Clothing Definitions — definitions of garments and clothing terms from Apparel Search
A mantua is an article of women's clothing worn in the late seventeenth century and eighteenth century. Originally a loose gown, the later mantua was an overgown or robe typically worn over a corset and a contrasting underskirt or petticoat, its skirt drawn back and draped to show the petticoat beneath. The mantua changed who made women's clothes: it was constructed by female mantua-makers rather than tailors, a shift with lasting effects on the dress trade. This page explains the mantua's forms and how it was worn.
From this garment arose the term mantua-maker, an early term for a women's dressmaker.
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The first mantuas of the 1670s and 1680s were deliberately informal: a loose gown of silk, open at the front, worn at home and in undress, in reaction against the stiff, boned bodices of formal dress. Fashion rarely leaves a comfortable idea alone, and by the early 18th century the mantua had been formalized. The bodice was fitted and stitched to the wearer's corseted shape, the front edges met over a decorative stomacher, and the long trained skirt was pulled up and back in draped folds, held by tapes and loops, to reveal a contrasting petticoat. In this grand form, with a wide skirt supported by hoops, the mantua became the standard court dress of the mid-18th century in England, surviving at court long after everyday fashion had moved on.
Construction explains the trade change. A mantua was made by draping and pinning fabric on the customer's body and stitching the folds in place, rather than by the tailor's pattern-cutting in flat cloth. Women who mastered this became mantua-makers, the first large female trade in fashionable dress, and the ancestors of the dressmaker and the couturier. Surviving mantuas in museum collections, often in spectacular woven silks, are studied precisely because their construction is recorded in the garment itself: pleats stitched down, linings fitted to the bodice, and skirts engineered to drape in the deep, formal folds the style required.
For modern readers the mantua matters as the bridge between the loose gown and the later robe styles, the sack-back and the polonaise, which all play the same game of a fitted front against a draped, displayed skirt and petticoat. The mantua also explains several words still used in the trade: the mantua-maker became simply the dressmaker, and the petticoat it displayed remained a named garment long after the overgown that showed it had passed out of fashion.
A mantua is a women's gown of the late 17th and 18th centuries. Originally a loose gown, it developed into an overgown or robe worn over a corset and underskirt, with the skirt draped back to display the petticoat.
Mantuas were made by mantua-makers, women dressmakers whose skill was draping and fitting the gown on the body. Their rise moved fashionable women's dressmaking substantially from tailors to female dressmakers.
The name is associated with Mantua in Italy, a centre for silk, and possibly with the French manteau, meaning a cloak or mantle, reflecting the gown's loose, enveloping early form.