Throughout the 18th century fashionable women wore full-length gowns over stays, a stomacher and a full-length skirt for formal wear. They might, however, wear short jackets over their skirts as less formal wear in the morning, or for receiving guests at home, and by the late 1770s a variety of different styles of short gowns or jackets became fashionable. These sometimes derived from those worn by servants and working women, although those garments were often made in less expensive textiles.

This jacket most closely ressembles the casaquin en juste , a simple tight-fitting bodice worn informally by fashionable women over a matching or contrasting full-length skirt. In 1778, the fashion journal Galerie des Modes et Costumes Français depicted a kitchen maid 'newly arrived from the provinces and beginning to learn elegant Parisian airs' (engraving by Le Beau, after Leclerc) in such a bodice, although in plainer fabric and with a shorter sleeve. The long sleeves of this jacket suggest that it dates to the 1780s or 1790s when three-quarter length sleeves ceased to dominate fashionable women's dress.