Pre-1900 uniforms

The Habit, in Eleven Pieces

Laid out complete and numbered: eleven garments, each with a name, a rule governing when it is worn, and in several cases a meaning attached to the act of putting it on.

A comparative plate of religious habits, a drawing of a woman in a nun's habit, and a painted portrait of a nun

The Railwayman’s Coat

Heavy wool, high collar, company buttons. Built for standing on an open platform in February by companies that were, briefly, the largest employers on earth.

Three photographs of railway staff in uniform, Hungary, early twentieth century

Academic Dress and the Hood

A vestigial garment that stopped being clothing and became a code. The hood carries faculty, degree and institution in a system almost nobody inside it can fully read.

Two portraits in academic dress and a doctoral robe held in a museum collection

The Coat Was Black First

Medicine spent most of the nineteenth century in black frock coats and changed to white in about a generation. The switch was not about hygiene. It was a claim to be a science.

A seventeenth-century physician in black, a rail of white lab coats, and a surgeon in modern scrubs

The Nurse’s Cape

Lined in a colour that identified the school, worn outdoors over a uniform designed for indoors. The cape is the only part of Victorian nursing dress that survived into living memory.

A nurse's outdoor uniform in watercolour, an American Red Cross nurse photographed in 1918, and a 1944 uniform dress

Livery, and Who It Belonged To

A servant in livery wore their employer’s colours, cut from the employer’s cloth, on the employer’s account. The garment said whose you were before it said what you did.

Pre-1900