A loose undergarment or lingerie piece that hangs from the shoulders.
In French, chemise is the ordinary word for a shirt, men’s or women’s, covering the torso and arms and usually worn next to the skin; a nightdress is a chemise de nuit, and chemiserie is the making and selling of men’s shirts. English borrowed it for something narrower: the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines a chemise as a piece of women’s underwear or a nightdress. In a French listing, chemises are shirts.
The chemise dress takes its name from the undergarment. Phyllis Tortora, quoted in FIT’s Fashion History Timeline, describes the chemise à la reine of the 1780s as a white muslin gown that resembled the chemise of the period but, unlike it, had a waistline and a soft, fully gathered skirt. Susan Ward writes that once chemise dresses had become the dominant fashion, around 1800, the word reverted almost exclusively to its former meaning. In English, the chemise is underwear or a nightdress; the négligée is a thin dressing gown.
In job listings
Chemise is a product word rather than a job title. In English it belongs to lingerie, where the roles are sales advisors in lingerie departments and in a house’s lingerie and swimwear category, stock and events staff for those departments, and merchandisers for underwear lines. See current lingerie roles.
