In recent months, I have been completely hooked by “The Date-Book of Remarkable Memorable Events Connected With Nottingham and Its Neighbourhood 1750-1879”, by John Frost Sutton. It records a world so similar and yet so different to our own. Fashion, for example:
“Here are a few words explanatory of the costume of the period. The dress of the upper and middle classes being then, as now, a model for those beneath, may be regarded as sufficiently indicative of the prevailing style.”
“Ladies were attired in stiff stays, tightly laced”:
“….tightly laced over the stomacher, and long in the waist, causing the upper portion of the figure to resemble the letter V.”
Like this:
The stomacher could usually be removed from one dress and transferred to another. In this way, it was possible to ‘mix-and-match’ designs and colours. Here are two stomachers of the period:
“The thinness of the waist appeared still more striking by the sudden fullness of the gown, occasioned by the hooped petticoat.”
Here are two hooped petticoats, both modern. One is structured horizontally, the other vertically:
Here’s the fullest dress I could find. And yes, that is a fabric called “cloth-of-silver”:
“A close head-dress, and shoes with high heels of divers colours, completed the ensemble. Gentlemen were much more gay in their apparel than would now be thought consistent with good taste. Claret-coloured cloths were deemed very handsome in the circles of high fashion, and suits of light blue, with silver buttonholes and silver garters at the knees, were quite in the mode.”
Here are two suits, one in blue and the other in claret. West Ham eat your hearts out:
“Perukes, of light grey human hair, were worn”:
“Dark hair was of no estimation whatever”:
Men used to wear:
“A large cocked hat, called “the Keven Huller, which was about six inches broad in the brim.”
This was named after Keven Huller, a now long forgotten Austrian general who fought against the armies of the French Revolutionaries and then Napoleon himself, in the last decade of the eighteenth century.I have been unable to find any picture of this fashionable hat from long ago. Men also wore:
“a square-cut coat, and a long-flapped waistcoat, and shoe-buckles of an enormous size”.
Here is a long waistcoat:
Here are some rather attractive shoe buckles:
Their overcoat might be
” a heavy dragoon type with wide gold braid”
I have been unable to find any picture of the type of hat with the so-called “Denmark Cock high at the back, low in the front and tilted forward” or indeed the “Dettingen Cock” or the “Monmouth Cock” style of headgear.
John Knifton 