dressing jacket

English

A woman’s dressing jacket, U.S., late 1800s

Noun

dressing jacket (plural dressing jackets)

1. (historical) A loose-fitting lightweight garment, usually hip- to thigh-length, generally worn at home while applying makeup, doing one's hair, or relaxing.
   • 1801, Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland, from the Arrival of the English‎^[1], Dublin: John Milliken, page 207:

     […] on entering an apartment, [he] found lord Edward lying on a bed, in his dressing jacket.

   • 1908, H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay‎^[2], Toronto: Macmillan, Book 3, Chapter 1, p. 247:

     Then we went on to Moggs and found him in a camel-hair dressing-jacket in a luxurious bed, drinking China tea […]

   • 1911, D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock‎^[3], Part 1, Chapter 6:

     A woman came to the door. One breast was bare, and hung over her blouse, which, like a dressing-jacket, fell loose over her skirt.

   • 1958, P. G. Wodehouse, Cocktail Time, Woodstock & New York: Overlook, Chapter 3, p. 34,^[4]

     Except that her ears did not stick up and that she went about on two legs instead of four, Phoebe Wisdom was extraordinarily like a white rabbit, a resemblance which was heightened at the moment by the white dressing jacket she was wearing and the fact that much weeping had made her nose and eyes pink.

Synonyms

• (woman's jacket): dressing sack, sack