By Susan/Miranda
There are few garments in Romance-Land more closely associated with historical heroes than shirts. Full-sleeved, snowy shirts, unfastened down to there and billowing freely in the wind like the hero’s tousled hair, the shirt remains a constant on the cover of almost every historical romance, as frequently torn asunder as any heroine’s hapless bodice. These shirts carry so much cultural baggage that they even inspired an entire episode of Seinfeld, when (of course) to please a woman, Jerry agrees to wear the humiliating “puffy shirt” on the Today show.
Yet just as the self-destructing gowns worn by romance cover-girls bear little resemblance to what the women inside our books are wearing, all those tacky polyester dress shirts don’t have much to do with a real 19th century gentleman’s wardrobe, either.
Our guys deserve better. And so, cheerfully, I’ll digress today from the usual Wenchly topics, and offer
instead a settling of the sartorial record.
For European men from the middle ages well into the late nineteenth century, the shirt wasn’t only an indispensable piece of clothing; it was a remarkably democratic one, too. The shirts worn by Henry VIII would have been cut exactly the same as the ones worn by his grooms, as well as by Thomas Jefferson, Beau Brummel, and Huckleberry Finn, too. These shirts were constructed from a series of rectangles, without a single curved seam. They pulled over the head with an opening slit to about mid-chest, and fastened with buttons at the throat. The book cover full-chest-bearing simply wasn’t possible. The sleeves were luxuriously full, about 24” wide or more, and pleated into the dropped shoulders and wrist cuffs. Additional gussets were placed under the arms for ease. The collar was another rectangle, soft and without interlining, whose final shape was determined by the neckcloth or kerchief tied around it.
These shirts were wide and long, reaching to the middle of the thighs. Suggested measurements from the 18th century calls for an ordinary sized shirt to be 60” around and 40” long! For most men, the shirt was an all-purpose garment, serving as a nightshirt and underwear as well (underdrawers still be rare and vaguely suspect.) The oversized nature of a shirt was also a protective barrier between the body and the more expensive (and harder to wash) coats, waistcoats, and breeches that went over it.
A gentleman’s shirt was generally made of linen, Holland linen being the most prized. Farther down the social scale, shirts would also be linen of a coarser grade, such as tow. (Cotton remained a luxury fabric until the middle of the 19th century, and not much used for shirts until then.) But forget that stiff, scratchy modern linen you have to take to the dry cleaner. Old-fashioned washed linen is a marvelously sensuous fiber. It’s long-wearing, easy to wash, and gets softer with wear. It holds the warmth of the skin gently, without getting sticky or clammy, yet it’s also remarkably cool in the summer. It’s the perfect stuff for our heroes to wear. If I could figure out a way to link to a touchable swatch, I would.*g*
And despite what the occasional hapless, carelessly-researched hero might be forced to wear, no self-respecting Englishman before 1900, rich or poor or in-between, ever wore a slippery woven silk shirt. Ever.
Social distinctions did show in a shirt’s details. The fine twist of the linen, the purity of the whiteness, the daintiness of the stitching and seaming, self-ruffles for the most fashionable, with a discreet monogram embroidered at the hem –– all were the marks of an expensive shirt. How that shirt was washed and pressed denoted a gentleman’s rank as well: the dozens of tiny vertical pleats pressed into the wide sleeves to compress them enough to fit into a narrow coat sleeve required the most accomplished laundresses using specialized irons. Among the middling sort, where clothes were still
made at home, women lavished much care and skill on their husband’s shirts, with needle-lace trim at the throat or whitework embroidery on the cuffs. A girl wasn’t declared marriageable until she’d demonstrated the sewing skill to stitch a man’s shirt, which her groom would wear on their wedding day.
But back to our cover-model. Not only should his chest be covered by his shirt, but that shirt in turn should be covered as well, by a coat or jacket and waistcoat. Two hundred years ago, a gentleman would no more consider walking about in company in his shirt-sleeves than a modern-day executive would appear on Wall Street in only his swim-trunks. It simply wouldn’t have been done. There was an excellent chance that the gentleman’s lady would have had to wait until they were wed to see his bare arms, let alone the other more private parts of him. If the gentleman is a Wenchly hero, at least we know the 
wait will be worth it.
So what’s your pleasure? We all like a handsome rogue on the cover. But do you prefer him with his anachronistic shirt barely hanging from his manly bare shoulders, or would you prefer him to be properly dressed? Do the bare-chested hero-covers make you sigh with admiration, or do they make you slip-cover your reading before you ride mass transit?