Here is an article I found on the Telegraph website discussing everday fashion in the 18th century. From the lower class to the higher class. Also a review on the book "the dress of people".

Everyday fashion in 18th-century England

 

Louise Carpenter reviews The Dress of the People by John Styles

The rustle of a calico gown; the swish of a red woollen cloak; the pocket watch pulled out with a flourish and the chink of silver buckles - who would associate such panache with the 18th-century plebeian class?

In The Dress of the People, John Styles, the historian who created the V & A's British Galleries, sets out to prove that the 18th-century poor were just as willing fashion victims as the lords, ladies, country squires and City merchants who comprised the nation's elite.

His argument moves from the restoration of Charles II in 1660 through to the Great Reform Act of 1832, a period in which ordinary people were experiencing an improvement in all other aspects of their material lives (tea and sugar, the fruits of the mercantile and colonial expansion, changing diets). But it is in their clothes, Styles argues, that we see this transformation most clearly.

This is not the consensus view among historians. Styles tells us that the working classes, from small farmers and labourers to seamstresses, have always been considered too poor to acquire the means to be fashionable. Yet, as we know well today, style is not simply about affluence.

Though wealth might buy you a statement handbag, you can look trendy for peanuts. Styles shows us that it was the same in the 18th century. Not everybody cared for clothes - "sullen resistance to fine dressing co-existed with desperate efforts to be genteel" - but most people, including the poor, used them to make judgments about others.
One of the most striking aspects of Styles's book is how the vagaries of 18th-century fashion mirror today's.
The working-class apprentice girls in the fashionable shops in the New Exchange on the Strand and the Royal Exchange in the City were extraordinarily overdressed and overdone in their presentation. When Voltaire arrived in England in 1726 and saw such girls along with servants and country people in their "holiday clothes" at a fair in Greenwich, he mistook them for "people of fashion".
Dressing above one's station became the bête noire of newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets.
Styles shows us that poor people interested in fashion wore simplified versions of elite styles, closest in form to the clothes worn by their social superiors when in the country or at home as morning wear.
Silk and muslin were beyond their reach, but advances in cotton manufacture made fancy prints cheaper. The poor cared about such things and saved for them. Outfits were usually run up by specialists rather than ready-to-wear, with seamstresses deploying similar tricks to today's high street (catwalk looks in cheaper fabrics) to create visually arresting garments.
Furthermore, much like today's symbiotic relationship between "high end" and "street", the dress of the plebeians influenced smarter circles. Domestic and rural ways of putting together a look seeped into the beau monde. That is not to say rich men swanned around in farm labourers' smock frocks or clogs - although had David Beckham lived then, maybe he would have - but Styles reveals that the round hats worn by the poor men, and their habit of going wigless, pre-dated equivalent changes in fashion.
One Frenchman noted in 1747 that in London "masters dress like their valets; duchesses copy their chamber-maids". As now, dressing down and aping the poor was an act of rebellion, especially for wealthy young men.
Women were not immune either. Why would titled ladies, used to the finest silks, suddenly think it au courant to wear an apron like a washerwoman? Because, writes Styles, "the virility and unaffected naturalness associated with plebeian dress exercised a powerful hold of their own."
The Dress of the People is meticulously researched, using such eccentric sources as the descriptions of stolen clothes in the records of criminal trials; probate inventories; advertisements describing runaways, and small pieces of fabric left at the London Foundling Hospital by mothers who abandoned their babies. There are household budgets, too, which reveal the effect of the pram in the hall on a stylish plebeian wardrobe.
The weight of such research can, at times, make it difficult, dense reading. And yet, like the clothes it discusses, the book weaves a spell, pulling us into a world in which the ability to choose a showy handkerchief or a fashionable ribbon was, for many, their only expression of freedom.