Tuesday Talk – Best Bib & Tucker: Dressing for Tea
Using extant garments, fashion plates, and fine art, Lynne Z. Bassett explores the rules that dictated how to dress for drinking tea in private and in company (having “tea” vs. having “a tea”), in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The development of the “tea gown” in the last quarter of the nineteenth century actually had more to do with signaling a woman’s values and politics than it had to with tea! Bassett’s lecture ends with the advice of today’s fashion influencers on how to wear and accessorize the “tea dress” —a nostalgic fashion evoking supposedly simpler times.
Speaker: Lynne Z. Bassett, Independent Fashion and Textile Historian
Image: “Morning Dress,” Ackermann’s Repository, February 1821
Additional Details
Institution or Organization name - Daughters of the American Revolution Museum
