A short, fitted jacket worn by men and women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a garment that originated in a tailoring accident and became a fashion phenomenon.
According to fashion legend, the Spencer was named after George Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer, who burned the tails off his coat while standing too close to a fire and had the garment shortened to the waist. Whether apocryphal or not, the story captures the Spencer’s origin as a coat that had lost its tails.
Women adopted the Spencer as a short jacket worn over the high-waisted Empire-line dresses of the Regency period. It was typically made of wool, velvet, or silk, trimmed with fur or embroidery, and cut to end just below the bust, following the waistline of the dresses it accompanied. The Spencer added warmth without hiding the dress’s silhouette.
The Spencer declined as men’s fashion abandoned short jackets for frock coats, but it survived in women’s wear as the bolero, the cropped jacket, and the fitted cardigan. Every woman’s jacket that ends at the natural waist or above owes something to the Spencer’s accidental origins: a coat that lost its tail and, in losing it, found a new identity.
