Late 19th/Early 20th Cent. evening wear?

[OC Richard]

The term 'waistcoat' has been used in English since the early 1500s, but 'vest' seems to be what Charles II called it when he set the sartorial standard at Court in the 1660s, according to Samuel Pepys - a French term no doubt as a result of the King's long sojourn in France during the Commonwealth.

About the 1500's I'll take your word for it.

All I know is that my various books and catalogues printed in Scotland prior to World War One use "vest", while the ones printed between 1926 and 1938 sometimes use "vest" and "waistcoat" interchangeably, while others only use one word or the other.

There's an adage in linguistics that a language won't have two words which mean precisely the same thing, because when a language does find itself in that position one of the two eventually undergoes a semantic shift or falls out of use.

Thus English found itself with two words that meant the same thing, borrowed Norse "sky" and native English "heaven" until the latter underwent semantic shift and began referring to a particular region in the sky. Ditto English "shirt" and Norse "skirt" which had to get out of each other's way, and moved above and below the waist.

So having "waistcoat" and "vest" meaning the same thing it's to be expected that one would undergo semantic shift, or one would disappear from the language. The former happened in Britain, but I don't know when.

Here's two pages from the same catalogue from 1936 showing "waistcoat" and "vest" both used to refer to the waistcoat/vest of the same style of Evening Dress jacket, the Coatee. This suggests that the semantic split between the two words hadn't yet taken place.





Moving earlier to 1909 "vest" is used in the description of all five Highland outfits (these three and two Youth's outfits).



Trying to quickly trace the vest v. waistcoat thing with my not-great library, I see:

John Telfer Dunbar (1962) "waistcoat"

HF McClintock (1950) "waistcoat"

MacQueen Douglas FRSE FSA Scot. (1914) "vest"

DW Stewart (1893) "vest"

John Allen (AKA Sobieski Stewart) (1842) "waistcoat"