When we say "Men's Victorian," what exact do we mean? It's true that some people mean one thing and others quite a different one. Some may mean clothing from the 19th century. To others, "Men's Victorian" may indicate only male clothing of the 1870s and 1880s. Others will include the clothing worn aboard Titanic or that from the show Downton Abbey in this classification although both are well after Victoria's reign and even after the reign of her son, Edward VII.

Queen Victoria inherited the throne of The United Kingdom on the 20th of June, 1837 at the age of 18. She reigned until her death on the 22th of January 1901. At the beginning of her reign, Great Britain was a small country based on agriculture. By the end, The British Empire had colonies on every continent on the globe and was an industrial giant. Needless to say, there was a lot of change going on in those years, not the least of which in men's fashions.

The frock coat was the height of fashion in the 1830s. With its puffy shoulders, narrow waist, and full skirts, the hourglass shape achieved by this garment was almost feminine. This was the dress of the privileged class in Dickensian London and indeed is the garment most worn by Pip in the recent PBS production of Great Expectations with Gillian Anderson once he is "made a gentleman".

The frock coat probably has its origins in military dress, but it is most easy to draw a parallel between it and the caped great coats worn by coachmen. As often happens in fashion, the everyday functional dress of the lower orders is adopted and elitized by the fashionable. Look what Marie Antoinette did for milk maids!

The 1830s represented a great change in the history of men's fashion. Previously, it was not unknown for men to wear brightly coloured silk coats or even cloth of gold. Indeed the most fashionable colour for men in the pervious century was pink. Adornment with embroidery of jewels was common for those who could afford it. The world's museums are full of exquistely decorated men's suits from that period.

But Victoria's time was different. The colour of men's coats became restricted to brown, tan, dark blue, black and other subdued colours. Cravats and waistcoats (vests) still used bright silks to display the wearer's taste, but compared to the previous time period, the look was far more subdued. Trousers also began to replace breeches as leg coverings. Men of the lower classes continued to wear breeches as did men while riding or hunting. This is a strange reversal from the late 18th century when French Revolutionaries earned the nickname sans coulottes because they wore trousers and not the breeches of the aristocracy. To put it in literary perspective, the frock coat and trousers would have been the typical dress of the wealthy men in Dickens' Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield. Yes, Scrooge would have worn a frock coat.

As the century progressed, changes made the frock coat less popular, and by the 1860s there was a new coat on the scene.

Like many Englishmen's coats, the morning coat derived from riding costume. On his morning ride, a gentleman didn't want to get the front edges of his frock coat dirty with contact with his horse. So English tailors created the "morning coat", a version of the frock coat that slopes open in the front below the button.

The morning coat became so popular in the second half of Victoria's reign that it made the leap from informal daywear to formal daywear. Lawyers and high-end shop assistants wore morning coats, as well as fashionable men about town. Today it remains the proper attire for a daytime wedding.

As sporting costume became more formal, there came a need for casual but fashionable dress. The Prince of Wales, Edward VII, was not only a notorious playboy but also a great sportsman. The story goes that during the 1870s Prince Edward was looking for a more comfortable outfit to wear while pursuing sport in the country and asked his tailors to make him a garment that would not restrict his movement. They complied with an easy-fitting jacket that expanded through the inclusion of box pleats on the front and back.

Typically worn with knickerbreeches for ease of movement of the legs in country climes, the Norfolk Jacket broke the mid-Victorian ban on flashy colours by introducing plaids and tweeds into the pantheon of acceptable fabrics for the fashionable. Men's fashion would never again attain the level of ostentatious display of the 18th century, but the Norfolk jacket and related sporting garments at least took men's wardrobes back from the precipice of black and brown.

In startling contrast to the drab colours of Victorian men's formal and informal dress stands Victorian Military Dress. Nothing says "British Military" quite like the scarlet tunic. Whether you think of the Redcoats of the American War for Indepedence or the “Thin Red Line” wearing scarlet coats while repelling Jacobite rebels, scarlet has been associated with the British Military for centuries. Even Prince William wore his scarlet dress tunic (Irish Guards) to his wedding in 2011.

In the illustration show at left, we see not the Full Dress uniform but "Mess" dress. This short jacket is a variation on Full Dress meant to be worn while dining ("in the mess"). Derived again from gentlemen's riding attire, the jacket is not meant to close at center front but a waistcoat fills the void. Because of its lack of length, Mess Dress was often worn with high-waisted trousers so officers would not have to bear the indignity of their shirts popping out when they bent forward. Unlike the Dress Tunic that varied only in decoration from regiment to regiment, different branches of the Army had widely varying versions of Mess Dress. Some had revers. Others did not. Collar styles differed as did the shape of the waistcoats.

Mess Dress was most recently seen in the TV series "Downton Abbey" and still is worn in very similar form to formal military dinners today.

But the true legacy of Victorian Men's Fashion that comes down to us today is the lounge suit. The lounge jacket (or modern suit jacket) began life back in the beginning of Victoria's reign as a loose-fitting short overcoat called a paletot. Various unfitted garments came into being throughout the 19th century and were known by the general term "sack", referring to their lack of shaped seams. The lounge jacket made one small improvement on the sack that allowed it to be accepted by the fashionable -- a single dart was made from under the arm to the waistline. This simple change made the jacket lean in appearance and appealed to the eye of the Victorian man of means. Always worn with trousers and a waistcoat, typically all three made from matching cloth, the lounge suit replaced the morning suit as informal daywear in the 1890s and continues as our most typical men's dress today.

© 2012 Kass McGann (article and photos)

Special Correspondent Kass McGann is the founder and owner of Reconstructing History.