Aristocrats (1999) is a BBC miniseries adaptation of the non-fiction biography of the four Lennox sisters: Caroline Fox, 1st Baroness Holland (1723–1774), Emily FitzGerald, Duchess of Leinster (1731–1814), Lady Louisa Conolly (1743–1821), and Lady Sarah Lennox (1745–1826). All four were descended from an illegitimate son of King Charles II and the daughters of the Duke of Richmond, and so highly placed in mid-18th century English society. And three had very interesting lives, as the mini-series demonstrates: Caroline defied her parents and married leading politician Henry Fox, Emily married the rich Irish Duke of Leinster, while Sarah was rumored to be married to the heir to the throne, the future King George III, but didn’t and went on to have a turbulent life.
Most important, the costumes, by James Keast, are very close to spot-on for the period, covering the 1740s through the 1780s, with some obvious budgetary limitations (in that many costumes are worn for “decades”). I had hoped that this post would be short, because didn’t I discuss everything I needed to when covering episodes one and two? Well, five million screencaps later, apparently no I didn’t. These episodes cover from 1759ish to 1769ish, and there’s plenty of interesting things to talk about, especially court dress!
Once again, let’s focus on the four main characters, and then discuss some other aspects of these two episodes!
Sarah Lennox
We really only saw her as a toddler previously, with a brief glimpse of grown-up Sarah (Jodhi May) at the end of episode two. Well, now she’s off to London to enter society under her elder sister Caroline’s wing, get entangled with the Prince of Wales, and then things get complicated.
To show her naiveté, Sarah starts off in tepid colors and hairstyles that make her look young. She’s pretty much always team sacque gown (aka “robe à la française” in French), which tracks as this was one of the most fashionable/popular styles of this era. First in blue:
And then the same fabric, but in beige?
However, she has a flair for acting, and plays the “rural ingenue” in these exposed stays and printed cotton petticoat:
She later is dressed in “rural simplicity” by her family in order to attract the Prince of Wales:
Both outfits call to mind the romanticized, stylized “peasant” dress worn in paintings by François Boucher:
As well as this fancy dress costume worn by the real life Emily Lennox:
However, the big guns come out when she’s presented at court. There are several court scenes, and at first I didn’t realize that she wears a different gown at this first one, because her elder sister Caroline doesn’t. But, she’s in a white damask sacque/française with embroidered stomacher, metallic lace cuffs, tiara, and giant feathers:
And here’s where I went down the rabbit hole, because, DID English people wear sacques at court in this era? The short answer I can give you is, I’m not sure; they did in the 1780s and beyond, but no source is clear about the 1760s. The longer answer is, the English were known for wearing a stylized version of the mantua at formal court functions. The late 17th/early 18th-century mantua was a fashionable gown that started as a dressing gown with looped-back skirts (for more orientation to all of these styles, see my rant about back-lacing):
As the mantua went out of fashion for everyday, it hung around for court wear with increasingly wider hips and that looped-back train pulled as far back as it could go and stylized into a carefully folded train:
I checked my main sources for this period, including Aileen Ribeiro’s Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, where she talks about mantuas being popular for court wear in England but never specifies about whether sacques were eventually worn; and Anne Buck’s Dress in Eighteenth-Century England, in which she writes that in 1761, “For these ceremonial occasions the usual court wear was a mantua and petticoat.” Sacques certainly became fashionable mid-century for “full dress,” but there’s a difference between formal wear (parties, weddings, etc.) and Actual Court Functions.
I did some poking around in primary sources, and found in The Lady’s Magazine (the very first substantial English fashion magazine) wrote in 1770 (its first year of publication):
- “Account of the Ladies Dresses on his Majesty’s Birth-Day” frequently refers to “petticoats,” occasionally to “mantua” or “train.” This interests me, because the focus is on the skirt (petticoat = underskirt, train = overskirt) with very few references to the actual gown! A mantua would indeed be the actual gown, FYI.
- “Account of the principal Ladies’ Dresses on the Queen’s Birth-Day at St. James’s” refers more frequently to “mantuas.”
Fast forward to the 1780s, and I can find sources for sacques worn at court in several key diaries — but these are twenty-plus years later:
- Charlotte Papendiek was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte. Her diary records an evening musical performance benefitting the Royal Society of Musicians that took place around 1784: “Evening dress [was worn], with the exception of feathers, which were forbidden. The Queen wore the same character of dress as that in which she appeared at the ancient concerts — a sacque, which had a bodice to fit… The part of the gown that denoted the sacque was the fulness required for the back breadth which was laid in deep double plaits between the shoulders, and only once confined about an inch below the original tack, and hung loose from there…” (Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte). It’s interesting that she’s bothering to describe the back pleats of the sacque as though they are novel; the gown certainly was worn in England since the 1730s, but maybe it’s new as court wear? That being said, I’m not sure this event counts as a Formal Court Event.
- Fanny Burney’s (Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe to Queen Charlotte) diary and letters make several references to sacques worn at formal court functions, including, in 1788, “At St. James’s [palace] I can never appear, even though I have nothing to do with the Drawing-room [a formal court event], except in a sacque : ’tis the etiquette of my place” (The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay [Frances Burney]). Again, however, this is decades later.
That digression over (we’ll talk more about court dress when we get to Caroline), Sarah gets a much more gorgeous sacque that she wears to two more court functions. It appears to be embroidered all over with silver beads, and has a beautiful embroidered stomacher.
Now, my next rabbit hole is, did they indeed wear giant feathers at court like these in this period? I had thought of them as a Regency (1790s onwards) phenomenon. According to Buck, discussing lady’s headdresses, “Feathers appeared with the lace and jewels from the 1750s and perhaps earlier, but according to Lady Louisa Stuart the Queen expressed such dislike of the towering plumes of the fashionable head-dresses of the 1770s that ‘for two or three years no one ventured to wear them at Court, except some daring spirits either too supreme in fashion to respect any other kind of pre-eminence, or else connected with the Opposition and glad to set her Majesty at defiance.'” Buck does confirm that by the 1790s, high feathers had “become the orthodox head-dress.” Got any input?
Otherwise, Sarah gets a NUMBER of sacque gowns, not all of which I have the fortitude to capture, and her hair mostly improves:
Sacques were indeed The Most Popular dressed-up dress, as demonstrated by this etching of the real Sarah (bottom) and her relation Lady Susan Fox-Strangways (in the window) with Caroline’s son, Charles James Fox:
That image also demonstrates the very simple hairstyles worn in this era by Englishwomen. They’re usually close to the head, and MAYBE get the added bonus of a twist of curls up the side of the head:
Sarah also has a riding habit in a patterned fabric with velvet — I discussed riding habits in my last post:
And a quilted jacket with a hood:
That jacket reminds me a lot of this Danish ensemble:
Her hair starts to improve as things go on, in that it feels less “romantic” and more historically accurate:
When she goes to France, her hair gets even higher – I hope this is meant to be 1766 or later:
Compare to the real Sarah several years later in what I think is a misdated portrait:
And compare to Queen Charlotte’s hair over the years — it’s really only in 1766-67 that height starts happening:
And finally, that last dress gets clunky criss-cross lacing which annoys me — read more about why in my Snark Week spiral lacing rant:
Caroline Lennox
Caroline is meant to be aging in these episodes, so she gets various touches to make her look more fuddy-duddy. Her gowns often have fur trimmings:
Which was absolutely A Thing, especially for winter wear:
I frequently got excited about her hair, as it’s often VERY tête de mouton/bichon frisé, the two most popular French hairstyles (also worn in Great Britain) that are close to the head with structured curls:
She’s often shown wearing more accessories than the other ladies, I think to age her:
Those kind of frilly accessories are spot-on for the real Caroline, but also very fashionable:
They also start aging her by giving her caps, near the end of the episode adding lappets, the long lace streamers:
Lappets were indeed fashionable in this era — here’s Marie-Antoinette with black ones:
Of course the big guns come out for Caroline’s silver court gown, which she wears in all the court scenes. It looks like a sacque from the front:
But in back, it’s actually fitted and laced:
Now, before any of us freak out and yell “HISTORICALLY INACCURATE BACK-LACING!” (which is, honestly, what I think this is… but let’s give some benefit of the doubt) — there WERE a very few women who, for a very few occasions, wore French-style court dress which indeed was cut like a corset and laced closed in back. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell has done some research on an extant English court bodice at the FIDM museum that was worn at George III’s coronation, and she writes,
“Although the English stiff-bodied gown was worn much less frequently and by fewer people than the French grand habit (the less formal mantua being the preferred court dress), its construction and ornamentation seem to have been virtually identical. Technically, it was not a gown at all but a three-piece ensemble consisting of a boned, back-fastening bodice, with bare shoulders and very short sleeves, to which were affixed ruffles of lace; in addition, a petticoat and a train were attached at the waist, all heavily embellished with metallic trimmings designed to sparkle in candlelight and enhance the effect of the copious jewels worn with or, often, sewn onto the gown. While grands habits of all colours could be seen at foreign courts, royal women typically wore cloth of silver or gold on important ceremonial occasions. The chief difference was one of semantics, for in England, instead of the grand habit, this costume was known by several related names: the stiff-bodied gown, the corps de robe, the robe de cour, the ‘court robe’, or the ‘royal robe’, so-called because it was, in general, reserved for use by female members of the royal family. But there were rare circumstances in which lesser mortals were allowed to don England’s royal robe: specifically, when they served as bridesmaids or train-bearers at royal weddings and coronations” (“Diagnosing the Dress of the Queen’s Train-Bearers at the Coronation of George III.” Costume, vol. 47, no. 2, 2013, pp. 145–60).
Here’s that surviving bodice – note how it has short sleeves and waist tabs:
And we can see what this type of ensemble would have looked like on the real Queen Charlotte:
I do quibble with the not-court-style sleeves on Caroline’s bodice, but the overall effect IS gorgeous and I think Caroline won the tiara lottery:
Otherwise, we get more sacques:
I was liking this green dress, which I assumed was another sacque:
Until horror of horrors, she turned around and we’ve got not just historically inaccurate back-lacing but also misaligned spiral lacing!
Emily Lennox
Emily is portrayed as a mature woman, focused on her children. At court, she too brings out the big guns with a gorgeous gold embroidered gown, which we never see from the back:
She also gets many, many sacques:
You really don’t see edge-to-edge bodice closures until the mid-1770s:
Luckily the rest are great:
Louisa Lennox
We see a LOT more of Louisa in this episode as she forms the linchpin between her sisters’ drama. For court, she wears what could be considered another stiff-bodied gown like Caroline’s:
But come on, that bodice doesn’t have tabs:
She also gets several sacques, and her hair starts listing up into a pompadour that’s sort-of 1780s, sort-of Gibson Girl:
She also gets one of the few nightgowns (the English term for what the French called the robe à l’anglaise, with stitched down pleats in back):
The open-fronted, stitched-down-pleats-in-back nightgown was super popular in England (hence why the French called it the “robe à l’anglaise” when they adopted it! Again, see my back-lacing rant if all these style specifics are confusing you):
I’m not sure what this dress is, but I liked the fabric and the multicolor embroidered fichu:
She’s also got a silver Brunswick-type outfit, which was essentially a short (jacket-length) sacque with a hood often worn for traveling:
Here’s a real Brunswick to compare:
And she gets a hooded cloak for traveling:
Which she wears over a VERY 1780s, edge-to-edge closed bodice robe à l’anglaise (I guess she too is psychic?):
Cecilia Lennox
Youngest sister Cecilia is a minor character, but she is finally old enough to wear interesting things — mostly this nightgown with a fitted back that went by too quicky to screencap, but it looks like Louisa’s above:
She also gets this blue gown, with perfect tête de mouton curled hair:
The tête de mouton hairstyle was particularly fashionable in France, but worn in Great Britain as well:
New Duchess of Richmond
Another minor character is the new (3rd) duchess of Richmond, Lady Mary Bruce. She lurks a lot in the background and plays a key role in Sarah’s life.
When Sarah goes to France, Mary (who goes with her) gets high, late 1760s hair, which none of the other characters get:
Compare to the real Lady Mary in 1770:
A Few Other Characters
And, just a few thoughts:
And Finally…
Stay tuned next week, when we’ll look at the final two episodes of Aristocrats!
Got any thoughts on Aristocrats, especially the court dress?
Find this frock flick at:
