Chemise

A chemise or shift is a classic smock, or a modern type of women's undergarment or dress. Historically, a chemise was a simple garment worn next to the skin to protect clothing from sweat and body oils, the precursor to the modern shirts commonly worn in Western nations.

For the wall in fortification, see Chemise (wall).
Fashionable young man in early 16th-century Germany showing a lot of fine linen in a studied negligee. This gentleman has a band of "smocking" around the collar of his shift.

Etymology

The English word chemise is borrowed from the French word for shirt and is related to Italian: camicia and Spanish: camisa, all derived from the Latin: camisia, itself probably borrowed from a Celtic language. It’s also possible the word could’ve come from the Arabic word qameez.[1] The English also called the same shirt a smock.

History

The chemise seems to have developed from the Roman tunica and first became popular in Europe in the Middle Ages. Women wore a shift or chemise under their gown or robe; while men wore a chemise with their trousers or braies, and covered the chemises with garments such as doublets, robes, etc.

This chemise or shift of the 1830s has elbow-length sleeves and is worn under a corset and petticoats.

Until the late 18th century, a chemise referred to an undergarment. It was the only underwear worn until the end of the Regency era in the 1820s,[2] and was usually the only piece of clothing that was washed regularly.

In the eighteenth century, the primary female undergarment was the chemise or shift: a knee-length, loose-fitting garment of white linen with a straight or slightly triangular silhouette. The term chemise was first used to describe an outer garment in the 1780s, when Queen Marie Antoinette of France popularized a kind of informal, loose-fitting gown of sheer white cotton, resembling a chemise in both cut and material, which became known as the chemise à la reine.[3] In the 1810s, the term came also to be applied to an outergarment.[4] In Western countries, the chemise as an undergarment fell out of fashion in the early 20th century, and was generally replaced by a brassiere, girdle, and full slip, and panties first came to be worn.

Men's chemises may be said to have survived as the common T-shirt, which still serves as an undergarment. The chemise also morphed into the smock-frock, a garment worn by English laborers until the early 20th century. Its loose cut and wide sleeves were well adapted to heavy labor. The name smock is nowadays still used for military combat jackets in the UK, whereas in the Belgian army the term has been corrupted to smoke-vest.

A chemise, shift, or smock was usually sewn at home, by the women of a household. It was assembled from rectangles and triangles cut from one piece of cloth so as to leave no waste. The poor would wear skimpy chemises pieced from a narrow piece of rough cloth; while the rich might have voluminous chemises pieced from thin, smooth fine linen.

Modern chemise
A modern-day chemise

A modern chemise is generally a woman's garment that vaguely resembles the older shirts but is typically more delicate, and usually more revealing. Most commonly the term refers to a loose-fitting, sleeveless undergarment or type of lingerie which is unfitted at the waist. It can also refer to a short, sleeveless dress that hangs straight from the shoulders and fits loosely at the waist. A chemise typically does not have any buttons or other fasteners and is put on by either dropping it over the head or stepping into it and lifting it up.

As lingerie, a chemise is similar to a babydoll, which is also a short, loose-fitting, sleeveless garment. Typically, though, babydolls are looser fitting at the hips.

gollark: Obviously all this needs power, so there's a 16kRF/t TBU oxide reactor (machine-designed) on the left powering it. Thorium is supplied by the lens of the miner setup and it somehow runs net-positive.
gollark: The roof has an AE2 system glued to it which does the main crafting.
gollark: Gold is supplied by a lens of the miner setup with some processing hooked to it. That dumps into the 28 or so storage caches.
gollark: Since I don't want to mine for those constantly, the machinery near the back grows redstone (and slime, string, cacti) and also produces several million wooden planks a day as byproduct. I don't know *what* to do with those.
gollark: I also wanted advanced computers (and tape drives and tapes) and turtles, so we need gold and redstone.

See also

References
  1. Barber, Elizabeth Wayland (1994). Women's Work: The first 20,000 Years. New York: Norton & Company. p. 137. ISBN 0-393-31348-4.
  2. Scott, Lord. "An Introduction to Ladies' Fashions of the Regency Era". We Make History.
  3. "Chemise Dress". Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion. 2005.
  4. "Chemise dress". angelascartier.net.

Bibliography
  • Burnham, Dorothy (1973). Cut My Cote. Royal Ontario Museum. ISBN 978-0-88854-046-1.. A survey of shirt patterns over the ages, with diagrams.
  • Smith, Kathleen R. (February–March 1987). "A Plain Linen Shift: Plain Sewing Makes the Most of Your Fabric". Threads Magazine.

Further reading
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