Reading the Regency

Fashion - Types of Dress

"How would it confound the female fashionables of the days of good queen Bess, who, poor souls! knew only the simple division of dress into working-clothes, and Sunday-clothes, if they could be told that a modern elegante divides every day into 1. A morning-dress; 2. A promenade-dress; 3. A close-carriage-dress; 4. A Full-dress; 5. A ball-dress. The distinction of a Sunday-dress is quite outré..."
[The Anti-Jacobin Review and Protestant Advocate: Or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor, Volume 31, pub. 1808]

Women's clothing was a complicated matter in Regency England, and the wealthier you were the more confusing it could be. Although the late 1790's and early 1800 offered simpler styles than those worn in the mid-1700s, by 1820, when the "Regency" officially ended, there were different types of dress for every occasion.

Female fashion at this time can be simplified to three main types: dress for morning or daytime, dress for evening, and dress for special occasions.

Although fashion plates of the time often categorised outfits according to a particular use, in reality, few types of "dress" were confined to one use. One example, printed in Ackermann's Repository in December 1816, described a "Dinner or Carriage Dress". It was a walking length gown with a low neck, which made it suitable for wearing at dinner. However, the description added: "when worn as a carriage dress, the head-dress is a bonnet ... an India shawl is also indispensable to it as a carriage dress".

The majority of women in the Regency period, particularly those in the gentry level of society, would not have the luxury of being able to afford multiple dresses for different occasions and would need a more flexible wardrobe.

Some fashion plates were simply titled "Full Dress", "Half Dress" or "Undress" without specifying when or where it might be worn. That suggests they could be worn to any event where half or full dress was suitable. A detailed description of Undress, Half Dress and Full Dress was included in: Fashion - An Introduction and Glossary - part 1 so will not be covered here.

The different types of dress could be as overwhelming to some ladies of the day as it appears to us. The European Magazine and London Review, (vol. 69) printed in 1816, includes this observation:

"One of the things which has most astonished and disgusted me in a London life, is the quantity of time that is wasted in dress, and in the preparations connected with it; such as going to the haberdashers, milliners, jewellers, &c. If you have a morning call to make, you must change your dress after breakfast for that purpose; and when you return, you have to make some sort of difference in your appearance for dinner. In the evening, if you are engaged to a party, you make another change; and it is then, and not till then, that you are, in the language fashion, dressed. Thus, in one and the same day, you change your habiliments either wholly or in part, four different times. You are en déshibille when you come down to breakfast: you are in your morning dress when you go out before dinner: you are in your afternoon dress when you sit down to dinner: and you are in full dress, i.e. you are dressed, when you go out to parties in the evening. I assure you I do not exaggerate when l assert that nearly one half of a fashionable lady's life is here wasted in this manner."

Daytime, or Morning Dress

"Morning Dress--A white muslin gown, with a rich lace or worked front; over which is a négligé pelisse of azure blue sarsnet, lined with white silk, made low in the back; the pelisse is trimmed with white fringe."
[The Mirror of Fashion, Lady's Monthly Museum, pub. May 1812]

At this time, "morning" was the time from waking up to just before dinner. Depending on your habits and where in the country you were living, dinner could be as early as 4pm up to around 8pm. Morning visiting might take place any time before 4 o'clock in the afternoon.