Sunday, November 3, 2019

Dress in the Age of Jane Austen

From Perspectives on History:
When fashion historian Hilary Davidson (Univ. of Sydney) was living in, as she put it, “Jane Austen’s heartland of Hampshire” in England, the senior keeper of decorative arts at the Hampshire County Museum Services and Archives asked her to make a replica of the novelist’s pelisse—a long women’s coat-dress that the novelist likely wore—which the museum owned. As both a curator and a sewer, Davidson was an ideal candidate to create a replica that could be loaned out without risking damage to the original. Through the project and the talks she gave on the pelisse, Davidson noticed that the public often learned what they knew about dress in Britain’s Regency era (1811–20) through such novels as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility and the costume dramas based on them. (Read more.)
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