Regency period and gratitude for modern sewing conveniences

My daughter has a huge creative streak and especially loves costuming and dressing up as characters in books and movies.  She has a Cosplay party coming up and she decided to step outside of her usual mold and take a fictional/historic character from the Regency period.  Channelling Jane Austen here.

Nearly there now.  Now I get to tackle buttonholes, which I have never done on my Janome.  The dread of new things is probably worse than actually doing it, don't you think?  I have a quilt that took nearly a week to begin cutting fabric for it.  So far I've only made one cutting mistake and hopefully that will be the last one but I've got three more fabrics to go.  The dress from the front:

Okay, not exactly true to the period.  We picked a cotton and another fabric would probably be the more likely fabric.  Softer too.  And I used elastic to gather the neckline because I can.  I would give anything for a zipper in the back instead of the cumbersome way they handled it.  (I didn't do so hot back there so I'll be using buttons instead of leaving it open.  They used to use overskirts to hide the open part, I guess.)  Hopefully the buttons will hide my mistakes.

My daughter has decided she's not really fond of how the dress fits, thinking it makes her look fat.  I suspect, given how exercise seemed to be frowned on for women, that most gentlewomen were fat and these dresses made them look more svelte.

Mostly though, I'm thinking we are spoiled with modern conveniences like elastic and zippers.  Those two items would have made a HUGE difference to their fashion lives!  We just don't know what we have!