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Ackermann’s Fashion Plates January 1817

October 17, 2018 By BlissBennet 1 Comment

 

January 1817’s fashion plates focus on French fashions: a full dress made for the Duchess de Berri, and a plate of hats of Parisian design. The Duchess’s court dress features an open robe (of British net!) trimmed with blond lace and adorned with intermingled lilies and roses. The underlying white satin slip features five rows of trimming: two satin twisted rolls; a wide wreath of lilies of plain blond; a deep flounce of blond lace; and a waves of lily stalks, surmounted by what appear to be fleur de lis. Ackermann’s fashion writer of late has taken to referring readers “to the print” rather than to actually describing the bodices of the gowns featured; a sign of growing social delicacy, perhaps? Or just a lack of sewing knowledge on the part of the correspondent? Rubies intermixed with pearl are the jewels of choice here, including necklace, earrings, bracelets, and armlets. The lady’s headdress is said to be “a single lily, placed in a bunch of fern,” although the fern here looks to be of the feathered variety.

Ackermann's January 1817, plate 4: Full Dress

Vol. III, no. xiii, plate 4: Full Dress

 

Each of the hats below are “furnished… from one of the first houses in Paris.” The similarities amongst them suggest that stylish misses wore their bonnets with large crowns, as well as deep fronts, and that floral decorations were the most in favor—auriculas, white roses, China asters, Provence roses, and unspecified “fancy flowers.” Straw in natural shades, or in black, dominate.

Ackermann's January 1817, plate 4: Parisian Head-Dresses

Vo. III, no. xiii, plate 4: Parisian Head-Dresses

 

Ackermann's Fashion plates description, January 1817

 

General observations on English dress and fashion include:

• Walking dresses made of the warmest materials for winter promenades

• Muffs made of ermine, sable, and “Isabella bear” fur

• A former trend of wearing sable and ermine caps “are rather too showy for the present chaste style of promenade dress”; bonnets of beaver, velvet, or black straw are preferable

• The “most elegant novelty for the carriage costume” is a pelisse “composed, we believe, of the wool of seal skin, and lined with white sarsnet”

Ackermann's fashion plate description January 1817 part 2

 

• “Fancy silks of every description are in high estimation for dinner dress, as is also plain and striped levantine, plain and fancy poplin, and plain velvet;… fancy striped poplin and spotted silk of a new pattern are higher than any thing else in estimation”

• The “Charlotte spencerette, composed of white satin, with a mixture of royal purpose, has just been introduced, and is greatly admired”

• Winter flowers are much worn in the hair for full dress; bandeaus and sprigs of diamond or pearl are in high estimation, while hair ornaments of coloured stone are rare

• Coloured stones are more in fashion in full dress jewelry than they have been in the past; crosses and lockets are “highly fashionable”

January’s fashionable colours include lead-colour; Provence rose-colour; royal purple; very dark green; various shades of brown; Clarence blue; and ruby

 

Ackermann's January 1817: Parisian fashions description

January’s issue includes the quarterly report of fashions from Paris, where the sartorial trends are as mixed as are the country’s politics. As our correspondent reports, “Some of our élégantes affect and excess of plainness and simplicity in their dress, which agrees as ill with the studied graces of their manners as rouge would with a Quaker’s bonnet. Others rush into the opposite extreme, and in their age for show decorate themselves with all the colours of the rainbow, and bird defiance at once to elegance and good taste.” Our correspondent christens the two groups Formalists and Dashers. Of course, a British woman’s taste “will point out the happy medium” amongst the descriptions of the melange of gowns that follow.

Seemingly, the form of the gowns worn by each group are similar. In day dress, the only real difference is in the cornette: formalists wear “a simple morning cap of a moderate size, without any ornament, not even a ribbon,” while dashers don “a high cornette, trimmed extravagantly with bows and drawings of glaring red orange or lilac; the colour of the ribbon is always different from that of the dress.” In dinner dress, it is the trimmings on the gowns themselves that differentiated the two groups. Formalists wear gowns with no trimming at all, or at most two narrow bands of velvet, “always of a sober colour, or a single flounce composed of the same materials as the dress,” while dashers  “wear three or four flounces, put on pretty close to each other, so that there is not above an inch of the edge of each flounce visible; each of these flounces is bound with ribbon, always of the most glaring colour.” Needless to say, our correspondent is not at all in favor of this trend (“at once tawdry and heavy”).

A novelty that I do not recall having been mentioned before in Ackermann’s pages is the witzchoura, which a quick search online reveals to be a type of sleeved cloak with a large collar and occasionally a hood. Deriving from the Polish word wilczura, meaning “wolf fur coat,” the style is said to have been introduced by Napoleon’s Polish mistress, Marie Walewska. I doubt any British belles would have had such a garment made from an actual wolf…

Fashionable colours in Paris include amber, blue, pink, yellow, and scarlet, quite different from those reining in London.

Ackermann's January 1817, French fashions description part 2

 

“Ornaments for painting on Fancy Work,” rather than an embroidery pattern, is featured in January’s issue. The classically-inclined pattern here is similar to the one which appeared in December 1816’s pages:

Ackermann's January 1817: Ornaments for painting on fancy work

Filed Under: Regency History Tagged With: Ackermann, Ackermanns, Ackermmann's, clothing, dress, fashion, paper

Ackermann’s Fashion Plates July 1813

April 26, 2017 By BlissBennet Leave a Comment

 

With the line of Regency gowns so straight and plain, dressmakers had to look to other parts of a dress for places to exert their creativity. One such part was a dress’s sleeves. While some Regency gowns boast sleeves as straight as their skirts, many feature sleeves with gentle or gigantic puffs. Still others display intricacies that would look overly fussy on a dress with a more curved or intricate line. Take for instance the sleeves on Plate 6: “short sleeves composed of the shell-scalloped lace and satin, decorated with bows on the shoulders, and formed so as to display perhaps rather too much of the bosom, back, and shoulders.” The sleeves look to me like tiny iced cupcakes, good enough to eat—which is perhaps why the writer felt called to add that cautionary note about the sleeves’ cut. All too easy to move from nibbling on a sleeve to nibbling on a bosom, back, or shoulder, no?

Plate 5, Vol. X, no. lv

 

Plate 6, Vol. X, no. lv

 

Have you seen other examples of intricate Regency dress sleeves?

This month’s issue features another “Letter from a Young Lady in London to Her Friend in the Country,” filled with fashion advice (which I will reprint in next week’s blog). Arbiter Elegantarium, who once delivered detailed advice via the fashion plates, seems to have been replaced by this new occasional feature. But perhaps AE has taken refuge in writing the fabric sample descriptions? Very different from the descriptions in past issues, July’s notes include digressions about choosing a dress color to match one’s complexion and the exhortation to avoid wearing a dress made of fabric of all one color: “It rarely happens, that a dress of one unbroken color, be it ever so brilliant, adorns the wearer, be she dark or fair, or her figure ever so graceful: so large a mass of color overpowers the countenance and complexion, and produces no high opinion of the taste of the wearer.” Do you agree with this opinion?

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Regency History Tagged With: Ackermann, Ackermanns, Ackermmann's, clothing, dress, fashion, paper

Ackermann’s Fashion Plates February 1813

March 15, 2017 By BlissBennet 1 Comment

 

To keep warm in the chilly days of February 1813, ladies are recommended to don cloaks with a military flair. In plate 13, a Cossack cloak, of “pale Russian flame-coloured cloth” covers the fashionable Evening Dress, while a “Prussian hussar cloak, of Sardinian blue velvet” with a “variegated ball fringe” protects the lady from wintry winds during her morning walk. The “Russian flame-coloured cloth” also featured in last month’s fashion plate; I haven’t been able to discover just why this color, which appears in the plates more as a tan than a red, should be labeled “Russian.” Perhaps because during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, the cossacks were ordered to burn the villages, towns and crops as they retreated, so that the French would not be able to live off the land they were invading?

Vol. IX, no. xv, plate 13

 

The oversized muff in Plate 14, a Promenade or Walking costume, is made of spotted ermine, a trim used in both of last month’s (January 1813’s) plates. The spots look amazingly regular, and very large, almost as if they were trimmings added on to a plain white ermine background. It does look amazingly warm, though, doesn’t it?

Vol. IX, no xv, plate 14

 

 

This month’s “Patterns of British Manufacture” includes both fabric and paper samples. Just look at #4, a “most beautiful gold embossed striped paper, designed for almost every order of paper-work.” It appears decidedly modern, does it not? I wonder how much Ackermann’s sold it for?

Vol. IX, no. xv

 

 

 

Filed Under: Regency History Tagged With: Ackermann, Ackermanns, Ackermmann's, clothing, dress, fashion, paper

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  • Ackermann’s Fashion Plates December 1816
  • Ackermann’s Fashion Plates November 1816
  • Ackermann’s Fashion Plates October 1816
  • Ackermann’s September 1816 Fashion Plates
  • Ackermann’s August 1816 Fashion Plates
  • Ackermann’s Fashion Plates July 1816
  • Ackermann’s Fashion Plates June 1816
  • Ackermann’s Fashion Plates May 1816
  • Ackermann’s Fashion Plates April 1816

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