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How To Dress For All Occasions In The 18th Century!

Mar 19, 2024
One of Britain's most historic cities is home to hot springs enjoyed by the ancient Romans, the magnificent Bath Abbey and, of course, streets and streets of unrivaled Georgian architecture, but one of the highlights of the city for me is the Fashion museum that today is located in the assembly halls. I'll be meeting with Museum Manager and fashion history expert Rosemary Harden, who will take me on a whirlwind tour of fashion history and provide me with some much-needed sartorial tips. Oh, Rosemary, it's good to be here, welcome, welcome to the Fashion Museum, thank you very much. for inviting us, wow these look like splendid costumes to try on, they are really fabulous so this is a mock version of a real

dress

from the 1760s so we have the real one on display behind us, oh wow yes but we have this fabulous. fabulous replica that we encourage our visitors to try on so that they too can feel what it is like to wear an

18th

century

dress

.
how to dress for all occasions in the 18th century
Would you like something? First up is a dress from the 1760s, a woven silk robe in yellow and gold, so this is what's in fashion. Ladies wore it in the early years of King George III's reign, absolutely that's very different to the

18th

century

. Okay, in the 18th century you would wear it like a coat. Okay, but I'll encourage you to intervene. I'm going to try not to trip you. There are many layers here. There are many layers. And what are those swollen parts on the sides? Those swollen parts are called saddlebags. Well, in the 18th century you would have put them separately. different in the first place, but our visitors only have limited time, so we have made sure that all the saddlebags are inside as part of the dress, so you have everything in a year, well, that's much more efficient, there you have it , so let me go fluff you in the front, if you allow me, you can move on.
how to dress for all occasions in the 18th century

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how to dress for all occasions in the 18th century...

I'm going to fluff your saddlebags because here it would have gone out, you know that too and that's what these little penny hoops that would have been made of cane and would have been worn separately, so actually first you would have put on a nightgown, well , which was made of linen, which was really very long, and then you would have put a couple of corsets over it and they would give you that, of course, okay, and that would give you that kind of bum shape and then you would you would have worn a petticoat, which is what this is all about, but a petticoat in the 18th century. it was designed to be seen well because what you would have done with the final piece which was the dress is you would have worn it in a completely different way than you had worn it, you would have worn it like a coat and it would have been open here in the front so you could see your petticoat, but the thing about silks too, and indeed dresses in the 18th century, is that silks were very precious and it took a long time to weave so many fabulous designs. material that were very, very expensive, so they were reused over and over again, so it is not unlikely that, even though the silk dates back to the 1760s, the 1770s could have been used, I think that too because the silks were reused in such a way.
how to dress for all occasions in the 18th century
There you are absolutely amazing, thank you. I feel incredible. The interesting thing about these dresses is that silk was so expensive that it was more expensive to buy the material than to get the item made. It's worth it. I guess to dress fashionably, but you. looks amazing thank you, I'm not saying that's all the views, we're going to go to a completely different style because it was the 1760s. Within 40 years of the 1760s, the silhouette had completely changed and was much more slender and this was kind of It had a lot to do with a new Wonder fabric that suddenly came up and the new Wonder fabric was cotton and you can't make a dress, a kind of big, sticky dress like that, with cotton, so the shape was much slimmer and also much more. more monochrome, so there were a lot of thin white cotton dresses in the early 19th century 18 15. this is around 1815. oh okay, so this is also the beginning of mechanization, so things could be made more quickly, which drove prices down. you know, flooded, you know, it really made more availability, so that kind of hand craftsmanship that we saw in the 18th century was completely going out of fashion and you get something that is much simpler, having said this is not particularly simple, so This It dates back to about 1815 and I think the kind of white look, I'm a very plain look, was right at the beginning of the 19th century, but the whole thing about fashion is that the moment something is in, it goes out of style, Yeah. in a sense you want to change and that's for both consumers and producers, so what really happened with fashion in the early 19th century is pretty blank, but how can we do it, how can we rinse it off a little bit and I think ?
how to dress for all occasions in the 18th century
What you're wearing here, which is based on a dress that's on display in the museum, is a woven chiffon, a Madras lace, which is a very light type of silk but with a weave as well, so we're starting to get a pattern on the fabric, but we're also starting to get a decoration and a pattern in the way the fabric is applied, so this type of scalloping also, you know, it just enhances it, for sure, and so all the materials here then there are cotton is muslin that comes in muslin is Thai but muslin is a type of cotton so it is a light fabric it is a light fabric and where do all these come from how do many colors come from? a lot of Muslims came from India, so again, there's this kind of back and forth trade, so there was a lot of fabric coming from India woven into the western market and then in the west things were woven, um, that that they were also for the Western market but they were based on what came out of the Eastern market, so again he said: do you know why things change?
Things change because of the movement of goods, people and ideas, and I think all of that is absolutely evident. here is also fashionable, that also looks very, very nice, thank you. I would like to talk to you about a hat, what is this? So, this is what it's about. This is a straw hat like this, which is absolutely like this and then you tie it under your chin and what. actually you could do it, you could be a straw hat that was braided and then intertwined, but the idea is also that you don't know that today we buy a hat and it's a hat, or you buy something and it's a something, but in the early 19th century, this whole concept of embellishment and, you know, altering something and refreshing something, and if you look at Jane Austen's necklace, she talks particularly to her sister Cassandra, she talks about trimming hats and, oh, I think I'll do it. just go and grab this I think I'll go back and spruce it up a little yeah that's fun okay well I think I've gotten used to this you got it I definitely could definitely see myself walking around the bathroom in this maybe more It looks very good on you, thank you.
I was a big fan of this Regency outfit, but there was so much more to try in the next look. It is one of my favorites. It's pretty iconic and should really be a staple for any wardrobe. This is what he used. Victorians are foreigners, but before moving on to the next look there was a question. I know we're all thinking there are people walking around the countryside around this time, how the hell did they keep these dresses clean? I mean, they must have been so Jane Austen said six inches deep in March, yeah, well, I guess that, but you wouldn't be wearing something like this, you'd be wearing sturdier clothing.
I think I'm going to leave this one out because it keeps leaning. off the hanger um what I really think happened is that certainly in some dresses from the late 19th century or mid 19th century they had something called brush braid at the bottom, which would be kind of an idea. to pick up the dirt, okay and again you can remove the brush braid and replace the brush braid, but other than that, it was almost like a kind of um, it's like a spot clean, a dry clean, a stains, but then many, many, things that we were talking about in the 18th century about replacing, like the ruffles on the sleeves were held in place with pins, those are the parts that you would wash, that is, the underwear or is there something else underneath that, also in terms of you would have a shift or a shirt, then you would have a couple of corsets, and then you would have a lot at this stage, you would have a lot of petticoats on top, so yes, it was the underwear that was washed, but also the ends of the sleeves and the cuffs and collars were washed, so now you are wearing a dress, so this is simply predating the crinoline, since Jane Austen in the 1820s where skirts were increasingly made larger and the women wore many petticoats underneath. up to eight Oros or eight layers of pedicates, some of which could be made of horse hair as well, so you can imagine they're really heavy, yeah, especially if it got wet shortly, exactly exactly and then, um, there was the development . of the crinoline cage, which were steel concentric hoop hoops that were taped together and worn around the waist, so they gave you that huge bell effect, meaning you weren't burdened with layers of layers and layers and layers and layers of petticoats this effectively has layers and layers and layers of petticoats underneath, oh my gosh, so this was kind of like, I mean, I don't know at that point crinolines that I'm in a punch cartoon Also, There were many kinds of satirism and satirical impressions of Saturn about women who were overturned and stuck in their crinlets and tipping over acrylic critlins and flipping over, but actually when you read accounts of women who had worn a lot of petticoats and were wearing these cage crinlins, it was a little liberating because it wasn't that heavy.
I see it didn't last as long in the 1860s, but it was a very defined style and a very defined look. soon about to become a Kardashian, but wait a second before we Zoom into the 21st century. I had to get to the bottom of something that had always seemed quite peculiar to me. It's time to discover the truth about corsets. Another example of something that changed its name so in the 18th century when you were like when you wore those dresses with arched backs they were called corsets but in the 19th century they were called corsets and the thing about corsets is that they lace up in the back and The zippers are on the front, so I'm going to put this here and then, if you want to breathe, try to fasten your zippers, which for our visitors are kind of like backpack zippers, but in the 19th century they would be small. metal hooks and eyes, very discreet and would almost be edge to edge so of course it would tie from the top and up from the back and tie in the middle so if you wanted to do this. tighter, I would pull all these laces, wouldn't that be okay, do that, I'll do that and then I'll have the backpack made, he said, I think there's, there was a lot of press about corsets and how.
Corsets, you know, hurt people's ribs and people, yes, because I can feel it, yes, it pushes in quite a bit if you tighten it too much, yes, it would suck you in, but the thing about a corset is that you can change. is so you can let it out again, it's another, you know, these fashion systems that we've lost is something that you can let in and let out and that's what of course I would do, so what kind of year exactly I would be? This style has, of course, changed its shape, particularly since the well throughout the 19th century, but a longer corset that would smooth you out here was the fashion when, when there was, there was a fashion for very slim long princess dresses. line dresses in the early 1880s and they had a kind of spoon bill effect, so you would have a basket that could be made of whalebone or metal to make it that shape and then when you go into the At the beginning of the 20th century there was a fashion for something called a silhouette called s-bend where everything was pushed forward and everything was pushed back and then you had a very small corset here and here that pushed the bust up and the bust, so, for Of course, it's not just a corset, it's not just a corset, there are different interesting shapes throughout the 19th century and people liked to wear them or women found these to be like they knew a friend who helped them and made them slim .
I think from what I've read is that it wouldn't even occur to you not to have it for sure, yeah, you know most women did, there was in um the dress reform. In society and there, you know, there have always been small groups of people who have given up corsets, but it wasn't the norm and it wasn't mainstream, the mainstream was wearing a corset, a gurgle, something like that and I . I don't think women were repressed. I think they just thought, you know, this is what I use, yeah, and I feel weird coming out with that myth busted.
I was ready to channel my inner Gen Z. This is what Kendall Jenner wore. A lot of fashion styles in the 20th century and probably the 21st century as well come from the margins of dress, so pants would have come from work where, you know, a lot of those styles. that we see in the 20th century come from underwear and we also think of underwear as outer clothing, okay, they come from work clothing. Also the utility, the whole kind of aesthetic, theminimalist aesthetic, it comes from Workwear, I think it's also very interesting, and the pants, it came from riding, you know, and again, women's tailoring, which is another of my 20th century headlines um they absolutely came from that, I think which is what you have to hang it on, it doesn't have straps, so let's try it and I'll ask you to take your hair.
I don't want to hurt you um it's like watching Kylie Jenner at the film festival Can here we go do you think that's how she prepared? Exactly, you have to look at the uh yeah, 20 years or 19 years into the 21st century and we're looking at an extraordinary red carpet. Gowns and red carpet gowns are a big Millennial thing that started in the 2000s, but I think they've picked up more and more pace with the advent of the Internet and Instagram. This is an Instagram dress. This is a dress that is. designed to be seen and, you know, streamed around the world instantly and this was for h m and I think it sold out at one point after it was first released, so we have this new kind of shipping, um, we talked about terminology right at first in a whole new use of words, you know, fashions drop now, collections drop and that's an Instagram thing, it's an Internet thing, so it's a lot faster, it's like fast fashion, it's fashion quick, um, but again you know what you could say.
Red carpet dresses started 20 years ago, so I think there is a slow advance in fashion, as well as fake fashion, well, there is a lot of material here, which is quite similar, it feels quite similar to wearing one of Victorian guards, actually, yes, notably. Come on and what kind of material am I talking about, what are the new big developments in clothing making these days? Materials I think they are a kind of smart materials, well, there are two aspects, there is all the type of smart materials, the synthetic ones, you know, and all the types. from the development of high-performance fabrics that again started with sportswear and then were used in fashion, but then there emerged, you know, very strongly, the whole kind of sustainability and reuse, you know, reusing another word that wasn't there. in the Lexicon 10 20.
Years ago, Deadstock, you know, Dead History, reusing things too, okay, and I'm sure that's going to get more and more because you know that's what we have to do, we have to do it, but what's going to happen with all this is. that we will continue to collect, we will make sure that you know that the barometer of fashion is absolutely reflected in the real staff here, real objects, real archives here at the Fashion Museum, so that you know that everyone can enjoy them and everyone can see what happened. That's where that came from, yeah, what am I going to do, you know, and all that kind of excitement about what's going to happen in fashion, it's rooted right here, in the archives of the Fashion Museum, yeah, well, I mean , it's amazing to see them all together. and seeing how fashions develop um and now we end up here today like this this hot pink type of all these waves of what is this taffeta I guess this is high this is the next one and the original um has been matched more Nets because the original than normally exhibited here at the Fashion Museum requires something to move around.
I will tell you that when you are fluffing these parts, you fluff one and you think we have to go and fluff the other one. I can't understand why when you see celebrities on their carpets they have all these people as I understand it now there are many, there are many, oh well, thank you very much, it has been a lot of fun, a great pleasure, yes, it's great. pleasure thank you so much for having us thank you so much for watching everyone I would love to know what you thought of the dresses which one you liked best which one you didn't really like I think my favorite was the Regency because it came with the Bonnet which seems quite useful and I think it really enhanced the appearance.
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