Regency Reader Questions: Fashion Plates and Ideal Body Types

Michelle asks:

What features were women looking for in the sense of body consciousness? So many of these sketches show teeny skinny flat feet in their not-very-memorable shoes. Was that just an indication that the establishment advertising them weren’t selling shoes? Were big beefy arms in fashion? Were really small heads considered dainty or lady like?

Love this questions, thanks for being a Regency Reader and leaving a comment!

Geri Walton has done some fantastic work looking at text that talk about popular notions of female beauty in the 1800s (Ideas of Female Beauty in the 1700 and 1800s – Geri Walton).  Geri reveals a Georgian gentleman’s list of beauty, which includes plump and long hands, small features (except for noses), and generally an overall symmetry.  Which is not unlike today’s well worn concept of the golden ratio.

There are other snippets of beauty from magazine and books of the day like this one,

La Belle Assemblee 1806

which generally tell us that any figure can be shown to advantage with the right fashions, but that the ideal was a body that could blend in.

There were some general ideas of women and health.  Indoor lifestyles encouraged pale skin and frailness, but generally the overly ornate styles of the early Georgian era (in fashion, homes, landscaping, furniture, etc) began to be replaced with a more natural aesthetic (How Women’s ‘Perfect’ Body Types Changed Throughout History (thelist.com)).  Slightness, delicate features, and deemphasized body was a way to display the “weakness” of the “fairer sex” (Women’s idealised bodies have changed dramatically over time – but are standards becoming more unattainable? (theconversation.com)).

As for the shoes in the pictures, these were by in large a depiction of the fashionable slipper which was very flat and with little shape (English Historical Fiction Authors: LADIES’ SLIPPERS AND HALF-BOOTS IN THE REGENCY ERA (englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com) and Regency Shoes – JaneAusten.co.uk) with the exception of half boots for long country walks.  Because most of the fashion plates are for visiting, balls, or other Tonnish activities, however, its unsurprising that the feet would be shod with slippers.  It is also the case that many of the designs were created by dressmakers and modistes who weren’t in the business of selling shoes, so your thoughts are probably close to correct on that score.

I think plates had also a lot to do with the relative skill of the artist designing the fashions.  The premier fashion plate artist was Nicolaus Heideloff who printed his Gallery of Fashion and became a sensation with subscriptions and patronage.  You can see his collection here: Nicolaus Heideloff | Gallery of Fashion, vol. V: April 1, 1798 – March 1 1799 | The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org) and see ladies with much more traditional proportions.  The arms are often emphasized, with long gloves or puff sleeves, and the heads obscured by hats or caps, but generally you will see that in the hands of a superior artist the features and form are more regular.

The University of Washington has a nice collection of plates from different 19th Century eras, and looks at them from the perspective of costuming::  Fashion Plate Collection ::: (washington.edu).  Notably, they feature French plates as well as fashions from Ackermann’s Repository and La Belle Assemblee.

Although the artists are seldom identified until the Victorian era (Fashion Plates introduction – National Portrait Gallery (npg.org.uk)) if you look at the plates, it is easy to start to identify certain stylistic similarities between some eras of plates (Fashion Plates | LoveToKnow).  Some artists were more talented than others, indeed, so much that The Lady’s Monthly Museum apologized in 1812 for the sloppiness of their fashion section and promised to devote themselves more thoroughly to investing in it.

In its infancy, fashion magazines had not yet completely commodified women’s bodies as targets for increasing consumption (gps_newsvault_britishlibrarynewspapers_p5_essay.pdf (gale.com)).  However, generally the women would appear to be of slender to medium built, average height, with small to average size heads, simple curls tucked into hats and bonnets or into coiffures, and regular to small features.  Its noticeable that the descriptions of general remarks on fashion begin to pivot around 1820s from exclusively about fashion trends to more general remarks about women (Regency Fashion: Walking Dress and Evening Dress (1820) – Regency Reader (regrom.com)).  While ads themselves from the early 19th century clearly hope to address insecurities, like skin or hair color, the actual copy in magazines would not zero in on defining fashion in terms of “femaleness” until the rise in industrialization (which should be a future post in our Industrialization series).

I feel like there is a lot more research to do on this topic, and would love it if Regency Readers have read something on the subject to share in the comments below.