Early Victorian Fashions

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the clothes of men and women were simple and comfortable.Women wore light, white dresses, with waists that fell just below the bust.This allowed them to
dress without corsets, which had been worn by women since the fifteenth century. Men wore knee breeches or close-fitting trousers, white shirts, waistcoats, and a coat with a cutaway front and two tails behind.This was originally an eighteenth-century riding outfit, designed to free the legs on horseback.


As fashions changed in the early 1820s, the waist of dresses moved down to the real position of a woman’s waist, allowing corsets, also called stays, to be worn again. For the rest of the century, all women would
wear corsets. In the 1820s these were tightly laced to give a narrow waist, contrasting with puffed-out sleeves
above and wider skirts below. Dresses now came in bright colors, decorated with stripes and floral patterns. Outdoors, women wore wide hats trimmed with feathers, flowers, and ribbons. In the 1820s, men, like women, used artificial methods to change the shape of their bodies. Fashionable men,
called dandies, padded their chests and shoulders and wore tight stays. 


An 1825 poem by Bernard Blackmantle declared,“Each lordly man his taper waist displays / Combs his sweet locks and laces on his stays.”