Britain’s Regency period is among fashion history’s most distinctive for what people wore, how they wore it, and what their clothes and accessories were made of. Its muslin gowns, high waistlines, bonnets and shawls epitomise the early nineteenth century in popular culture. Technically, the Regency only lasted from 1811, when the prince regent ruled in place of his incapacitated father, George III, until the king’s death in 1820. ‘Regency’ is a more flexible concept that’s an easy way to refer to the years 1795–1820, and especially its distinctive styles.
The period and its fashions are irrevocably intertwined with Jane Austen’s six completed novels, published between 1811 and 1817. The legions of Austen adaptations for screen have created their own lively, influential visions of period dress. Most people now first encounter Regency fashion through versions in these kinds of costume dramas – a legacy continued through the fantasy-romance series Bridgerton, screening on Netflix since 2020. Curiously, the show isn’t truly ‘Regency’, as in its alternative historical timeline the Act of Regency hasn’t happened.
‘Bridgerton has helped inspire the ‘Regencycore’ aesthetic across social and fashion media (very) loosely inspired by the era’s historic garments and accessories. So, although by any reckoning the Regency ended over two hundred years ago, interest in its clothing cultures is alive and well, and even growing’
But what did people really wear then? Due to rapid changes in manufacturing, construction, politics, textiles and style, the Regency is one of the most quickly evolving aesthetic and technical periods in the history of fashion. Clothing always envelops and reflects the body, especially the body for which it was made in this time before mass-manufacture and sewing machines. A garment is where style and consumer cultures of an age manifest themselves, demonstrating how the wearer may have negotiated those cultures to reflect their own taste and situation in life. My interest in Regency dress began with this kind of personalised garment. I remade a pelisse, or coat-dress, said to have belonged to Jane Austen herself–the only known item with this connection. This led me to explore the world of Regency dress production and fashion consumption as Austen would have known it and as she extended it to the worlds of her fictional characters.
I ended up writing three books exploring these worlds. The first two books focused on the author’s life and times. Dress in the Age of Jane Austen: Regency Fashion (2019) took a broad view of how and why people wore clothes during her heyday. Next, Jane Austen’s Wardrobe (2023) did a deep dive into what we can know the writer wore, based on her surviving letters. These are where Austen speaks for herself, not as a narrator. Within these writings we get insight into her wardrobe at random points, ranging from a word or two to the rare times she goes into detail about her clothes. There I looked beyond the surfaces of style and examined what they meant deep down to Austen, and reflected on the serious business clothes were for her.
Studying her dress foregrounds Austen as a woman of her time, as a surprisingly typical middle-class Regency consumer of limited means and with an interest in style. We can see Austen as a person instead of an author (although no-one but Austen could have written those letters!). Examining her things allows us to better understand her daily life and perceive how she specifically negotiated taste, money, consumption practices and many more social dimensions of dress and adornment. The getting and maintenance of clothing was no trivial matter for Regency women, nor the ‘frivolous distinction’ Austen very ironically dubbed it in Northanger Abbey. They were materialised status, reputation, class, income and taste – and everyone knew how to read that.
My latest book, A Guide to Regency Dress: From Corsets and Breeches to Bonnets and Muslins (2025), is a kind of dictionary or glossary. It shares extensive research in an accessible, practical way to help modern audiences in their own readings. Fashionable Regency style saw a transformation from classicism, based on order, harmony, balance, rational structure and perfection, towards the feeling, individualistic, intuitive, picturesque Romantic movement. There was a comparative freshness and modernity in Regency dress. Style broke with stiff, artificial eighteenth-century silhouettes, then concerned itself with an idealised relationship to the natural body. Fashion simultaneously discarded clothing’s immediate past yet looked back to history for old dress to be made new again– much like Regencycore does today. Many passing novelties recorded in magazines’ fashion descriptions relate to three main stylistic influences: antiquity, medieval and baroque history, and non-European worlds. Changes of language–for instance, from ‘gown’ to ‘dress’–can be traced as part of larger cultural changes, such as the rise in French fashion descriptions after Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815. The Regency is a fascinating period precisely because it contained so much change and experimentation, both in the wider world and the field of fashion.
Garments generally had a high value for their Regency wearers, mostly related to the textiles they were made from. Whether a silk fabric was a soft sarcenet, crisp taffeta or glossy satin really mattered to the wearer. For the Regency lady perusing a fashion plate in a magazine, there was a significant difference between whether the pretty white gown in the picture was a cambric or a jaconet muslin, if it was ‘japanned’ or tamboured, or trimmed with hand- or machine-made lace. Although researchers now frequently turn to these fashion plates as a resource, Austen doesn’t mention these or any other artistic representations of a dressed body as a source for style. New fashions were instead usually transmitted by people observing what other people wore. Someone had seen it or touched it for themselves–often in a thriving fashion metropolis like London–and told someone else, y voice or letter, or bought goods for their community at home. Austen abundantly recorded these practices in her letters. Clothes were a considerable and infrequent investment for consumers of her social level. They planned, discussed and collaborated on new garb with relatives, acquaintances and professionals.
After all this discussion, once a gown existed it could be refashioned for as long as the fabric endured. Many surviving garments in museum collections show evidence of careful alterations to improve or update the style. Austen and her sister, Cassandra, were constant amenders of their wardrobes. Alterations and new trimmings extended a garment’s life and revived a limited wardrobe but also kept the item up to date. Haberdashery applied in inventive, novel ways was an easier, cheaper way to achieve freshness and fashion when investment in a new garment was a significant cost.
But not everyone adopted or wore fashionable clothing at the same rate. The trendsetting attire of social leaders or new style innovations took a while to filter through society. It could be top-down but had more to do with access to resources for fashion and a willingness to engage with them, which everyone decided differently. The middle classes were concerned with being neither too far ahead of nor too far behind fashion, aiming for a happy medium. Age and individual taste influenced fashionable adoption as much as money and class.
Dress for Jane Austen, her family, her milieu and by extension her characters was an individual negotiation based upon personal networks of taste and possibilities for consumption. Her letters demonstrate her own personal and lively interest in dress, no matter how discreet she is in fiction–never does Austen directly describe what her heroine is wearing! But what Pride and Prejudice’s Lizzie Bennet and her real life counterparts wore spoke volumes about the world around them. The glorious Regency ensembles that remain to us in collections like the NGV’s can be an enduring and alluring entrance back into that world.
Dr Hilary Davidson is Associate Professor and Chair of MA Fashion and Textile Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. Her books include Dress in the Age of Jane Austen: Regency Fashion (2019), Jane Austen’s Wardrobe (2023) and, most recently, A Guide to Regency Dress (2025).
The NGV warmly thanks Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family for their generous support of the Regency period fashion works on display, and an anonymous donor for their ongoing support of the NGV Observations series in which Dr Hilary Davidson is a special guest.
This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 56 Jan–Feb 2026.