A loose-fitting, sleeveless undergarment or lingerie piece, often unfitted at the waist.
The chemise is the oldest garment in the European wardrobe still called by its own name. It descends from the late Latin camisia, a soldier’s linen shirt, which also gave Italian camicia, Spanish camisa and, by a diminutive route, the English camisole. For the better part of a thousand years it meant one specific thing: the plain linen layer worn directly against the skin, beneath everything else.
The Layer Against the Skin
Its purpose was economic before it was anything else. A silk gown could not be washed; a linen chemise could be boiled. The undergarment therefore took the body’s wear — the perspiration, the friction, the soil — and protected a garment worth many times its value, being laundered weekly while the gown above it was laundered never. Personal cleanliness in the seventeenth century was measured largely by the whiteness of the linen a person showed at the cuff and throat, which is a more rational standard than it first appears.
The Queen in Her Shift
In 1783 Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun exhibited a portrait of Marie Antoinette wearing a loose white muslin gown of a kind then called the chemise à la reine. The response was severe enough that the picture was withdrawn from the Salon: the Queen of France had been painted, as her critics had it, in her underclothes — and in imported muslin rather than the silk of Lyon, which was the graver charge. The dress became the defining shape of the following decade anyway, and the episode remains one of fashion’s clearest demonstrations that an undergarment brought into daylight is never merely a garment.
The pattern has repeated since. The straight, waistless chemise dress of the 1920s and the slip dress of the 1990s both took the same route from beneath to above, and in current retail usage the word has settled back into lingerie, where it began.