As I mentioned in last week's post, the July 1813 edition of Ackermann's Repository featured in addition to its fashion plates a “Letter from a Young Lady in London to Her Friend in the Country,” a letter replete with information on the latest in urban fashion. Some key shifts in fashion our Lady reports:
• The adoption of the Cossack coat and Pomeranian mantle, in place of the spencer and French cloak
• Fashionable headgear includes the “skimming-dish hat of straw or chip”; the “large hamlet poke, with lace bands, brought under the chin”; and “the provincial bonnet, composed of satin and lace, ornamented with flowers”
• Trains are beginning to “revive” in dancing dresses, although our young lady fears “they can never be admitted in the dancing dress, without infringing on good sense and good taste.”
Add-on bodice
• Colored satin bodices have become too common, so much that they “can no longer be considered as genteel, or select,” although our Lady contends for their “utility, in offering an easy purchased change.” (See this informative post by Natalie Garbett for more on these add-on bodices)
• Hair worn in “the Grecian style” is better than wearing a turban or even a small Spanish hat, especially for “the female who has not passed her meridian.”
• Diamonds and pearls “must always retain their pre-eminence,” but “bracelets of wrought gold, or of colored enamel, to represent small natural flowers” are also in style
• Satin half-boots for full dress are decidedly out (“most sensibly exploded”!)
Chinese fan 1820-30; Philadelphia Museum of Art
• A “few first rate fashionables” have given up their parasols in exchange for “the Oriental or Indian fan composed of feathers,” but such items are “as yet too singularly attractive for general adoption.” Wouldn't that make you wild to get your hands on one??
