Riding Attire
The long, straight, narrow, severely tailored riding coats that emerged toward the end of eighteenth-century England traveled to France as the redingote, to become a high-fashion garment for both men and women for the next several decades, through the 1820s. Eventually, red coats became the acceptable color for the hunt, possibly for the obvious reason of making the riders more easily visible. As early as the eighteenth-century, women also adopted severely tailored riding coats based directly on men's styles, creating a standard that still characterizes women's sportswear in the early twenty-first century. Americans, both men and women, followed the English lead in sporting activity. These upper-class choices set the tone and provided the models for the future, but it took democratization to affect change overall. That came with the industrial revolution and the rise of leisure activity among even the poorer classes.