I’m always taken by the color words from the Regency period. “Morone” is the color for January 1813, used to describe the “Morning Walking Dress” in Plate 5. As one might surmise from the print, “morone” is a (now obsolete) variant of maroon, a “deep crimson colour,” according to the OED. In a citation from 1836, the shade is described as “the colour of the unripe mulberry.” When trimmed with spotted ermine, as the robe pelisse in this plate is, it makes me think of all those costume robes for kings that we used to dress up in as children. Do you think the combination had the same connotation of royalty for Regency fashionistas?
Both dresses are credited to one Mrs. Gill, Cork-street, Burlington-Gardens; for “the superior elegance” of her dresses she “has long stood distinguished and unrivalled.” A decidedly English name, Mrs. Gill. Perhaps all the Regency novels that portray the most sought-after dressmakers as French (or as pretending to be so) do not have it quite right?
This month’s “Patterns of British Manufacture” are not fabrics, but rather decorative papers. The sample is difficult to see, but #4 is rice paper, “imported from the East Indies.” The OED gives 1810 as the earliest mention of “rice paper” in English, so its appearance in Ackermann’s Repository (and at Ackermann’s shop) illustrates how up to the minute the magazine was in bringing innovative goods to the attention of its fashionable readers.
The paper, which comes in multiple colors, is recommended for fashioning paper flowers, which will “possess a superior degree of delicacy, and a nearer approach to nature” when constructed from such thin, translucent paper.