What you’d be wearing to Rockaway Beach or Coney Island if you were a woman in the 1860s

Bare arms, visible ankles, a more relaxed waistline—the most fashionable “bathing dresses” of 1868 allowed a woman to strip off her day-to-day corsets, feather hats, and petticoats and luxuriate in the freedom of the seaside. This ad for what were also called “bathing costumes” came from Godey’s Lady’s Book, an influential periodical that helped shape fashion styles, cultural trends, and domestic habits in the 19th century. At the time, as “sea bathing” gained popularity, women who had the leisure time to visit a beach needed something fashionable and appropriately modest to wear. “The ankle length, loosely cut dress of heavy wool fabric with full sleeves was now worn with pantaloons underneath, belted at the waist, finished at the wrist with ruffles, and worn with a high collar, full stockings, and shoes,” explains the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, in a post about swimsuit styles. But could you actually move around in the water draped under such heavy material? And clearly no one…