Cover of The Newport Mercury, August 19, 2009
The Newport Mercury, August 19, 2009
A RARE PUBLIC EXHIBIT UNVEILS FANCIFUL CLOTHING WORN BY COLONIAL NEWPORTERS
By Jennifer Nicole Sullivan
As Great Britain squeezed its American colonies in the 1760s and ’70s leading up to America’s war for independence, revolutionary era women squeezed their breasts into corset-like underwear but liberated their cleavage at the top of their elegant gowns.
Maybe revolutionary bosoms weren’t as tortured as it sounds, but political unrest in the colonies certainly did affect the social fabric of the times — its fashion. In a new Newport Historical Society exhibit, Homespun to High Fashion, visitors can see a fascinating sampling of clothing from the late 18th to early 19th centuries on display in the newly restored Seventh Day Baptist Meeting House.
Guest curator Rebecca Kelly was awed by all the fine, Newport-linked, American Revolutionary era pieces she discovered while delicately digging through hundreds of items in the Newport Historical Society ’s little-before-seen collection of historic clothing stored in acid-free boxes on the second floor of the society ’s Touro Street office.
“Just their age, it’s quite spectacular,” said Kelly, who works at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology and teaches at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. “It’s sort of daunting to take a dress out of a box and it’s over 200 years old.”
Set in one of the nation’s oldest Baptist churches, built in 1730, the exhibit gives a rare glimpse of life in our fledgling country and how, even in the midst of a war for independence fought on American soil, Newporters still knew how to look good. Beautiful, full-length, high-fashion gowns worn by wealthier women dating 1765 to 1785 comprise most of the exhibit.
“We were really surprised to see so many high styled gowns. I think that speaks to the economic stability in the early days,” Kelly said.
Never mind the homespun movement where revolutionary era women would weave their own cloth instead of importing British textiles or garments — wealthy Newporters still had their local dressmakers use fine British silk — most likely imported from London’s Spitalfields area — to construct sophisticated gowns that would have been fashionable in Europe. All of the dresses are open-gown, or open-robe style, meaning that the front of the dress is split to reveal an outer petticoat that often matched the dress and could be interchanged with different colored or textured petticoats. The older gowns feature stomachers, a decorative panel that filled a gap in the gown’s bodice.
Stomachers went out of style by the late 1780s, so the later gowns simply closed in the middle of the bodice with pins. Layers of clothing underneath the dress, such as a whalebone-ribbed stay (a precursor to the corset) and a shift (durable linen underwear that resembled a nightgown), protected the women from getting pricked by pins.
Stays provided support to the breasts much like a modern bra, but unlike corsets in the Civil War or the Victorian period, women of the revolutionary era didn’t pull their stays uncomfortably snug to strive for a tiny waist. The structured undergarment improved women’s postures. To maintain modesty during the day, women wore a fichu (pronounced fee-shoo), or handkerchief, around their necks, tucked into the top of the bodice to hide their cleavage. In the evening, they would ditch it, giving liberty to their décolletage.
“They were creating an idealized female form, which was cone-shaped from the waist up,” said Ruth Taylor, the society ’s Executive Director. As for the waist down, Taylor added, “ You could hide a kid under there.”
Under the skirt, women wore padding in a hoop structure that tied around the waist and layers of petticoats to dramatically poof out the hips and buttocks. As for panties, revolutionary women sort of went commando. “Underwear as we think of it today is really modern in its arrival … a 20th century kind of thing,” Kelly said. “So really, for men, they didn’t have anything other than an undershirt which was really long. For women it was many layers of cotton petticoats … not anything comparable to modern undergarments.”
Two of the dresses can be traced to prominent Newport families: a multi-colored floral brocade gown circa 1765 was likely worn by a woman of the Robinson family and an ivory and taupe geometric striped gown with a lavender quilted petticoat circa 1775 is said to have been worn by Catherine Malbone of the wealthy merchant family. In stark contrast to the evening gowns is a coffee colored Quaker dress circa 1775, possibly made with a wool/ silk blend and homespun linen lining (cotton was very rare). The simple dress is a style that Newport Quaker women would have worn through the late 1770s. A men’s outfit with an ornate waistcoat embroidered with silver thread dating from the early 19th century rounds out the display.
Kelly and interns Jennifer Robinson and Kaitlin Morton Bentley — both University of Rhode Island grads — made reproductions of stomachers, padding, fichus and men’s breeches to fill in missing wardrobe pieces or items too deteriorated to display. Some of the mannequin’s heads are topped with huge white, bouffant wigs that the interns modeled after period fashion plates and constructed from raffia and acid-free spider tissue paper.
“If you’ve seen the latest Marie Antoinette movie, in France, some of the hairdos were gigantic,” said MortonBentley. “ They weren’t quite as large here, but for a really formal event, they would have done a nice updo with rolls, powdered their hair and perhaps even had a wig.”