Another week of museum activities has come and gone and so today I would like to turn our attention to nightclothes! I mentioned last week in the post about bleaching that a number of the white garments were nightgowns. After spending some time photographing everything and marvelling at the different styles and intricacies of sleeping garments, I decided to write a little piece on their history.
As a general rule, we do not know a great amount about sleepwear, probably because of how private a thing it was until relatively recently. This also indicates, however, that for a long time, at least in Western Europe, there may not have been much consideration of specific clothes for sleeping or that people primarily just slept naked. However, our modern understanding of the nightgown began to emerge in Western society as early as the 17th century[i]. The style of a long, T-shirt shaped garment was adopted by Britain from the Banyan in India. At that time, the Banyan took the form of a long, house robe type garment made of a heavier, often colourful fabric with wide sleeves. It was worn in the morning before dressing for the day or in the evening after removing constricting day clothes. This type of nightgown was worn primarily by men and was not necessarily considered as exclusive nightwear but rather as a sort of informal dressing gown that one might wear around the house or in a situation that did not require formal dress.
Moving along through history, the idea of specific sleepwear began to develop in western Europe by the late 1600s as higher class women began to wear chemise - like gowns, or nightshifts, to bed. In other classes of society, 17th and 18th-century women were far more likely to wear a white nightgown made of linen, the quality of which would denote socioeconomic status. It was important for the nightgown to be functional and to absorb moisture as well as add an extra layer of warmth on cold winter nights. It was also important that it was easy to clean and as such white was the colour of choice for most nightgowns. Even though the nightgown was now exclusively for sleepwear, most nightgowns retained a modest cut and were fairly unadorned by decoration. When negligee was introduced in France in the 18th century, nightgowns and shifts began to become more tailored and a certain elegance when dressing for bed became desirable as the waist was brought in and it became more typical for lace to be included. Many nightgowns from this period and even right up until the 1930s retained a sort of out-of-bed acceptability in terms of style even though they were not meant for such a situation. Even with the changes that the introduction of negligee brought, however, there were not many major changes in terms of decoration, length, or cut were made to the typical English woman’s nightgown as too much embellishment or too tight of a cut was considered to edge on moral depravity.
By the late 1800s, the first movements away from the strict Victorian morality began to take hold and expand and after 1870 the length, cut, and adornment of nightgowns changed dramatically. Lace and adornment were added to the collars and cuffs, and nightgowns could include any number of decorations from ruffles and frills, to embroidery and cut-outs. The addition of this adornment was shocking to some of the strict Victorian sensibilities as it implied that nightgowns might be seen by people outside the bedroom. However, the flow of movement away from the nightgown as something exclusively modest and unadorned continued. By the 1920s, following the changes induced by the First World War, the ongoing women’s movement and the first sexual revolution, nightgowns of different cuts, colours, and fabrics began to gain popularity. The peachy colour seen here was particularly popular. Women in and beyond this era could choose from an elegant and silky gown, or a short and lacy slip, or the traditional long, white, cotton nightgown, among many others. The variability in style represented, in many ways, the changing roles and responsibilities of women and better reflected their own desires and interests than the white cover-alls of the days before. Over the next few decades, nightgowns took on all manners of styles and options and women embraced the varying choice of glamour, elegance, and sensibility that lay before them.
In the collection, we have a number of examples of different styles of nightgowns. Many of them, as you can see, are long, white, and relatively shapeless. Others have elaborate lace detailing but remain quite modest. Some, as we move into the 20th century, are smaller slips or long and elegant. Many of them are hand-made and extensively detailed. All of them indicate different things about the time period, what was deemed acceptable by society, and what was considered desirable by the wearer.
What kinds of things do you look for in a nightgown or sleepwear? Is it form over function or the other way around? What styles of nightgowns do you prefer?
[i] http://www.larsdatter.com/18c/banyans.html - https://fashion-history.lovetoknow.com/clothing-types-styles/origins-nightgown#:~:text=Nightgown%2C%20now%20the%20term%20for,historically%20a%20somewhat%20confusing%20term.&text=In%20the%20seventeenth%20and%20eighteenth,to%20church%20in%20their%20nightgowns.