this typically happened by the time a boy reached the age of six or seven (Callahan). In the first half of the eighteenth century, boys then began to wear adult menswear fashions. However, by the 1770s this practice was changing. Instead of going directly from short gowns into adult styles, young boys now entered somewhat of a transitional phase. They would wear suits that were more relaxed and looser-fitting than adult menswear, and their shirts may have been open-necked or with a ruffled collar (see Fig. 3) (Callahan).

The following two family portraits are excellent visual resources for childrenswear of the 1770s (Figs. 4 and 5). In both paintings, the youngest children wear white frock ensembles with either pink or blue sashes. The oldest girls in both paintings do not wear the novel frock ensemble, but instead their dress closely resembles that of the decades before. They wear gowns with back-opening bodices and aprons. The older boys all wear menswear suits, though they would have more relaxed fits than suits for adults. This is especially clear in figure 5, where the boys’ collars are very noticeably open. Figure 5 also features an enslaved African boy, who wears a suit and an open collar.

References:

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• James-Sarazin, Ariane, and Régis Lapasin, Gazette des Atours de Marie-Antoinette:  Garde-robe des atours de la reine: Gazette pour l’année 1782. Réunion des musées nationaux – Archives nationales, 2006. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/76785133 
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Secondary Sources

Also see the 18th-century overview page for more research sources… or browse our Zotero library.