Archives for September 2015

Ackermanns Fashion Plates April 1810

September 30, 2015 By BlissBennet Leave a Comment

April 1810, and for the first time, Ackermann’s features a fashionable man! I love the rich brown (“corbeau”) of his coat, paired with the light sage breeches. Quite different from the usual black or dark blue, no? I do wonder what he is doing with that scarf, though, don’t you?

To balance him off, we have not one but three ladies in Evening and/or Opera dress. I’m quite taken with the unusual hair style of the woman seated at the front of the bench—”an eastern style, confined with a comb ornamented with pink topaz, and flowing in loose irregular curls per the bands in front” (262). Perhaps I’ll give it a try…

: April 1810, Vol. 1, issue 16

: page 262-63

This month’s fabric selections focus on dress materials. “Rock-coral muslin” looks a bit brown to me (see #3), but I do like the pattern. I wonder if the color has faded over time?

: April 1810, Vol. 3, issue 16

: page 270

Ackermanns Fashion Plates March 1810

September 23, 2015 By BlissBennet 2 Comments

March 1810’s fashion plates focus again on whites: white satin for a Ball Dress; spotted white muslin for a Morning Dress. I’m struck again by how often children are shown with their mothers in the morning dress plates; is Ackermanns simply reflecting the new societal focus on the importance of motherhood? Or helping to construct it?

Arbiter Elegantiarum insists that, despite last month’s critique of women’s fashion choices, “I beg I may not be considered as exclusively censuring the foibles of the fair. No, no; the lords of the creation, with all their boasted superiority, are equally implicated.” But, despite the disclaimer, Arbiter insists that “This is not the place to register the follies and fopperies of men.” Why not, I wonder?

I do have to laugh, though, at Arbiter‘s disdain for the “monstrous tippets” being lugged around by the fashionable women of the day: “Should this wretched thing continue in use, I would strongly recommend the re-introduction of the hoop and farthingale, that the foundation may bear some proportion to the superstructure, and that our ladies may no longer have the painful appearance elf being top-heavy.” Wish we had a picture of that!

: Ackermanns March 1810

: Vol. I, issue 4, pages 185-86

In addition to the usual fabric samples included in each issue, March’s book also features fancy paper samples, which I’ve included below. Can you imagine Regency women using them to covering boxes, screens, card-racks, and portfolios? Maybe we should all try out the paste recipe helpfully included?

And finally, this month’s fabric samples. I can’t quite make out what the figures on #4, the “amber-shot sarsnet,” are meant to be—the ever-popular bee? A flower? Or just a geometric figure? A lovely color, no matter what the figure…

: March 1810, Vol I, issue 4

: page 195

Ackermanns Fashion Plates February 1810

September 16, 2015 By BlissBennet Leave a Comment

The word for February 1810 is swansdown. Both of our fashion plates for evening dress include cloaks “trimmed entirely around with with swansdown.” I’ve never seen a garment with swansdown trim; is swansdown as warm as fur?

Not sure why the lady in the first plate is holding an opera glass, when the label on the second plate is “Opera Dress”…

N.B. The color of the “Evening or Full Dress” in the first plate is described as purple, not black, as it appears to my eye in this print.

Arbiter Elegantiarum‘s commentary includes a lengthy report on men’s fashions this month, although sadly no pictures accompany it. We do have a reference to waistcoat colors, which mentions an “India rib patent green print,” reproduced on the fabric sample page at the back of the journal (see sample #4 below).

Arbiter‘s actual commentary, though, focuses on female dress. Fascinating to see how women’s dress can simultaneously be seen as of “indicative of easy virtue” AND “originated with some desperate prude” (123). Pretty amazing to see how Regency-era women had to toe such a narrow fashion line to avoid sexualized judgments…

Ackermanns Repository, February 1810, Vol 1, issue 4, pages 122-24.

This month’s fabric samples include a technological innovation: “A patent has lately been obtained by Hewson, Higgins, and Ilett, for printing green on cotton goods, a discover never before offered to the public.” I rather like the little green starbursts on this sample, and can definitely picture the fabric made up as a waistcoat. Alas, this green was in all likelihood the quite toxic Scheele’s green, made from a compound of arsenic.

Ackermanns Repository, February 1810, Vol 1, issue 4, pages 130.

Happy Book Birthday to REBEL

September 15, 2015 By BlissBennet Leave a Comment

Happy book birthday to me! Or really, to my first novel, A REBEL WITHOUT A ROGUE! You can purchase an e-book, or a paperback:
At amazon: http://amzn.to/1HxCK1Q
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At Kobo: http://bit.ly/1Kb4Nb3
iBooks: http://apple.co/1e3kxyh
Barnes & Noble: http://bit.ly/1O0brPx

Ackermann’s Fashion Plates January 1810

September 9, 2015 By BlissBennet Leave a Comment

The first fashion plates of the year 1810 feature an evening dress and a carriage or promenade dress. The latter is lined with “the spotted American squirrel skin,” which seems an unusual, and likely expensive, choice, if the squirrel in question is the spotted ground squirrel, one of the smallest squirrels found in North America, and one native only to Mexico and the western half of the continent. Arbiter Elegantarium suggests an alternative of leopard skin—which do you think would be more expensive?

From Ackermann’s Repository, January 1810, 1.3, pages 45-47.

: Ackermann’s January 1810, Vol I.issue 3, page 57.

This month’s fabric samples include a lovely ruby damask for furniture, and two fabrics for clothing. Unfortunately, the flowers in sample 3, which the copy reports as being “orange,” appear to have faded.

Anyone know what “mole velvet” is? After receiving a copy of Fairchild’s Dictionary of Textiles for my birthday last month, I thought I’d be able to define any fabric term for you, but unfortunately there’s no listing for “mole” or for “velvet, mole” in the 7th edition of Fairchild’s…

Ackermann’s Fashion Plates December 1809

September 2, 2015 By BlissBennet Leave a Comment

I would have thought that fashions for wintertime might feature more color, but in December 1809, Ackermann’s featured two plates with ladies clothed in white dresses, one a “Tyrolean Walking Dress,” the other an Evening Dress. Although Arbiter Elegantiarum declares that “crimson, purple, dark green, and brown, are likely to become the prevailing colors, with borders of black, gold, or ermine; and that scarlet, that terrible destroyer of female beauty, grace, and elegance, is consigned, I hope for ever, ‘to the tomb of all the Capulets.'”

Another oddity: the walking dress is described as having an “elastic belt.” Elastic cord or string dates from the 1840s, according to the OED. But perhaps the belt is elastic in one of the word’s more general senses, “that which spontaneously resumes (after a longer or short interval) its normal bulk or shape after having been contracted, dilated, or distorted by external force” (OED, dating from 1674), or “that can be stretched without permanent alteration of size or shape” (OED references elastic corsets c. 1835). Any information on the use of elastic in fashion, I’d love to hear from you!

Plates from Ackermann’s December 1809, Vol. II, no xii, pages 402-3.

And here are this month’s fabric samples, all in shades of gold. Since several are labeled “Jubilee,” I’m guessing they were manufactured to commemorate George the III’s 50th year of rule, which was celebrated in October 1809. Sample #4 looks rather fuzzy; was this its original texture, or has the sample deteriorated over time? Pages 411-42.