The underlying gowns of both of our fashionable October ladies are white, but added accent colors suggest the changing of the season. The Promenade Costume features a “lappelled cloak, of bright amber or yellow crape,” while the Autumnal Carriage or Morning Costume is adorned not only with a “grey satin spencer ornamented with silver cord and buttons en militaire,” but also with lemon colored shoes and a purple ridicule (reticule). [Read more…]
Ackermann’s Fashion Plates September 1812
September echoes the summery mood of August’s plates featuring both Evening Dress and Walking Dress in white (crape and muslin, here). I wonder if anyone actually made a pelerine that looked like the one in the Walking Dress plate; its black lace trim puts me in mind of bat wings. [Read more…]
Ackermann’s Fashion Plates August 1812
August means summer, and summer means white, at least for the ladies of 1812. Both evening and promenade dresses in this month’s fashion plates feature that color, although the evening gown is of crape, while the walking costume is of jaconet or imperial cambric muslin. [Read more…]
Ackermann’s Fashion Plates July 1812
Well, the great Ackermann’s Fashion Plate project had to go on an unexpected hiatus this summer, due to some personal business that had to be dealt with. But with fall on the horizon, the project is back on track, with two lovely dresses from the July 1812 issue.
The first is an embroidered crepe round evening gown, featuring what are described as “melon” sleeves, with “bosom and back to correspond.” The sleeves do not puff out as much as one might expect from what we now call a “melon sleeve”: [Read more…]
Ackermann’s Fashion Plates June 1812
Springtime brings thoughts of babies and motherhood, and thus we have yet another fashion plate featuring a young child. Unlike many earlier Ackermann fashion plates that include children, the toddler in this plate features so large as to almost obscure the details of the fashionable dress its mother is wearing. Strangely, mom is wearing gloves (of fashionable lemon) while interacting with her child! Baby has lost its little red shoe; can mother’s “small sprig of geranium placed in the hair on the left side” be far behind?
Ackermann’s Fashion Plates May 1812
This month’s first fashion plate looks almost as if it had been made over from last month’s ball gown, with its “blossom-colored” sarsnet, and its trim of “tufted Chinese silk” all down the front and about the hem. But this dress is meant for walking, not for dancing. The second plate, featuring a “Morning Dress,” looks quite fancy for casual letter writing or reading, in which the model in this plate appears to be absorbed. The lemon-colored kid gloves strike my eye as rather odd, but perhaps the celestial blue of the hat and waist ribbons was not an option for gloves?
Ackermann’s Fashion Plates April 1812
April 1812’s fashion plates feature a “Morning Dress” and a “Ball Dress,” both topped by the loveliest of headgear. For casual wear, a “Flora cap” of white satin and lace; for evening occasions, a “Spartan or Calypso helmet cap of pink frosted crepe, with silver bandeaus, and embellished with tassels, and rosets” to match those on evening gown. Did those tassels and rosets make a charming tinkling noise when my lady took to the dance floor, I wonder?
Before reading the description, I assumed the fabric in sample #1 & #2 was meant for a lady’s gown. But to my surprise, I read that it is intended not for women, but for gentlemen’s waistcoats. A popular item, it would seem, especially among members of the “Whip Club,” who “distinguished themselves by double-breasted waistcoats of this attractive article.” As the fabric resembles “tambour work,” or what appears to be embroidered netting, it seems a rather delicate choice for hard-driving bucks. But perhaps that is part of the appeal: a true pink of the ton would be able to handle his horses so smoothly that there would be no danger of tearing the fabric of his oh-so-fashionable waistcoat.
An extra plate this month, featuring an engraving of a “Ladies’ toilette dressing-case.” Equipped with not one, not two, but five separate mirrors, the dressing-case allows his owner to judge the success (or failure) of a particular hairstyle or dress adornment “more quickly and accurately than is possible with the usual accommodation.” I wonder how much Mssrs. Morgan and Sanders charged for such an extravagant piece of fashionable furniture?
Ackermann’s Fashion Plates March 1812
White, enlivened by touches of pink, are the colors featured in Ackermann’s March 1812’s fashion plates, which depict an “Indoor Morning Dress” and an “Evening Full Dress.” I wonder if the pearls (or, for the more frugal lady, white beads) adorning the stomacher of the evening dress sat heavily on one’s chest?
This month’s General Observations focus on the irony of current-day language to describe the dress appropriate for different times of the day:
“what will the good people say to the names applied to dress, when they are informed, that the undress of the present day consists of a comfortable kind of habiliment closed round the neck and covering the arms; that the half-dress is rather more open and exposed; and that the full-dress scarcely admits of any covering at all, bit in common language would be called complete nakedness.”
In fact, our commenter explains in a footnote, the full-dress pictured in plate 18 “is not at all a fair specimen of haut ton” because it exposes far less bare skin that do the fashionable dresses worn by the denizens of society. “[W]e could not overcome the modest objects of the artist, to representing the figure in the extreme of fashion,” an extreme in which the “whole of the bust, shoulders, and arms may be completely exposed.”
Women should not ape such fashions, our commentator recommends, for if the “object is to captivate,” “by this abrupt exposure, all those little arts which arise out of the consciousness of inspiring admiration, are at an end; what man would be ambitious to possess the confidence of a lady who freely unbosoms herself to all around her?”
I can’t help but feel that the entire column was written just so the author could crow over that particularly painful pun…
I’m struck by this month’s fabric sample #4, a “very striking and appropriate printed Marseilles for gentlemen’s waistcoats.” According to Fairchild’s Dictionary of Textiles, a “marseilles” is “a double-faced cotton quilting that is made in a plain jacquard weave with a raised, woven pattern…. Usually it is made with two sets of filling one fine and one coarse, and one fine warp. The plain ground is composed of the fine yarns, the coarse ply filling the floats to form the raised figures” (347). I’m wondering if the brown dye of the raised figures (which have a flavor of native american bird motifs, to my eye) have bled, making the plain ground appear mottled.
Ackermanns Fashion Plates February 1812
February’s prints feature a Ball Dress and a Walking Dress. Unfortunately, there seems to be some discoloration in Plate 11, the Ball Dress. The dress’s fancy border, sleeve bands, bodice, and the accompanying slippers are all described as “marigold” in color, but the bodice in the print looks as if the summery yellow has partially faded to a brown tone more suited to autumn. Or does the print appear this way in other libraries’ copies?
The walking costume (plate 12) also features brown, but in this case the brown seems original to the print: the “Russian mantle” is described as being made of “fine drab cloth.” The fetching bonnet, a “village hat,” is described as being “simply tied across the crown with a Barcelona handkerchief,” an accessory with which I was not familiar. According to Fairchild’s Dictionary of Textiles, a Barcelona handkerchief is “a fine, twilled silk square in solid colors, checks, and fancy designs, worn around the head or neck. Originally made in Spain and later manufactured in Great Britain for export to southern Europe, North Africa, and South America” (41). I quite admire its shade of rose, don’t you?
This month’s fabric sample descriptions suggest one way a Regency-era lady of fashion might while away a dull morning: by visiting a fabric warehouse. In particular, that belonging to the “celebrated Allen of Pall-Mall,” which “now classes amidst the polite morning lounges of fashionable resort.” Didn’t realize this, but according to the OED, “lounge” can refer not only to “a kind of sofa or easy chair on which one can life at full length,” but also to “a place for lounging” or to “a pastime.” Which usage do you think is meant here?
Ackermanns Fashion Plates January 1812
Ackermann’s fashion models are dressed for the cold in January 1812’s plates. The outfits worn both consist of multiple layers. For the lady in Plate 4 (“Half Dress”), both a “High Roman round robe,” a “Pomeranian mantle of silk,” and a “high standing collar of muslin or net” ; for the one in Plate 5 (“Carriage or Polish Walking costume”), a morning robe, a demi pelisse, and a pelerine. Both also rely on fur for warmth: sable fir trim on the half boots in Plate 4; “sable, oppennoch, or other tastefully contrasted fur” for the “Canonical cap” in Plate 5. Perhaps the editors suspected the spring and summer would be particularly cold? (See Pascal Bonenfant’s informative web site on “British Weather from 1700 to 1849” for more details).
Arbiter Elegantiarum returns this month to offer an assertion that his work criticizing current-day fashion is important:
“Dress has been so seldom made the subject of serious criticism by the writers of any age or country, that the observations which have appeared under this head in the former volumes of the Repository, whatever faults may have distinguished them, must, at least, be allowed the merit of novelty.”
Even literary men cannot escape his discerning eye. AE criticizes Alexander Pope, Waller, and Marmontel for the way each dresses his heroines in “silly and cumbrous appendages of fashion,” rather than the more “tasteful” costumes of which AE approves. He concludes by vowing to continue to offer both his praise and his anathemas “with a license unlimited, but by the anxiety I feel for their best interest, and the love I bear for the sex in general.” Not sure if I were a fashionable lady, I would have found his reassurances all that assuring…
This month’s fabric samples include the longest write-up of a single company I’ve yet to see in the magazine. Praise for the “house of Millard, in Cheapside” goes on for more than an entire column; was it the largest, or most prestigious, fabric shop of the period? The copy claims it is “unrivaled, both in the variety, richness, and elegance of its supplies; and possesses, at the same time, the advantages of a superior economy.” While some of Millard’s goods can be had for as low as a single shilling per yard, its Indian shawls can cost up to one hundred and fifty guineas!
Ackermann’s also seems prescient in featuring a “fine Merino wool of Wellington brown” amongst this month’s samples—did someone have the inside scoop that General Wellington would be raised from an earl to a marquess the following month?