At the Court of French King Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie Antionette, fashion was a spectacle that reflected one’s taste, wealth and status. Nobles paraded in cascading gowns or suits made of rich silk and brocade, embellished with ornate trims and embroidery, following trends seen in fashion plates from periodicals such as the Galerie des Modes et Costume Français. In the later decades of the eighteenth century, however, aesthetics drastically changed.
Beginning in the 1770s and 1780s, lightweight cotton and muslin dresses materialised as a wave of historical revivalist styles freed women from the heavy and cumbersome court fashions involving panniers and crinoline underpinnings. These simpler styles of dress referenced Neoclassical aesthetics and later a renunciation of the opulence of the ancien régime, marking a shift towards dress reform that embraced the natural form of the body.
Although scandalous at first, Marie Antoinette’s preference for white, lightweight and revealing chemise-like dresses influenced the French Court and abroad, becoming known as the chemise à la reine, which, instead of being pulled over the head, gathered at the waist with a drawstring fastening.
As part of this transition to simpler dress, round dresses, also known as round gowns, appeared, combining bodice and petticoat as one with a front-fastening bodice and no stomacher (the decorated triangular panel that covered and fastened the front bodice of women’s outer garments). This innovative design became popular due to the practicality of being able to dress oneself without assistance. It also pre-empted the renunciation of three-dimensional shaping seen in the First French Empire (1804–14).
By the 1790s, round gowns were characterised by lightly draped bodices, three-quarter-length sleeves, soft, full-gathered skirts with trains but without the over gowns of earlier decades. Constructed from fine hand-woven muslins and cottons, round gowns of this period featured delicate embroidery and drapery. Motifs were first inspired by Rococo ornamentation as well as Egyptian, Roman and Grecian decorative artforms inspired by new archaeological discoveries. As interest peaked, embroidery became more monochromatic, like Round dress, c.1795, which features delicate floral sprigs evoking a classical purity.
These fine handwoven fabrics also contributed to changes in the fashionable silhouette, most notably the raising of the natural waistline. The waist of this type of gown sits further south than the under-bust cut of the Empire period (1811–20) but is above where it had previously been. By the time of Jane Austen’s Regency-era heroines and Jacques-Louis David’s famous portrait of Madame Recamier, women’s fashions in Europe had become a Neoclassical column.
A painting in the NGV Collection from the same period, generously supported by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM & Family, Louis-Léopold Boilly’s The lacemaker (La dentellière), 1789–93, depicts a woman in a round gown similar to Round dress. Boilly was one of the most significant painters of portraits and everyday scenes during Revolutionary France. Here, he makes his lacemaker an unmistakably modern young woman, visible in her choice of dress and relaxed comportment.
Domestic needlepoint and lacemaking were a popular pastime for European and British girls through to adulthood, beginning with samplers and advancing to intricate three-dimensional embroidery and lace patterns for domestic objects and garment trims. Boilly’s lacemaker is working in the bobbin lace technique, which takes its name from the spools of carved wood or ivory on which the lacemaker plaits, twists or weaves threads around a network of pins resting on the support of a pillow or frame.
Round dresses heralded radical shifts in fashion where the wearer could have dressed herself; however, the style was not to last. Tastes gave way to the slimmer lines of the Regency period till 1818 when waistlines were right under the bustline. Without being able to go any higher, waistlines began to drop an inch every year till the Victorian era (1837–1901), when hourglass, serpentine lines were in vogue.
Charlotte Botica is NGV Curatorial Project Officer, Fashion and Textiles.
The NGV warmly thanks Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family for donating these works to the Collection.
This article was originally published in NGV Magazine, Sep-Oct 2024.