Here in the rainforests of the 49th Parallel, we are feeling febrile and summerish. Sleeves are shorter, sweaters stay at home, and though we conscientiously pack our umbrellas, we cherish the reasonable hope of not needing them. Last year, the Hemwick Regency Society celebrated this annual miracle with attendance at a summer cello concert at Vancouver’s Van Dusen Gardens. This concert was part of the Van Dusen Gardens’ own annual early summer blowout. The laburnum was in full bloom, which would be reason for celebration enough – laburnum is known as Golden Rain, and in the garden’s formal laburnum walk, the flowers fell around us in showers like golden sunshine. It was prettier than you can possibly imagine. The gardens were timeless. The Cello music was modern. I dressed myself as a fusion of both: the high-fashion French Merveilleuse wearing all of the late 1790s fashion trends at once! On my head I wore Grecian curls, on my body, my green muslin 1790s gown. My arms were bare, I wore jewelry everywhere but my toes, and I had Grecian sandals on my feet –
So what’s this high-fashion French merveilleuse then?
The merveilleuses were the acme, the ultimate, the absolute nonpareil of French fashion during the last years of the 18th century. Think Kardashians for the Regency Era and you’ve got the basic idea. Compared to the more mainstream fashion of the period, their layers were less, the silhouettes were sharper, and for upper class women, somewhat more risqué. In their more extreme moments they wore their hair short, their dresses sleeveless and sheer, and they went about in sandals instead of stockings and shoes. These ladies and gentlemen were to die for. Sometimes literally so – out of their sheer dresses have sprung the fables of battalions of fashionable women shivering in sheer dresses in unheated country houses and barn-like continental ballrooms, and of their going out in howling gales with their dresses wetted down to better show off their curves. If you listen to the cautionary tales told by their retrospectively scandalized grandchildren, they died in droves of galloping consumption.
We do, however, have to keep in mind that contemporary satire is about heavy exaggeration, and a lot of these cautionary tales come down to us from a generation or two later, a time when the fashion pendulum had swung so far the other way that the natural shape of the female form was distorted almost beyond recognition – women were wearing cage crinolines on their lower halves and pillows (or even more cage crinolines) stuffed up their sleeves. Moreover, these censorious grandchildren lived in a world where the attitude “less-is-chic” had been replaced with “layering-is-the-first-step-to-goodliness.” Heaven knows layers were more appropriate for most of the year in northern and central Europe than sheer muslins. By the mid-19th century, in winter it was not unknown to replace a cage crinolines with a feather-stuffed petticoat bag.
Like all people on the bleeding edge of the fashion curve, even in their own time the Merveilleuses could be seen as a lot. Today, we are most familiar with the merveilleuses, and the contemporary attitudes towards them, through contemporary satire prints, and while these sketches are often amused, they are also scathing.
No-one is ever this satirical about people who aren’t having a good time doing what they’re doing, and doesn’t it all look fun? For myself at the gardens, something just that giddy and frivolous to celebrate the summer seemed to be the order of the season.
Unlined muslin gown?
Check.
Cropped hair? Well… my blonde bobbed wig looked more 1990s emo than à la Titus –
– so I skipped the bob and hopped onto another hair fad of the period and plopped a set of very regency-greco-roman ringlets on my head!
And jewelry? The only issue was how much I could pile on before I started to clank.
Lastly, shoes. My leather sandals were M.I.A somewhere in my closet, so I pulled out a pair of my modern havaiana sandals. Like any good influencer, if I couldn’t wear a trend I would start my own, so behold the havaiana flip-flops, the essential accessory for any historical summer ensemble!
I really do think these flip-flops could catch on.
I mean, I could do statuesque and elegant. If I wanted to:
– but we were a gaggle of Regency Fashion plates hanging out on picnic blankets listening to rock cellos. And when we weren’t listening to Johnny Cash or Coldplay, we were exploring the gardens and discovering that we were dressed to match the flowers. All of them.
What’s prim and statuesque against an afternoon like that?
