Over the four decades of Jane Austen's lifetime, dress styles for women and men altered radically; as always, the ‘love of novelty’, defined by Beau Brummell as the ‘parent of fashion’, had much to do with it. But more importantly, changes – in manufacture and in political thought – prompted late eighteenth-century society's move away from brocaded stiffness towards a more natural flowing shape characteristic of the Regency era.

Innovations in cotton spinning technology, such as Crompton's mule of 1770, suddenly enabled the production of high-quality yarn in quantities large enough to satisfy the demands of an already modernised weaving industry. As a result water-powered mills soon supplied cotton and linen fabrics affordable even to the most deprived: registers for the London Foundling Hospital record the cotton garments that abandoned babies were mostly clothed in. The low production costs of cotton fabrics came at a high human price, for mills were run on a factory system that exploited a cheap workforce, chiefly women and children from neighbouring workhouses. Evidence given to a Parliamentary Committee in 1814 revealed that working hours at the notorious Backbarrow mills lasted from five in the morning until eight at night. Printing techniques were also industrialised: block-printing of the 1770s, a step-by-step process which had required separate wooden blocks for every colour and involved much handiwork, was superseded in 1783 by rollerprinting utilising machines which produced the distinctive striped designs of the period.

To satisfy the demands of this accelerated textile industry, cotton wool imports to Britain increased exponentially from 6.8 million lbs in 1780 to 99.3 million lbs in 1815. The West Indies, Britain's established supplier, could not keep up with the demand and India, provider of finer varieties of the fibre, proved increasingly unwilling to equip a rival industry. A solution presented itself with the St Domingo slave uprising in 1791–2, which inflated raw cotton prices and encouraged planters in Carolina and Georgia to cultivate it. By 1802 America had firmly established itself as Britain's largest supplier of cotton wool.