Fashion in the Lady’s Magazine
The Lady's Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex was a hugely popular publication. It ran from 1770 to 1832 and boasted among its readers a number of noted writers, including Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë.
Arguably the first identifiably modern women's magazine, this monthly periodical carried an extraordinary array of contents, including essays on history, geography, science and philosophy, short stories and serialised novels, opinion pieces, travel writing, poetry, trial accounts and news and politics. This text-based content – some of which was repurposed from already published works, but much of which was penned by the magazine's reader-contributors – was accompanied by copperplate and later steel engravings. For the first thirty years of the magazine's history, the majority of these illustrations accompanied the magazine's fiction and domestic and international travel writing, although portraits of notable figures from past and present were also popular. Fold-out embroidery pattern inserts and music sheets also appeared in each monthly issue. From the 1790s, and reliably from 1800, the editors introduced regular fashion plates which accompanied journalistic reports describing the latest modish styles in London and across the Channel in Paris.
These glorious, and for the most part hand-coloured, engravings are among the features of the magazine best known to modern readers. But as noted above, they were something of a late addition. This was not for want of a market for such images. In the magazine's inaugural issue of August 1770, the editor asserted in an 'Address' to readers that the Lady's Magazine would make the most of its monthly publication schedule and distribution network to assist readers in their bid to keep abreast of the latest styles, especially if they lived outside of London. As a sign of things to come, this issue opened with an imposing image of a rather stern looking woman wearing full dress for the month (above left).
But the editor's promise of 'unremitting' attention to fashion proved rather hollow. Very few fashion plates prior to 1800 appear in the magazine (a notable exception from April 1771 is pictured above right). Brief fashion reports did sporadically appear in its pages over the decades, but engravings, the magazine's editors lamented, were expensive to commission. Keeping up with fashion's apparently relentless march and obtaining up-to-the-minute fashion intelligence made the task as complex as it was costly. Reader grumblings about the dearth of fashion coverage resurface throughout the periodical's first three decades, but the magazine insisted on keeping its price low (just 6d a copy for its first 30 years of publication).
In 1798, the launch of The Lady's Monthly Museum, a deliciously elegant monthly periodical with its own 'Cabinet of Fashion’ section, forced the editors to reconsider their position. By 1800 (and now costing 1s an issue to offset the production costs), hand-coloured fashion plates adorned every issue of the Lady's Magazine where they accompanied detailed descriptions of the gowns, shoes, accessories and hairstyles sported by the most modish.
This website contains several dozen of these plates from the Age of Bridgerton, or the Regency period if you like (1811-1819). We have made these images searchable by drawing out keywords from the verbal descriptions that accompanied the plates in the magazine. In the 1800s, the designers of the clothes pictured in the plates were rarely acknowledged, but this changed in the 1810s when the names of Mrs Bell (‘inventress’ of the Armenian divorce corset), Miss MacDonald and Miss Smith are offered up as badges of pride by the editors. Even rarer still are the engravings attributed to their creators, although where a designer (del.) or engraver (sculp.) is noted on a plate, we have included this information in our item entries.
If you would like to learn more about the Lady’s Magazine and fashion in this period, please follow the link above to 'Further Reader and Resources'.
We hope you enjoy tracking evolving styles in the Regency as documented in the Lady's Magazine.
Jennie Batchelor, June 2022