A Stitch in Time: how the fashion of yesterday informs today’s textiles

By Teresa Teixeira Greene

Every generation likes to imagine they are discovering new ideas, setting trends more innovative than any previous generation. Those left behind imagine the same: they established good taste in fashion for the first time in recorded history. Today is no different. Individuals from Gen Z are parting their hair in the center and rediscovering flared pants, while Baby Boomers are bemoaning the decline of appropriate formality.

But is this perception true? A new exhibit going into the Vermont History Museum's National Life Gallery will explore this question by examining four aspects of fashion over the course of the next year, with the first installation focusing on loungewear and athleisure. Both terms have wide definitions, but they do overlap. Each are designed with an eye for both fashion and comfort, meant for wear at home and during particularly informal activities, such as visiting close friends and running household errands.

Informality has always been a part of people’s lives, and for those who could afford it, their wardrobes. Historically, loungewear represented heightened informality; clothing only appropriate to be seen by members of one’s family and closest confidants. Allowing someone to see you in such a state was a sign of great regard. This principle was famously illustrated to an extreme degree in the French royal court, where duties such as dressing the monarch were given to the highest-ranking nobles, as opposed to servants.

For the rest of society, this informality was achieved simply by removing outer layers of clothing. For men in the eighteenth century, this could mean simply removing their coat and waistcoat, leaving their shirt (considered underwear) completely exposed. For those who could afford it, specialized garments such as banyans and wrappers (roughly equivalent to today’s robes) allowed the wearer to lounge at home in a structured way with close friends. These garments often conveyed one’s wealth; they were made of show fabrics such as silks or printed cottons, rather than the plain linen used for undergarments.

With the Industrial Revolution, textiles became far more affordable, and a greater number of people now had leisure time. One result was the creation of the tea gown, a garment made specifically for women to wear at home while entertaining their female friends. While ostensibly informal, they differed from housecoats and robes by being purely fashionable. Like housecoats and chore clothes, tea gowns were cut slightly looser than regular clothing, giving them the appearance of comfort and utility despite being worn over corsets and bustles, which maintained the wearer’s fashionable silhouette. Additionally, they were made from expensive, stylish fabric, rather than the easy-to-wash cottons of utilitarian chore clothes and undergarments. These tea gowns hold a significant place in fashion history. They are one of the first garments created specifically for this informal social sphere. Unlike wrappers, they were not created to be worn while performing household chores or lounging alone with immediate family, but specifically to be shown off to one’s peers.

Men were not exempt from this trend. Instead of tea gowns, men wore smoking jackets. Like tea gowns, these garments carried markers of comfort without the ease of care and thoughtlessness of true informality. At their inception, smoking jackets were used to keep ash and smoke from one’s clothing, so they were worn over formal clothing. However, because they were made of silks and other heavy, expensive fabrics, smoking jackets were often much more expensive than the clothing they were protecting. Unlike tea gowns, smoking jackets have persevered in both actual use and public imagination as a symbol of luxury.

Our current trend for athleisure and loungewear is widely attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, after everyone quarantined in their homes for months. Without social activities and work to get dressed up for, people prioritized comfort, favoring elastic waists and soft fabrics. Those are not the only concerns in designing clothes to fit the trend. With these fashions increasingly making their way out of the home by way of social media images and informal, in-person activities, they also reach for the same goal as tea gowns and smoking jackets: exhibiting wealth. Historically, garments could be identified as expensive, and thus symbolic of wealth, by the material they were made from. Today, synthetic and imitation fabrics make this difference difficult to spot by the untrained eye. A dress made from silk might look identical to one made of polyester, while hitting vastly different price points. The same could be said for coats made from wool and acrylic. Without those easily identifiable, visual markers for showing off wealth, we have moved to more representative messaging as well as explicit, legally protected markers such as visible branding.

The leisure clothing fashionable today trends more toward athleticwear than sleepwear, showing off the wearer’s perceived access to healthy activities as the markers of status, such as taking yoga classes. Many status brands, like those sponsored or designed by celebrities, are marketed more similarly to everyday clothing rather than activity-specific clothing, indicating their intended use as leisurewear over gym wear.

It can be easy to recognize the inspirations and influences of history within the past while still viewing the present as separate from, and thus unaffected by, it. In this exhibit, we hope to use the things you interact with the most—your clothing—to show how we are all part of our collective history.

This article originally appeared in the Summer/Fall 2023 issue of our member magazine, History Connections. To get it and support the Vermont Historical Society, sign up as a member.