My long buttoned coat is trailing through the puddles, my ringlets are unfurling in the drizzle, my corsets are killing me and I see no sign of Regé-Jean Page, who they promised would be part of the deal if I spent a day dressed up as a Regency lady to celebrate the return of Bridgerton.
Without Regé-Jean – or any other dashing Regency cove – on my arm, I am left to promenade alone along the beautiful Royal Crescent in Bath, idly wondering why hand mufflers ever went out of fashion.
It’s chilly and so I am also grateful the bloomers I am wearing are not the crotchless variety Bridgerton actresses must wear to stay authentic to the era.
For Regency knickers were designed – by men, I’d wager – to let women get passionate with least fuss. The show’s costume designer Ellen Mirojnick says: “They just had to lift their skirts.”
Tut tut. That kind of behaviour by ladies and gentlemen of, shall we say, easy virtue, made series one of Bridgerton, based on Julia Quinn’s novels, a hit, watched by 82 million people.
It focussed on Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) and her dashing Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page).
The second series follows Daphne’s brother Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) and his love triangle with Sharma sisters, Kate and Edwina (Simone Ashley and Charithra Chandran). It was released last Friday and racked up 193 million hours of viewing time in its first three days.
The sumptuous sets and costumes keep viewers hooked, and so to get the Bridgerton look I head to Bath Theatrical Costume Hire, an Aladdin’s cave with more than 30,000 costumes.
Owner Rusette Auton, 56, leads me through to their studio, telling me: “Welcome to the Tardis.”
I’m hoping she doesn’t think I’m here for a Doctor Who outfit, although, to be fair, I am travelling though time to the Regency era, from 1811 to 1820, when a mentally-ill King George III was unfit to rule and his son stepped in as Regent.
While Bridgerton’s bodice gowns, by Emmy Award-winning Ellen, show plenty of heaving bosoms, women in this period escaped the horrors of the earlier, more constrictive Georgian corsets, famous for creating impossibly tiny waists.
Instead, as Bath Theatrical’s costume designer Sylvia Spilsbury, 64, explains, Regency-style corsets celebrated the natural female form. Usually it would be a boned chemise, or one with a ribbon tied underneath to enhance the bust.
Well, after a failed attempt at getting a boned chemise over my chest, I opt for the latter. It’s surprisingly comfortable, if a bit tight.
Over my fetching cream bloomers, and petticoat skirt, I put on a purple dress and lavender coat, and accessorise with the furry muffler and a feathered headpiece.
With hair and make-up, again, Georgians lived dangerously, using deadly lead and mercury in their white face powder. Regency ladies preferred a more natural, and safer, look, says beautician Rebecca Rose Robinson. They claimed their smooth, pale complexions, rosy cheeks and tinted lips, were down to temperance and avoiding the sunshine, but really they used make-up to get the effect.
Having realised women were dying young from mercury and lead poisoning, the Regency make-up was made from non-toxic substances, such as saffron and red sandlewood, mixed with wax to create a rouge pomade. For me, it’s white and red cream stage make-up mixed to a bespoke colour.
Next, my unruly thick hair is styled into dainty Regency ringlets, a process that took the lion’s share of the three hours I spent getting ready. Rebecca, 28, says: “Regency hairstyles take inspiration from Ancient Greeks, with headpieces, feathers and hairbands. They tended to have a lot of up-dos, tight ringlets and braids.”
For ringlets, maids would heat up metal tongs in the fire, then spit on them to try to get them to a temperature that would not burn the hair straight off, with varying degrees of success.
Sylvia says: “Curls were viewed as part of the package of being a woman. So women had to achieve them by any means. A lot of them burned their hair off in the process and would use wigs and hairpieces instead. Poor women could make a bit of extra money by selling their hair to wig makers.”
I managed to keep my hair on, and the ringlets even stayed in during my promenade, admiring the Georgian architecture of the Royal Crescent.
Although Bridgerton is set in London, much of the filming takes place here in Bath, with the scandalous Featherington family’s house at No1 The Royal Crescent.
A Regency lady must be accomplished in many talents, so it’s off to the nearby Jane Austen Centre, to use a quill to pen a love letter to my beau... Dear Regé-Jean ... Oh, hang on. If I am going to be a proper Bridgerton lady, I need to learn to dance so I can go to the balls and find a husband.
Thankfully, I have the Bath Regency Dance Group to show me the moves.
Charlotte Cumper, 30, says: “We have balls and dress up in our finery. There’s hundreds of dances,like the Duke of Kent’s Waltz or Mr Beveridge’s Maggot.”
If a Regency woman refused a man a dance, she had to sit that dance and the next one out. Charlotte says: “You either dance with someone awful, or not dance at all. Not dancing at all was unthinkable. It’s why a lot of the literature includes women dancing with men they don’t like.” Martin Souter, 58, chips in: “And if you were bored by your partner, you couldn’t show it.”
Luckily, Martin proves to be an entertaining partner for our Waltz, but for the sake of his poor, trodden-on feet, it’s time to get my bonnet and go. My carriage awaits... my train carriage back to London and the 2020s.
See baththeatrical.com and janeausten.co.uk. Bridgerton is streaming on Netflix
