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Men’s fashion ca. 1830: The bottom layers

The longest post in the history of the world, and no, I am not proud of that. I am apologizing in advance for when it breaks everyone’s tumblrs.

^^^This is our object of study: the well-dressed male of 1825-1835. The silhouette of the ca. 1830 gentleman bears an interesting resemblance to that of his female counterpart: an hourglass figure, exaggerated by having extra puff in the sleeves, extra width and height in the collar, extra body in the skirt of the coat, and a tightly cinched waist. Both the male and female silhouettes rely on sloping shoulders, a padded chest, a narrow waist, and a lot of curves in the hips:

Just as with the ladies, we should start by asking what goes underneath.

^^^Probably from the earlier end of our period of study (ca. 1825).

^^^Probably from the later end (ca. 1835).

The most basic layers to a ca. 1830 male outfit are essentially three: 1.) the shirt; 2.) the trousers; and 3.) the braces. Sometimes underwear is involved as well, but that’s questionable. As far as these men were concerned, their shirt was their underwear, and, similar to the ladies’ chemise, the shirt can be considered the base layer (and the layer most improper to show in public).

It sounds pretty grotesque, but aside from extant clothing, some of the best ways to get a good look at these under-layers of male clothing are A.) drawings of dead or injured people on barricades, and B.) pornography (as usual). Ironically, female undergarments are represented more commonly than male ones in images of the period, obviously because the artists and their audience were mostly heterosexual men who liked to get their kicks drawing/looking at half-naked ladies. Men almost never represented their own undergarments in images, though, except in the above circumstances. Art showing barricade fighters in 1830 is good for looking at shirts and braces. I’ll give a few examples when I can. Pornography is good for looking at how trousers work (duh), plus other fun things like nightshirts and such. No, I’m not going to give any examples here. But if one were hypothetically to search for “Achille Deveria” on Google Images, I think it would become obvious what I mean. Hypothetically, of course. >__> Even allowing for some artistic license that might stretch the truth of how these garments really worked, these sources shouldn’t be ignored by the costume historian, because what other chances do we have to see people of the past in a state of undress?

Shirts first!

^^^An 1820s extant example.

Men’s shirts ca. 1830 were cut a bit loose and long (long enough to cover the genitals), usually with a slit on each side for mobility:

The collars of these shirts are easily recognizable to anyone familiar with portraits of this period. They were cut high in order to accommodate the tall cravats/stocks of the period and were closed with one or two buttons before the cravat was tied. They could be worn stiff and upright, which would cover part of the jawline, or soft and folded down over the cravat.

^^^The collar of the shirt can be seen extending up from the cravat, covering the sides of his jaw and whiskers.

^^^Showing the button closure on the collar, which would be hidden beneath the cravat when the man is fully dressed. You can see how stiff the collar can be.

These shirts were opened and closed by way of a front center placket set with buttons, but the placket did not extend all the way to the bottom hem. In laymen’s terms, this meant that, since it could not be unbuttoned all the way down, the shirt had to be pulled on and off over the head. This is what we would now call a “tuxedo front”:

The sleeves of the shirt had to fit beneath fairly tight coat sleeves, so they could not be too voluminous, but they did have extra material that was gathered to the sleeve holes and cuffs using knife pleats or cartridge pleats. The sleeve hole for these shirts is always cut low on the shoulder, so that the sleeve pleats actually sit down the arm a few inches instead of right on top of the shoulder, like so:

This is done so that there won’t be an uncomfortable, lumpy gather of fabric right underneath the coat shoulder seam; instead, it shifts that mass of shirt fabric down into the most roomy, puffed part of the coat sleeve, where it won’t aggravate the wearer too much.

A really fashionable shirt might have cuffs cut longer than standard modern cuffs; they would be more comparable in length to what we now call the “French cuff.” This was so that they would extend just slightly beyond the long cuff of the coat, sometimes almost to the man’s knuckles:

Shirt cuffs must have been cut to flare out a bit so that the man could retain full mobility in his hands while wearing them.

The front of a ca. 1830 shirt is a product of waistcoat design. In previous decades, waistcoats had been cut higher, such that they covered pretty much the whole front of the shirt, up to the cravat. In this period, some types of waistcoat are beginning to be cut lower than in previous periods, meaning that more of the shirt front is being exposed. This means new designs of shirt are coming into fashion. 1825-1835 shirts can come with a front ruffle or without. When without, the front of the shirt is often pin-tucked into small vertical decorative pleats. Shirts with a ruffle are more conservative, fashion-speaking, a holdover from earlier decades. Without ruffle will be the future of the 19th-century shirt.

^^^An 1820s shirt, probably from the early years of the decade. There is no decoration on the shirt front, only gathering/cartridge pleating that joins the shirt front to the collar. This probably indicates that this shirt was worn with a high-necked waistcoat and a large cravat that didn’t allow any of the shirt front to show beneath.

^^^An 1826 shirt with a ruffled front: another older style of shirt.

^^^A late 1820s shirt, still ruffled.

^^^An 1820s shirt with a pleated front, possibly from the later half of the decade. The style is still somewhat unrefined, with wide, clumsy pleats instead of the fine, delicate ones that would come into fashion in the 1830s.

^^^An 1830 formal shirt, still retaining the conservative ruffle.

^^^An 1830 informal shirt, with pin-tucked pleats.

^^^An 1832 shirt with a plain front (or pin-tucked pleats, it’s hard to tell). By this point, pleated or plain shirt fronts are definitely squeezing out the ruffled shirts.

^^^An 1832 shirt with tiny pin-tucked pleats.

More illustration of how the placket in the front works (on dead people, sadly):

^^^With braces as well.

You see that the shirts can’t unbutton all the way–in the middle example, it’s clear that the shirt is open as far as it will go. Important to remember when writing scenes of men dressing and undressing: shirts go over the head.

Shirts were typically made of linen (not cotton), and generally the wealthier the wearer, the finer the fabric and the whiter the color. (Linen is not naturally white in color, it’s like a light tannish color, so it needs to be bleached to get a white color.) These shirts were the man’s underwear, and, like the ladies’ chemise, they would be the layer to sustain all the wear-and-tear, the sweat stains, the stank of everyday wearing. Like the chemise, they would need to be sent to the laundress pretty often, so a man would hopefully have the means to keep a number of them to cycle through. With the laundress, the shirts would be washed and bleached, and the collars could possibly be re-stiffened with starch.

Before talking about trousers, we need to touch on the possibility of underwear, or “small clothes,” as they’re sometimes called.

^^^A ca. 1810 example of “small clothes.” These have a simple drawstring waist and are made of linen (I believe).

Underwear meant to be worn beneath trousers or culottes definitely existed–there are surviving examples. Whether they were in widespread use is unclear. It seems to me that, as with ladies’ drawers, there are more surviving examples of underwear for the decades before our period of study, and especially underwear meant to go under culottes (knee-length breeches), like these:

The 1810 “small clothes” example is the only one I’ve found that appears to be designed specifically for use under long trousers. I mean, one can see why underwear would be, ahem, a good idea, especially considering how dreadfully tight these trousers could be. On the other hand, considering how dreadfully tight these trousers could be, the unfashionable pantyline you’d get from boxer-briefs like these is pretty sad to think about. I’ve heard that shirttails in this period were so long because they were meant to kinda tuck around your parts and act as underwear. Hm. On the other other hand, if you were wearing leather riding breeches, it would seem prudent to put something substantial between your bits and that chafing leather, yikes!

So, trousers. Typical trousers of this period have a distinctive cut, very different from modern trousers, but quite suitable for the needs of the overall outfit ca. 1830. Firstly, they have an extremely high waist, so that the waistcoat can solidly overlap them, so that you’ll never have that awkward moment when you “flash” polite company with a glimpse of your shirt. Secondly, these trousers are similar to waistcoats in that they have two fastening devices: a fly of some kind in the front (usually a buttoned fall front fly), and then a tightening device in the back, whether laces or a buckle. Thirdly, these trousers often have stirrups at the bottom of the leg, which go around the shoe and hold the trouser legs down. And fourthly, these trousers are almost always cut with a baggy seat, even if the legs are cut to be tight (though pantaloons are sometimes tight throughout).

Why the baggy butt? Hm. I always assumed it was to allow greater mobility, but it could serve a number of other purposes, from modesty (speaks for itself) to better fit (allows for the pants to be adjusted to fit a greater range of body shapes) to silhouette (extra fabric around the butt and hips gives more fashionable flare to the coat skirt on top of it). Maybe all of the above.

^^^I knew the 2012 musical movie of Les Mis was going to be a “Serious” adaptation when photos of these beauteously baggy pants came to light. Without baggy butt pants, your Les Mis is just, well, the stage musical:

No baggy seat here, no sir.

In general, the musical movie had lovely historically-accurate trousers for its men:

Ca. 1830 trousers came in several types, with three main variables to distinguish them: the material they’re made of, the cut of the leg (length, width, tightness), and the type of fly closure.

The material that trousers are made of depends on what they’re being used for. If the trousers are for riding, they’re usually made of leather, like this crazy green (!) pair:

Short breeches are often used for riding (they allow for greater range of motion in the knees, presumably), but as the above example shows, they could use full-length trousers also.

If trousers are just regular day dress trousers, they’re made of linen or cotton. If they’re evening dress pantaloons, they could be made of linen or some silk blend.

In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo writes lovingly about trousers made of a material called cuir de laine, which were apparently something of a byword for fashionable dress ca. 1830. When Joly is lamenting his estrangement from his mistress Musichetta, Bahorel’s advice involves these magical trousers: “‘My dear [said Bahorel], then you have to please her, be fashionable, make effects with your knees. Buy a good pair of cuir de laine trousers at Staub’s. They help.’” (Grantaire’s rejoinder–”‘How much?’”–reminds us of the enormous expense of being in fashion. The absurdity of using pants to heal one’s broken relationships is not lost on me, but apparently cuir de laine trousers were so awesomely-omg-incredible that they were worth the expense. ;)) But what is cuir de laine? At first glance, one might translate “wool-leather,” or maybe “lambskin.” The Fahnestock/MacAfee/Wilbour translation inexplicably translates “doeskin” in the above passage, but “double-milled cassimere” for the same phrase in a later passage. (I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume by “doeskin,” they mean the fabric called doeskin, not the actual skin of a deer.) As it turns out, cuir de laine is indeed a woven fabric, not a leather: the 1831 supplement to the Dictionary of the Académie Française defines cuir de laine as “a woolen fabric, very heavy.” This woolen fabric, then, seems to be another fashionable choice for trousers, though most of the examples of long pants that survive today are made of linen, not wool. (Culottes, that is, breeches, are more commonly made of wool.) Staub’s, as implied in the Hugo quotation, was the premier tailor’s shop in Paris in this period, and was referenced as such by other writers of the time as well (notably Balzac). I’ll discuss tailors at more length in a later post (when I have more space to spare!).

As for color, trousers usually come either in black or, more commonly, in some light neutral color somewhere between white and tan. Because these pants are made of linen or cotton, an off-white, yellowish, or tan color could be the natural color of these fibers.

Nankeen was a popular fabric used for trousers, known for its yellowish color:

Nankeen gets its name from Nanking/Nanjing, the Chinese city that used to produce this fabric from a cotton with a natural yellow color. In later years, regular cotton was dyed to have this yellow color, and this also was known as nankeen. It was a fabric highly in demand in a period that valued light-colored trousers.

Besides cream or yellow or tan, sometimes you see pants represented in some other light tone, like a pale blue-gray:

(I’m never sure if fashion plates are colored that way to represent white pants, or if they really mean that pants came in a light blue-gray. I haven’t yet seen an extant example that was actually that color, though since fabric dyes can degrade over time, perhaps I shouldn’t expect to…?)

^^^A range of trouser colors on display in this 1830 image.

The cut of the trousers’ legs can vary quite a lot in this period. There are some that are cut wide, loose, and baggy from top to bottom. There are others cut as tight as modern leggings or skinny jeans. Some are tight in the legs and baggy in the seat, while others are tight throughout. Some have a straight, loose leg, while others have a leg that tapers down from a wide hip to a narrow ankle, while still others have the opposite (a leg tapering from a tighter hip to a wide ankle, like a modern boot cut or even bell-bottom). Some are cut with a rather high ankle hem (i.e., the trousers end above the ankle), while others are cut like a modern boot cut and practically touch the ground behind the heel. Some have stirrups and others do not. Some of this variation is year-to-year (as in, some cuts are more popular in 1825 than in 1835), but some is within the same year (as in, within 1830 alone, several different types of cut are possible).

Some examples:

^^^Child and adult versions don’t differ too much.

Besides regular day dress trousers, which most of the above examples illustrate, there were trousers better known as pantaloons, which were cut very tight and intended for evening/formal dress:

^^^Cute socks!

^^^Note the curvy cut of these, meant to hug the leg. Linen itself is not an especially stretchy material, so just as with medieval leggings, 19th-century pantaloons were cut to the shape of the leg and cut on the bias to give the fabric extra stretch. Also note the buttons along the ankle: absolutely necessary to fit tight-ass leggings over the foot (as many people today surely know well).

The fly on trousers is one of their most important features and another detail that varies from one pair to another. There are two families of fly in this period: fall front, and center. Fall front flys are far more common in the 1820s-early 1830s, with the center fly gaining ground from the later 1830s onwards. Fall front flys can be either wide…

…or narrow…

…but both types obviously serve a practical purpose.

A wide fall is defined as a flap extending all the way to the side seams: in other words, across the entire front of the trousers. A narrow fall is a flap that only opens about 25-50% of the front and is constructed from a more complicated pattern. (Urg, the hardest thing ever to make a pattern for…)

The flap is held onto the pants by buttons, usually three across the top for a narrow fall and five for a wide fall, as seen in the above examples. The mystery is what lies beneath the flap (no, you dirty-minded people, I mean how the trousers are constructed beneath!). Let’s see the two above examples open:

Button heaven! Can you imagine being in a rush to take a piss? Or, even worse, being drunk out of your mind and being in a rush to take a piss?

You can see that there are 2-3 buttons assigned just to hold the waistband closed. The bottom-most button on the waistband doubles as the center button keeping the fall front fly closed. Then there are two buttons below the waistband, to keep closed the modesty panel beneath the fly. (Anyone who’s seen these things in action should remember that the fly does buckle up a bit when a guy sits, so a modesty panel is necessary to keep, um, impertinent ladies’ prying eyes out.) There are an additional 2-4 buttons on the sides to keep the rest of the fly closed, then even more buttons lined up above those, along the top hem of the waistband, which are where the braces are supposed to button onto the trousers. Whew!

The fall front fly had been around since before trousers had been around. The 1790s sans-culottes abandoned their culottes for trousers like these…

…but the fly remained the same as that found on culottes. (BTW, who doesn’t love sans-culottes trousers in cute patriotic tricolor stripes?)

Here are some interesting fly pictures:

^^^These two shots show the corner buttons of a wide fall fly, but also the line of buttons above it, where the braces would be buttoned on.

^^^Lots of buttons! To close the waistband, to close the fly, to attach the braces.

^^^Two shots of an earlier wide fall closure (ca. 1810). He even has some little secret pockets there under his fall! (So ladies, if you are offended one day to see a guy rudely groping around in his fall front fly, he may not be “adjusting himself,” he may just be looking for some change in his pocket.) He also has a tiny pocket in the waistband, which many of these examples seem to have.

^^^An extremely narrow fall front fly, just wide enough to take care of business. This is what the front looks like when closed:

^^^Two pictures of a center fly closed with buttons. The center fly of course eventually superseded the fall front fly to become the most popular style of fly. This particular example has so many buttons that it’s really no more efficient than the fall-front fly (and perhaps less efficient, if you’re one of those lazy guys who just whips it out of the fall front fly without bothering to unbutton too much).

Before we look at braces, I should say that most of what we look at in these posts is fashionable clothes. There is of course a simpler style of trousers that persists among working-class men from the time of the sans-culottes all the way up to the 20th century. It is essentially a basic set of trousers with a fall front fly, a straight, roomy leg, a baggy seat, and a little slit at the ankles for easier dressing:

There also remain plenty of examples of earlier styles coexisting with fashionable trousers. Culottes are still common among older or fashion-conservative people, and for certain social functions:

Finally, braces.

Braces are there to hold up the trousers. They are fastened to the top of the trousers by buttons (not clasps like modern-day suspenders) and they are meant to lie completely hidden beneath the waistcoat. Of course, that did not stop fashionable dudes from seeking out fancy decorative ones that no one (except their girl/boyfriend?) would ever see.

Let’s go back to this fellow:

You can see those decorative braces there over his shirt.

We saw plenty of buttons for braces on the front of trousers. Here’s what the back buttons look like (the middle triangle of fabric is the adjustable insert, where the pants would be tightened with a lace):

In this detail from Delacroix’s painting “Liberty Leading the People,” you can see the fall front fly of a soldier’s trousers (partially unbuttoned), and the braces buttoned to the top of the trousers:

On the other side of the painting, there’s this guy, a workingman:

At first I thought he was wearing an apron over his shirt/trousers (many workingmen wear these), but now I’m thinking he’s just wearing his trousers especially high. You can see his braces there, holding his trousers up.

Okay, so we’ve got an 1830 man in a shirt, trousers, and braces. He’s going to reach for a cravat next, then a waistcoat, and finally a coat. Now let’s suppose that our man has maybe a little bit of baby fat around the belly, or maybe doesn’t exactly have the most ripped pecs, or maybe he has skinny little legs that don’t cut a nice figure in skin-tight pantaloons. As Balzac once put it, in the 1830s “men still showed off their bodies, to the great despair of the thin or badly-built.” What’s a fashionable fellow to do to achieve an unrealistically curvy hourglass silhouette? Why, the same thing his girlfriend would do: he’ll corset what’s sticking out and he’ll pad what’s sunken in.

^^^A caricature showing a dandy. Note the strange corset bodice (it bears more resemblance to a female corset of the time than a male one). His coat sleeves are going to be so tight, he can’t even have shirt sleeves underneath, just a little false dickey and cuffs.

^^^Not only corseting, but also padding for sadly skinny hips, calves, and shoulders.

^^^Lampooning the “feminized” and highly corseted fashion popular with military officers of the period. The cartoonist seems to saying that this lancer is so gussied up that he looks like a pretty young lady!

^^^A typical shape for a male corset. It’s cut like a cummerbund, basically, and unlike a lady’s corset, it pretty much only concerns itself with squishing in the belly. It uses vertical strips of either boning or cording to shape the body, and it’s fastened in the back with loops and buttons. As the pictures above seem to indicate, it would have been worn over the shirt and under the waistcoat.

More male corsets:

^^^Front.

^^^Back fastening.

^^^Front.

^^^Unfastened.

^^^These pants seem to have a built-in corset function, with boning and laces sewn right into the pants.

Courfeyrac and other super-fashionable gentlemen would have been all over these man-corsets, but it’s not clear to what extent the average guy used them. I’m guessing the average guy back then wasn’t too different from the average guy now–he dressed up when he needed to (i.e., to get laid), and didn’t worry about it all the rest of the time.

So, to sum up:

Gorgeous pants make for gorgeous silhouettes. (And man-corsets don’t hurt either.)

When you see what fashionable guys have to look forward to ca. 1840, it makes ca. 1830 look mild by comparison:

Yikes!

#1820s fashion #1830s fashion #writeblr #writerblr #historical fiction

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