Déshabillé
Women’s garment of varied shape, loose and almost always long, made in a light fabric and worn over a nightgown made from the same fabric. It is worn when getting up in the morning or when ready for bed in the evening. The Gazette du Bon Ton doesn’t allow it to be worn outside the bedroom. With this garment, which appeared in the early 1800s, one can see the meaning of the term — although it did appear before that, in 1677 — used for that comfortable freedom provided by a man’s dressing gown, short or long, with sewn-on pockets, loosely fastened with a belt, which in the 1700s took on the characteristics of an everyday article of clothing for the home. The 1772 pamphlet written by Dénis Diderot, Regrets About My Old Dressing Gown, in which the garment’s comfort is praised together with its long service (“Why didn’t I keep it? It was made for me and I was made for it”), is justly famous. A synonym for déshabillé is peignoir, from the Latin pectinare, but only in its 18th century form as a large dressing gown with long sleeves in a light and warm wool, the equivalent, for women, of a man’s dressing gown, although the male garment is worn in more parts of the house. In the early 1800s, in fact, the term peignoir also indicated a bathrobe in which one wrapped oneself after a bath.