FACULTY
Animating Jane Austen
By Hilary Davidson
Dress is essential to all culture, a shared experience that is part of what makes us human. To look at how people engage with dress in a particular time and place is to learn about their whole social sphere.
One person I’ve studied at great length is the author Jane Austen (1775–1817). Her six finished novels are masterpieces of English literature. Their screen adaptations are the main way British Regency-era dress of the early 19th century appears in popular culture. But how did Austen, her family, and society understand clothes in their own time? My research has taken 18 years so far and encompassed a spectrum of technology from the past to the future.
I began my research into Regency fashion by reconstructing the only known garment belonging to Austen, a pelisse, or coat-dress, held in the Hampshire Cultural Trust in the UK. By meticulously studying, copying, and remaking this garment, I learned a lot about Austen’s tall, thin figure and her tastes as a consumer. This led to writing three books about the period.
But I also kept researching. While I’ve made many physical copies of the pelisse, I wanted to explore virtual reconstruction and new insights the technology might offer. Working with my colleague Larissa King, assistant professor of Fashion Design and an expert in the CAD modeling program CLO 3D, we created a digital version of the pelisse for the summer 2025 exhibition A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250, held at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York. Larissa animated the pattern pieces coming together over a specially crafted avatar matching Austen’s physiognomy, and she added appropriate historical dress layers underneath, including stays (corset), petticoat and gown.
Working with James Pearce, emerging technologies manager at FIT’s FabLab, we even undertook motion capture to create more appropriate historical movement for our virtual Austen, to replace CLO 3D’s very modern runway strut. While we were ultimately unable to transfer our recordings to the final rendering, we learned a lot about the advantages and limitations of the emerging field of digital historical fashion reconstruction, and helped bring accurate fashion history research into another medium and mode of interpretation.
