In the popular imagination, Jane Austen’s works are synonymous with Regency fashion in the early nineteenth century, where delicate yet feisty heroines with bosoms heaving from white muslin dresses are pursued by dashing, financially well-endowed heroes with leather-clad thighs and manly cloaks. High-waisted ‘empire’ line gowns and Austen-style costuming proliferate amongst ever-growing communities ranging from casual costumers to dedicated re-enactors. These neo-Regency aesthetic visions are themselves constructed on refigurings of dress in Austen’s day, influenced by later creators’ work – notably twentieth-century historical romance novelist Georgette Heyer – and the constant screen adaptations of Austen’s writing. The Netflix series Bridgerton has further increased the popularity of fantasy Regency styles. However, the twenty-first century’s Regency costume salad tossed from historic dress elements itself echoes the deep, Romantic interest in other times and places underlying many clothing styles during the Regency itself. This chapter examines these relationships between conceptions of modern and historical Regency style in dress, and how both epochs express a nostalgic, romantic, multilayered relationship with the past and the Other. I concentrate on British female clothing in the ‘long Regency’ period, c.1795–1825, as connected with Jane Austen, her legacy and fandom, and keep the modern focus on the Anglosphere. These years also represent what costume re-enactors understand as the Regency (Smith and Stannard 2016).

Austen, it can be persuasively argued, is neither a Romantic nor a romantic author. She questions and satirises contemporary Romantic tropes throughout her novels – although always with her trademark ironic ambivalence – and her plots equally undermine accepted literary conventions of love and marriage on the way to happily ever after. Through passionate fandom, constant screen adaptation and ‘cultish devotion’, however, she can now equally be argued as the epitome of romanticised writers (Wootton 2018, 537). Adaptations frequently remove Austen’s metaphorical tongue from her cheek and present seriously what she wrote ironically. Her work is always concerned with finding balance between calm, rational sense, and romantic, personal sensibility, which epitomises in prose what was happening in the wider cultural landscape.