Dress

A dress (also frock, gown) is a garment consisting of a skirt with an attached bodice or with a matching bodice giving the effect of a one-piece garment.

In Western culture, dresses are usually considered women's clothing.

The hemline dresses can be as high as the upper thigh or as low as the ground, depending on the whims of fashion and the modesty or personal taste of the wearer.

Dresses in the 19th century

Dresses increased dramatically to the hoopskirt and crinoline-supported styles of the 1860s; then fullness was draped and drawn to the back by means of bustles. Dresses were generally one-piece garments from 1800 through the 1840s; after that it became common for a dress to be made as a separate skirt and bodice, and many dresses had a "day" bodice with a high neckline and long sleeves, and an "evening" bodice with a low neckline (decollete) and very short sleeves.

Throughout this period, the length of fashionable dresses varied only slightly, between ankle-length and floor-sweeping.

Victorian fashion, Artistic Dress movement, Victorian dress reform.

Dresses in the 20th and 21st centuries

File:Kodak dress 1920s rene lelong.jpg

Dress of the mid-1920s: Ad by René Lelong.

Beginning around 1915, hemlines for daytime dresses left the floor for good. For the next fifty years, fashionable skirts became short (1920s), then long (1930s), then shorter (the War Years with their restrictions on fabric), then long (the New Look), then shortest of all during the 1960s, when skirts became as short as possible while avoiding exposure of underwear, which was considered taboo.

Since the 1970s and the rise of pants as an option for all but the most formal of occasions, no one dress length has dominated fashion for long, with short and ankle-length styles often appearing side-by-side in fashion magazines and catalogs.

Styles of dresses of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries include:

Basic types:

Shirtwaist, a dress with a bodice (waist) like a tailored shirt and an attached straight or full skirt
Sheath, a fitted, often sleeveless dress, sometimes without a waistseam (1960s)
Shift, a straight dress with no waist shaping or seam (1960s)
Sundress, a sleeveless dress of any shape, with a low neckline in a lightweight fabric, for summer wear
Tent, a dress flared from above the bust, sometimes with a yoke (1960s)

Fads and fashions:

Chanel's Little Black Dress (1920s and on)
Tea gown, a frothy, feminine semiformal dress
Dinner dress, a semiformal dress worn when fashionable people "dressed for dinner" (men in tuxedos or dinner jackets, even at home)
Coronation gown, formal wear for coronations
Evening gown or formal, a long dress for formal occasions
Ball gown, a long dress with a full, sweeping, or trained skirt for dancing
Kitty Foyle, a dark-colored dress with contrasting (usually white) collar and cuffs (1940s, after a dress worn by Ginger Rogers in the movie of the same name)
Cocktail dress, a semiformal party dress of the current street length (1950s and sporadically popular since)
Granny gown, an ankle-length, often ruffled, day dress of printed calico, cut like a Victorian nightgown, popularized by designer Laura Ashley (late 1960s-1970s)

How dresses are worn today

In Europe and America, dresses are worn by females of all ages as an alternative to a separate skirt and blouse or trousers. Outside the U.S., higher-status women (judges, cabinet ministers, physicians, corporate executives et al.) generally avoid wearing trousers in public.^{[citation needed]} Conversely, women at the lowest socio-economic levels often do not own dresses.

Potential dresses include them being either too long or cumbersome for the performance of some physical activities such as climbing ladders, that their use can run contrary to the individual or wider public sense of modesty and decency, especially given their potential to intentionally or accidentally expose the wearer's underwear, or some styles, particularly those with back closures, can be harder or even impossible to don or remove by the person wearing it.

Dresses however can be cooler and less confining than many trouser styles, and they are still very popular for special occasions such as proms or weddings.

Underwear

Dresses are, like other outer clothing, usually worn with underwear. A wearer of a dress is likely to wear a form of panties as innerwear, though depending on the occasion, type of material, and type of skirt for modesty one may wear a slip over the panties.

One may usually wear a bra, but for modesty wearing a camisole / vest or full slip is also an option for the top.

References

Oxford English Dictionary
Brockmamn, Helen L.: The Theory of Fashion Design, Wiley, 1965.
Picken, Mary Brooks: The Fashion Dictionary, Funk and Wagnalls, 1957. (1973 edition ISBN 0-308-10052-2)
Tozer, Jane, and Sarah Levitt: Fabric of Society: A Century of People and Their Clothes 1770-1870, Laura Ashley Ltd., 1983; ISBN 0-9508913-0-4

External links