Fashion

In clothes, also, fashions were set by the rich. They could afford a lot of new clothes, and could keep up with the changing styles. Fashion did not mean much to the poor, except when they could get hold of rich men's and women's cast-offs. For that reason, poor people's fashions were a few years behind the styles of the rich.

Women's dresses were always long, but their shape changed. Hooped petticoats in the mid-eighteenth century gave way to the straight 'Empire line' of 1800. By the 1850s, metal supports were back with the 'crinoline'. And this in turn was replaced by the 'bustle' in the 1870s.

Between 1750 and 1900, men's fashions changed much more than women's. They stopped wearing wigs before 1800. By the mid-nineteenth century, they were wearing trousers, not breeches. And suits, not very different from those that are worn today, had appeared by the 1880s. All this time, men's clothes had been growing less colourful - no men dressed in pale blue or yellow by 1900.

Walter Robson: Britain 1750 – 1900; Oxford University Press, 1993/2002, page 87