Welcome to our Waistcoat Department.

The iconic image of the mid-18thcentury is that if a gentleman in a long-skirted waistcoat with pockets, but by 1777, waistcoat skirts were rapidly disappearing.

The colonies’ inability to clothe their army drove Congress to seek help from France and in February of 1777, directed its commissioners there to procure clothing:

[February 17, 1777] “Honorable Gentlemen - We have the honor to enclose you a resolve of Congress that is of great importance to the public service, which has suffered considerably the last fall, and during this winter, by the insufficient manner in which our Soldiers were clothed. Having much delay heretofore in getting cloth made up hath induced Congress to desire that forty thousand compleat (sic) suits of Soldiers cloaths (sic) may be sent. – In giving directions for this business Gentlemen, it may be necessary to inform that both the Coats & Waistcoats must be short skirted, according to the dress of our Soldiery, and that they should be generally (sic) for men of stouter make then those of France.”

Major General Israel Putnam appears on the left in a 1775-1776 engraving in a hybrid waistcoat, with skirts, but “straight cut,” without the upside down “v” at the bottom over the groin.

Lace on the buttonholes indicates that the coat is an early image. Putnam had a stroke in 1779 and retired.

It appears that the skirted waistcoat soldiered on as a garment for high status officers, as they are depicted in Trumbull’s “The Resignation of George Washington,” although these may just be the same ones they were wearing in Trumbull’s paintings of Trenton and Princeton depicting 1776. It appears that General and Staff officers (majors and above) wore the skirted version, while field officers (captains and below) wore the 1777 version.

Enlisted men, of course, wore what was issued to them. This was a simple government issued garment made out of hardwearing materials such as wool, hemp or flax, without pocket flaps nor pockets. Most reproduction waistcoats do not look like the originals, for the simple reason that they are not made like the originals.

Waistcoats consisted of a heavier fabric outer layer and a lighter fabric inner layer. The component pieces of the layer were assembled and the completed layers were just stitched together around the edges, leaving a raw fabric edge. With the advent of the sewing machine in the 1850s, two-layer garments became stitched together backwards, turned inside out to cover the raw edge, and then again stitched around the finished edges. This was possible because the sewing machine is 14 times more efficient than hand sewing. In other words, that which took 14 hours to do by hand only took 1 hour by machine. While turning the waistcoat meant that the edges were sewn twice, it was still much less work than hand sewing it once. Turning the garment could theoretically be done in the 18th century, but this doubled the amount of stitching and therefore was rare.

Welcome to our Waistcoat Department.

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