It’s quite clear that, for many attendees, a highlight of the Jane Austen Festival is the opportunity to wear any number of dazzling Regency-era costumes.
The showcase events bookending the week—the Promenade and the Masquerade Ball—both require Regency costume to participate. There’s been at least one person wearing a costume at every event I’ve attended thus far, and the only place period attire has been explicitly unwelcome is the archery workshop, for obvious reasons. Every so often you’ll see someone cross a street, casually decked out in muslin, spencer and bonnet.
If you came unprepared, the Festival offers some assistance. The Jane Austen Centre gift shop stocks reticules and fans. After the promenade, there was a “fayre,” where you could purchase dresses and a truly impressive array of accessories. Kid gloves, fans, trim, reticules, cameo broaches, bonnets, button hooks, feather plumes, shoes and even a £220 Georgian wig—you name it, they had it. If you’re more the D.I.Y type, there was a workshop on bonnet “cheats,” in which we were walked through the process of turning a modern straw hat into a fetching Regency bonnet (or at least, close enough). I put mine on my head and instantly felt like a Jane Austen character—unfortunately, I felt like Mrs. Jennings or another very silly person.
To really do it up right requires some prior planning, however. The festival’s website recommends a local costume rental shop. Or you might turn to somebody like Katy, the proprietor of the Etsy store Regency Regalia, which offers an absolutely astounding array of dresses and beautiful accessories in a wide variety of colors.
Katy is a lifelong vintage clothing enthusiast, rather than a Janeite. She attended theater school and worked on various film and TV projects, before attending the festival one year and thinking there might be an opportunity. She set out to offer a wide range of options—“not the fancy-dress level, not the entirely hand-sewn, but that middle ground that people can actually afford to buy something but at a level that’s hopefully quite historically accurate and looks right.” She tries to keep all of her machine sewing invisible, for instance. “I try and keep it so you can pull a full outfit. There’s a dress, there’s a bonnet—and get everything together. That’s the goal of the shop, is to make sure that people have got everything that they want in one place.”
Please note that her wares, while they are pitched to that middle-of-the-road buyer, still aren’t cheap. A blue cotton dress runs $135.33; purple silk will cost you $310.46. If you want that proper foundation, a set of short stays costs $156.03.
It’s her full-time job, and her customers fall into three basic categories: Austen enthusiasts, who are mostly concerned with getting the look; English country dancers, who want something breathable; and museum reenactment work, the most historically particularly. She also does custom work, including a couple of weddings a year. (The hardest part, she says, is explaining to the brides that “you will have to wear loads and loads of ugly underwear.”) The vast majority of her customers are American. Her most popular items tend to be her vintage shawls, which she buys directly from India, but she wishes it were bonnets, her favorite item. She makes them from scratch, buying shapeless woven straw and molding it on a hand-carved wooden block before trimming the result. Which makes $111.45 for one of her creations sound like a deal, frankly.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
