First we need to remember, we are talking about the late Baroque and early Rococo, as well as about the Age of Enlightenment that influenced the humans’way to think and act.
In those years, the Italian way of dressing becomes a funny ostentation: colorful clothes, powdered hair, buttocks and legs in tight pants. It seems to be ordinary that elegance and finesse show a folly way of appearing at all costs: a crazy exhibition through bright colors and silky fabrics, usually for the most part decorated. And I would say, this folly show it’s fine to look at.
From the court of Louis XV arrived not only the gold and silver lace fashion, but also the use of wearing a bulky coat (probably already trendy in the period of Louis XIV), without sleeves, replete with overlapping collars, ready-to-wear, with black, blue or brown cloth, narrow waist and open in the back exactly to ride easily (from the English riding-coat -a coat to saddle- later turned into redingote).
Typical was l’habit à la française, or a dress with marsina – tail-coat -, a shorter and less wide redingote that both in France and in Italy would be worn until the end of the Ancien Régime, and also during the First French Empire. During the first decade tail-coat will have no collar and tight fitting in its upper part, from the waist down flaring into skirts by four or five pleats right below the knee. Following a garment under the coat, like a long gilet, with only some centimetres longer sleeves than the marsina – tail-coat. Usually the front was made of precious fabrics, embroidered and well decorated, while almost not visible was the back made of cotton or linen. The end of the first half of 1700s discovered pants, fitted with various long pockets, just under knee-length trousers, and here tied with ribbons.
Over the years and the advent of reason and enlightenment fashion turned. And over the second half of this century, fashion will be less decorative, less showy and more functional. At a certain moment sewing a dress wanted only one-third of the fabric that usually was available in previous decades. Around 1760, in Italy, as in Paris, European capital of fashion, military-style will have some success, marked by gold and silver stripes.
As in the beginning of the 1700s silk and luxury became trendy, so cotton and linen will be used at the end of the century.
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Italian version here.
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Pietro Longhi, Il precettore di casa Grimani.
Abito di cerimonie, Francia, 1729.
Alessandro Longhi, Ritratto di Antonio Renier, 1765.
Fra Galgario, Ritratto di cavaliere Costantiniano, 1740 ca.
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