What Colonial Americans Wore in 1776

Colonial America during the American Revolution is often framed in a certain look: powdered wigs, tricorn hats and bonnets, ruffled shirts and long gowns. It’s an image shaped as much by popular culture as by the surviving portraits of wealthy colonists. But the clothing worn by most Americans in 1776 was far more utilitarian than the version most people picture today.

Summer Anne Lee, a faculty member at the Fashion Institute of Technology and author of the forthcoming book Presidential Fashion: An Illustrated History, says while the styles we associate with the era are real, they represent only a slice of colonial society. “The idea of the powdered hair and the tricorn hat and the ruffles and the heels was present in America in 1776,” Lee says, “but maybe not as universal as Hollywood might have us imagining.”

Revolutionary‑era dress was shaped by class, occupation, climate, access to imported textiles and, for many, enslavement. “Most American colonists were dressing for work and not dressing for portraits,” Lee says.

For working‑class colonists, who made up a large portion of the population, clothing was built to last. “Working class people [were] more focused on function versus display,” Lee says. High-end fashion existed, she adds, but it was “quite exclusionary,” designed to signal social rank instantly.

According to historical costumer Leslie Lambrecht, who previously worked at North Carolina’s Tryon Palace, men’s everyday clothing followed a consistent structure across the 18th century: a coat, a waistcoat (the era’s name for a vest), a shirt and knee breeches.

Shirts were linen, long‑sleeved and generously cut. “They were always long sleeves with a button at the cuff, and the sleeves were very full,” she says, adding that ruffles, so often emphasized in film, appeared only on dress shirts. A frock coat served as a semiformal outer layer.

Breeches “stopped just below the knee with a cuff and buttons,” Lambrecht explains, while longer trousers “were not often worn by the average man,” appearing mostly among lower‑class laborers and boys. Stockings rose above the knee and were held up with garters, and shoes had modest heels and buckles. Rounding out the look, tricorn hats were common but not universal; some people wore round hats instead.

Women’s clothing involved more layers. According to Lambrecht, stockings and a linen shift formed the base. Over that came stays; these semirigid undergarments supported the torso “similar to a corset, except it stops at the waist” and wasn’t pulled tight, Lambrecht says. Women who couldn’t afford stays wore a quilted version called a jump. Properly fitted stays and jumps, she adds, were “as comfortable as a modern bra.”

Women tied on pockets under their skirts, added petticoats for warmth or shape and often wore a bum roll to extend the silhouette, Lambrecht explains. A short gown, often accompanied by an apron, served for housework, while a fitted day gown was worn for visits or errands. “This was closely fitted in the top but fell in many pleats as a skirt,” she says. “It was often an open-front skirt.”

Hair was typically worn up and covered. “Only if you were going someplace special would you not wear a cap,” she says.

Despite these conventions, Lee says clothing varied sharply across social class and geography. Rural farmers wore durable fabrics, such as coarse linens and wools, that were suited to field labor. Urban merchants, meanwhile, had access to finer imported textiles and better tailoring, especially in port cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Women in the merchant class often wore lace, ribbons and decorative trims, and elite colonists closely followed London fashion, especially in cooler months.

Climate also mattered. In hot, humid Virginia, even wealthy men sometimes ditched wardrobe formalities. “It would get so hot that they would have to wear just white linen or even go without” coats and wigs, Lee says.

For enslaved people, clothing was controlled by enslavers, who might provide full outfits or only raw materials. According to Lee, field laborers dressed in rough, utilitarian garments, while domestic workers wore clothing appropriate for “polite society.” Men often wore the family colors of their enslaver. Lee points to a 1790s George Washington family portrait showing an enslaved man in a red suit, reflecting Washington’s chosen palette.

Yet, enslaved people found ways to express individuality. According to Colonial Williamsburg, they dyed fabrics, styled their hair with kerchiefs and sewed patches and pockets onto their clothing.

If modern closets are overflowing, colonial wardrobes were the opposite. “People during this time period [had] very small wardrobes,” Lee says. Nearly all textiles were imported from Britain, making them, rather than labor, the most expensive part of clothing. That meant most working‑class colonists owned only one or two outer garments and several launderable undergarments, she adds.

Clothing was repaired, altered, restyled and passed down repeatedly. Inheriting a relative’s coat meant tailoring it to fit, and wearing patched garments was normal.

“Just the life cycles of those garments is something that I think [would] feel foreign to a lot of people today,” she says.

Clothing around the time of the Revolution also carried political weight. According to Colonial Williamsburg’s magazine Trend & Tradition, late 1760s tensions with Britain led colonists to embrace homespun textiles. Wearing these domestically produced fabrics was a way to show support for nonimportation agreements and one of the methods of colonial resistance.

Homespun was “a symbol of American independence and American self-reliance,” Lee says, as domestic production could not match the quality or affordability of British imports. Still, it became a powerful statement. She points to the plum-colored homespun suit that George Washington wore at his 1789 inauguration. Woven in Hartford, Connecticut, the fabric was so finely made that newspapers mistakenly reported it was imported.