The Tea Gown

The tea gown was a delicious contradiction: an 'undress' garment that could be more fashionable than any formal dress. It was a loose, flowing gown worn at home in the late afternoon, and — uniquely among respectable Victorian garments — it was worn without a corset. A lady received her intimate friends for tea in it, but never a formal caller; the tea gown belonged strictly to the private hours of the house. This example, a silk twill with supplementary weft-float patterning, was sold by Liberty & Co. of London around 1887.

Liberty's, founded in 1875, made the tea gown its own. The store's soft 'art fabrics' and Eastern-inspired prints suited the Aesthetic movement's taste for the artistic and the flowing, and the tea gown became the uniform of the artistic set — a garment that looked as if it had stepped out of a Rossetti painting. Despite being informal, tea gowns could be lavish: trained, beaded, and trimmed, they were frequently the most expensive garment in a woman's wardrobe.

The tea gown occupied the new territory between day dress and evening dress, and it pointed straight at the future: the hostess gown, the negligee, and eventually the entire modern category of luxury loungewear — respectable undress, designed to be seen.