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- Court dress (as distinguished from court uniform mentioned in the section below) is worn by all men not entitled to court uniform or military uniform on all occasions of state where such are customarily worn. Court occasions include courts, state balls, and evening state parties, and levées. Courts are for the presentation of women, levées for men. Peers' robes were worn over normal dress, which gradually became stylised as the court suit. It was only from the late eighteenth century that court dress became fossilised. By the early to mid eighteenth century velvet was largely confined to court dress. Court dress was obligatory in Westminster Abbey for all not wearing official or lordly apparel. During the seventeenth century, gentlemen's court dress was largely determined by two related influences, the retention of out-dated styles, producing a distinctive form of dress, and an interest in military uniform. The first produced the court suit, a coat with tails, waistcoat and knee breeches, worn with silk stockings, and a formal court sword with a cut-steel hilt and embellishments, and bicorne hat. The court suit has undergone a number of changes since the eighteenth century. However, apart from changes in the cut of the sleeves and shoulders, there was little basic alteration until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, dress worn at court comprised gold and silver stuff, brocades, velvets and cloth coats. They were always embroidered, and worn with waistcoats generally of a different colour- gold or silver brocade, damask, silk or satin, heavily embroidered or laced in silver or gold. From the 1730s at least cloth was popular for court wear. By the 1780s dress was established as dark cloth or velvet, embroidered in silk or metal, single-breasted silk waistcoat (usually white), with the fronts curved away. From 1810, the Lord Chamberlain laid down regulations for court dress. In the nineteenth century court dress coats were commonly black, brown, dark green, purple, or blue. Breeches matched, or could be silk of a similar colour. The coat, and sometimes the breeches, were embroidered. The waistcoat was generally white satin, sometimes embroidered. These were worn with white silk stockings, black buckled shoes, and sword. A wig-bag was found on the back of the neck. A crescent-shaped chapeau-bras, known as an opera-hat, developed in the 1760s-70s from the three-cornered hat. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, this hat became known simply as the cocked hat. In the 1830s and 40s, the full court dress was sometimes decorated with embroidery, and sometimes not. Cloth was most general, but velvet was also used. For levées cloth trousers were worn. The court suit consisted of a coat and breeches of fine wool cloth, or increasingly from 1840, velvet, the waistcoat of white or cream silk, single breasted, without lapels and cut with points at the front. It would be embroidered in coloured silk in a conventional pattern of flowers.
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