La Mode (March 1839)

 

Like many nineteenth century fashion plates, this one was separated from of the magazine where it was originally published.  This means it has no context.  We can hazard a guess that it was published in a French magazine and happily it has a date printed on it, but otherwise we can't know what types of outfits these ladies are wearing (morning dress? promenade dress? afternoon dress?) or what their garments are made of.  Chances were that their garments were made of silk, plain (on the left) and figured (on the right) both being favoured:

Some of the dresses are decorated with fancy trimming, others with folds... but in whatever manner the skirt is trimmed, the sleeves must always be decorated to correspond.  Silks are upon the whole the materials most in request for promenade robes, for though white muslin begins to appear, it is but slowly, and mousselines de laine though enjoying a certain vogue, are not so distingué as silk.

The New Monthly Belle Assemblee, June 1839.

The Court and Ladies' Magazine of March 1839 announces that:

The newest mousselines de laine and de soie, are striped, two, three and four colours... Striped silks and satins are likewise coming in, so that striped dresses will be de rigeur this season.

Court and Ladies' Magazine, March 1839

Nearly two centuries later, what seems most evident is the way in which the fashionable silhouette of the 1830s has almost become that of the 1840s.  Skirts are now bell-shaped and reach the ground, while the full sleeves, modish in the earlier part of the decade, have shrunk and slid down to the lower half of the arm.  The bonnets our models are wearing are not quite as small and enclosing as the "poke" bonnets of the 1840s, but they're getting there.

Gentlemen of Fashion (La Mode, 1832)

 J.C. Flügel called it "the great masculine renunciation", that is, the early nineteenth century abandonment of colour and ornament in men's dress.  That's not to say that men's dress couldn't be stylish —as depicted in these fashion plates from La Mode below.

 

 

Here we have one gentleman on the left wearing an early version of the frock coat, another on the right in a double breasted tail coat.  Both were acceptable forms of daywear in the 1830s.  The man on the right wears his coat flung open to display his patterned waistcoat, also nicely framed by his wide revers.  The outfits are not yet what we'd call suits, as the coats are worn with lighter, not matching trousers.  They are accessorised with high hats, canes, and fancy neckcloths worn over high collars.

This plate depicts two gentlemen in sporting gear.  The man on the left is dressed to go shooting (complete with natty cap and hunting belt), while the gentleman on the right is ready to go riding (as shown by the riding crop he is carrying). 

At first I thought both these gentlemen were wearing dressing gowns, but then I noticed the hat on the mantelpiece, and the buttons on the garment worn by the gentleman on the left, I realised that he was wearing a form of long overcoat ("reddingote" in the French caption, from the English "riding coat").  He's clearly a man-about-town dropping in to visit his friend in the velvet dressing gown on the divan at the right.  The man on the right is also wearing some kind of cap, possibly a smoking cap used to keep the smell of tobacco from permeating the wearer's hair.

All the models have neatly trimmed and styled facial hair, an intermediate step between the clean-shaven faces of the previous generation, and the wild whiskers of the mid-Victorians!

(Images from the Bunka Gakuen University Library.)

"Costumes Parisiens" 1830

Every once in a while fashion changes really, really fast.  The 1820s was one such decade.  It began with women wearing the high-waisted and narrow-skirted dresses that had been fashionable for nearly a quarter of a century and ended with them wearing outfits like this:

This fashion plate from 1830 illustrates the sort of lively and flamboyant clothes that were fashionable before the demure modes of the early Victorians.  The two most noticeable details of the model's costume are her exaggerated hat and her exaggerated ("leg o' mutton") sleeves.  The sleeves, of course, couldn't retain their shapes on their own.  Women would either have their sleeves lined with some heavy material such as buckram or horsehair ("crin") or would wear separate sleeve supports underneath.  Leg o' mutton sleeves would become fashionable again in the 1890s

Hats would also fall out of fashion by the end of the decade with bonnets becoming the preferred type of feminine headgear.  Hats would make a tentative comeback in the 1860s, but it wasn't until the early twentieth century that large and extravagantly decorated hats like this would become popular again.