Undressing for bed?

Away with silks, away with lawn,
I'll have no scenes or curtains drawn ;
Give me my mistress, as she is,
Dress'd in her nak'd simplicities ;
For as my heart, e'en so mine eye
Is won with flesh, not drapery.

Lovely words from Robert Herrick, but it's quite possible that his naked mistress would have been, by our standards, quite well-dressed:

I drank bohea in Celia’s dressing room:
Warm from her bed, to me alone within.
Her night-gown fastened with a single pin:
Her night-clothes tumbled with resistless grace,
Her bright hair played careless round her face;
Reaching the kettle made her gown unpin,
She wore no waistcoat, and her shift was thin.

Yes, it was quite usual for women in the early eighteenth century to wear some sort of waistcoat as their night attire, and although Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1716 doesn't mention it, sexy Celia would almost certainly have been wearing a night cap.

Just to make things even more confusing, according to historical costume expert Cathy Decker, during the Regency period, "Undress" meant simply casual, informal dress. It was also called "dishabille" or "deshabille," the French word for the same type of dress. Another clue is anything "negligently worn" or "à la négligé" is probably either undress or designed to resemble closely undress. Undress is the sort of dress to be worn from early morning to noon or perhaps as late as four or five, depending on the engagements one had. Compared to half dress and full dress, undress was usually more comfortable, more warm, more casual, and much cheaper in cost.

In other words, clothes to slop around in at home, rather than some sexy little nothings for the boudoir.

You begin to suspect that there wasn't a whole lot of the full Monty in the Regency. For one thing, you didn't need to take your clothes off for any sort of sexual contact (drawers were to remain crotchless into the Edwardian period); if you did, you'd then have the problem of lacing oneself back into the stays, which were nearly all back-lacing, unless you'd had the foresight to wear side lacing or front lacing ones.

Where it gets really interesting, of course, is that you would only undress completely in front of your inferiors--your personal servants. So nakedness, or its absence, implied a certain level of power, and we talk quite a lot here about power and power shifts. But nakedness also implies vulnerability and trust. So was there an added frisson here, on the rare occasions when one or both (or all!) participants got their clothes off, that rules were being broken, the social order turned upside down?

What do you think?