1830s in Western fashion

In the 1830s, men wore dark coats, light trousers, and dark cravats for daywear. Women's sleeves reached their ultimate width in the gigot sleeve. Here, the boys (on holiday in the mountains) wear buff-colored belted knee-length tunics with yokes and full sleeves over trousers. The girls wear white dresses with colored aprons. The Family of Dr. Josef August Eltz, Austria, 1835.

1830s fashion in Western and Western-influenced fashion is characterized by an emphasis on breadth, initially at the shoulder and later in the hips, in contrast to the narrower silhouettes that had predominated between 1800 and 1820.

Women's costume featured larger sleeves than were worn in any period before or since, which were accompanied by elaborate hairstyles and large hats.

The final months of the 1830s saw the proliferation of a revolutionary new technology—photography. Hence, the infant industry of photographic portraiture preserved for history a few rare, but invaluable, first images of human beings—and therefore also preserved our earliest, live peek into "fashion in action"—and its impact on everyday life and society as a whole.[1]

  1. ^ "America's First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1862". Archived from the original on 2009-05-06. Retrieved 2009-03-26.