1800 White Muslin Dress, European. Empire style, high-waisted dress of light weight cotton, with softly falling gathered long skirt and with a train. via Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California, USA. collections.lacma.org

The type of dress worn across Europe in the early 1800s. This sort of high-waisted dress would have been worn by Jane Austen and her contemporaries in England. The Empire waist gown defined women’s fashion during the Regency Era. ‘Empire’ is the name given in France to the period when Napoleon built his French Empire. High-waisted, loose gowns were adopted by the aristocracy as a symbol of turning away from the fussy, elaborate and expensive clothing worn in the 1700s.