c called the cotte and a loose-fitting blouse called a rochet had evolved toward what by the nineteenth century had become the coat and vest. From the early seventeenth to late eighteenth century, men's highly decorated and large-sleeved coats and vests gave way to less complicated clothing in general and more tailored bodicewear in particular.
Women's clothing evolved less dramatically than men's from the medieval period through the sixteenth century but thereafter changed virtually from generation to generation. In the sixteenth century, the farthingale, or massive hoop skirt foundation, emerged in England and France, and as a practical matter it constricted the movement of the aristocratic women who wore it. Toward the end of the seventeenth century middle class women wore several layers of looser-fitting garments, though including a stomacher, or ornamented bodice cover; by the mid-eighteenth century the hoops returned, to be followed (in the post-Napoleonic era) by high-waisted Empire styles and construction of lightweight (e.g., gauze) but highly decorated dresses. The main tendency was toward increasing rather than decreasing elaborateness of women's dress.
It was in the eighteenth century that Western fashionable dress became structured by transformation, with England and France exchanging fashion cues. By 1700, France was the fashion leader in Europe. Laver cites the invention of the fashion plate in France in the 1770s--not, as in the modern period, designating a female clothes horse but engravings in magazines of what the well-dressed aristocrat would wear. As he puts it, "[I]t is hard for us to realize that, before the invention of the fashion plate, information concerning the latest fashion was so hard to come by that Marie-Antoinette's dressmaker found it worth while to travel the Continent every year in a huge berline containing dolls dressed in the latest modes de Paris." Modern fashion trends--i.e., the tendenc...