Royal women of old had such beautiful and elaborate dresses and gowns and seemed to be dressed to the nines on a daily basis.

I am going to get to the main point, but I think it's worth questioning this sentence. From one angle (and this is a statement I've seen come up on this sub more than once), most women "of old" dressed formally by our standards, with foundation garments, petticoats, and closely-fitted bodices. From another, what makes it seem that they were dressed to the nines by their standards on a daily basis? Painted portraits are not candid photos; sitters were particular about choosing garments to project a particular image, and in many cases that image was "wealthy and powerful as all-get-out". This portrait from 1775 by Jean-Baptiste Gautier Dagoty shows Marie Antoinette in full and formal court dress, draped with royal robes - one of those "wealthy and powerful" portraits. Compare that to this painting of her with Louis, welcoming her brother, the Archduke Maximilian Franz in the same year - a modern reading of the clothing puts this as dressed to the nines, but in the context of 18th century aristocratic dress, this is informal.

Marie Antoinette is the archetypal dressed-to-the-nines royal woman, so I'm going to concentrate on her as an example. While she's remembered as an 18th century Imelda Marcos who loved gorgeous frippery, something that caused her a great deal of trouble was that she was very quick to abandon grandeur in her dress. The cutting edge of fashion in the late 1770s and 1780s was simplicity, such as that seen in redingotes and chemise gowns. The former was a masculine-styled garment that could be made with solid wool and manly brass buttons or softened with taffeta and satin, but was always on the plain side; the latter was generally made of plain white cotton, unfitted and unadorned. There were also robes à la polonaise (looser, looped-up gowns worn with shorter petticoats) and lévites (loose gowns held in with a sash). While she was criticized for spending too much (traditionally the complaint lodged against the royal mistress, but without a royal mistress in place ...), she was also criticized for dressing without adequate care for her position. Critics linked the cross-dressing aspect and the loosely-fitted garments to sexual immorality. I should really cede this to /u/kittydentures as she knows more about the chemise gown than anyone else.

I don't believe we know for certain that she did or didn't wear gowns twice. Certainly a very high level of consumption was required for her, as a) her clothes were perks for her servants and would walk out of her rooms, plus b) she needed to dress elaborately at court in order to affirm her status as the head of it, and to encourage spending among the courtiers on domestically-made luxuries. It's very commonly stated that nobody could dress in the same clothes twice at Versailles, but I don't think I've ever actually seen a citation for that. /u/kittydentures?