Sack-back gown
any of several styles of woman's dress with a tight bodice and a sack-back consisting of two box pleats, popular in the 18th century
The sack-back gown or robe à la française was a women's fashion of 18th century Europe. At the beginning of the century, the sack-back gown was a very informal style of dress. At its most informal, it was unfitted both front and back and called a sacque, contouche, or robe battante. By the 1770s the sack-back gown was second only to court dress in its formality. This style of gown had fabric at the back arranged in box pleats which fell loose from the shoulder to the floor with a slight train. In front, the gown was open, showing off a decorative stomacher and petticoat. It would have been worn with a wide square hoop or panniers under the petticoat. Scalloped ruffles often trimmed elbow-length sleeves, which were worn with separate frills called engageantes.
The casaquin (popularly known from the 1740s onwards as a pet-en-l'air) was an abbreviated version of the robe à la française worn as a jacket for informal wear with a matching or contrasting petticoat. The skirt of the casaquin was knee-length but gradually shortened until by the 1780s it resembled a peplum.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sack-back gown” is any of several styles of woman's dress with a tight bodice and a sack-back consisting of two box pleats, popular in the 18th century. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sack-back, gown and several, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q249975. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sack-back gown” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.