Middlemarch vocabulary

women's clothing for horseback riding.

Since the mid-17th century, a formal habit for riding sidesaddle usually consisted of:

A tailored jacket with a long skirt (sometimes called a petticoat) to match

A tailored shirt or chemisette

A hat, often in the most formal men's style of the day (since the Victorian era, a top hat with a veil has been worn)

Typically, throughout the period the riding habit used details from male dress, whether large turned cuffs, gold trims or buttons. The colours were very often darker and more masculine than those on normal clothes.

From Emily Post:

"[it] is like a uniform, in that it must be made and worn according to regulations. It must above all be meticulously trig and compact. Nothing must be sticking out a thousandth part of an inch that can be flattened in...Keep the idea of perfect clothes for men in mind, get nothing that the smartest man would not wear, and you can’t go wrong...Correct riding clothes are not fashion but form! Whether coat skirts are long or short, full or plain, and waists wasp-like or square, the above admonitions have held for many decades, and are likely to hold for many more"