Even during the 18th century, prior to the rise of modern nationalism, the various forms of national dress had played a crucial part in fashioning a sense of community and belonging, serving as means for symbolic communication between the Hungarian body politic and the imperial centre. After the Rákóczi uprising (1703-11), Hungarian dress was banned from the Viennese court; Maria Theresa, however, frequently portrayed herself wearing Hungarian trappings, and from the 1760s the uniform of her Hungarian Guards became fashionable in Vienna. In the 1780s, wearing national dress was an expression of protest against Joseph II’s attempts to centralize and Germanize the Empire.

By the late 18th century, the identification of dress with nationality came to be related to the putative Scythian origin of the Hungarians. In his poem A régi magyar viseletről (“On the old Hungarian attire”) Pál Ányos (1756–1784) addressed the “noble youth of Nagyszombat” (his fellow-students at the Jesuit University) and urged them to adhere to the national tradition of “our Scythian blood” and wear “true Hungarian attire”: “a shako on the head” and a plait of hair, even in the “temple of Pallas”. The idea of Hungarian dress being Scythian in origin was further reinforced when the Holy Crown was carried over to Buda in 1790. The uniform of the bandériums (the symbolic guards of the Crown wearing the colours of their respective counties) was celebrated as the revival of the Scythian (and/or Hunnish) tradition of the Magyar warrior, supposedly continuous from the Conquest. (The oriental features, e.g. fastening by means of frog-and-loops cords) that characterized this attire were, in fact, most probably derived from the 15-16th century contacts with Ottoman Turks, much as in the case of similar items such as the czamara worn by the Polish nobility and subsequently adopted also in the Czech čamara.) This archaizing ideology placed the question of dress (along with music and dance) in the centre of national identification.

The heroic-military display of nationhood expressed by the attire remained pre-nationalistic inasmuch as it mainly pertained to the nobility, which claimed to be the descendants of these ancestral conquerors. The feudal notion of national characteristics, while restricted to the politically privileged, remained open to symbolic integration for non-noble and non-ethnic Hungarian subjects of the Kingdom of Hungary: when receiving the Crown, the German and Jewish Bürgers of Pozsony and Buda also donned Hungarian dress of some kind to hail the occasion. It suggests that in the celebration of Hungarian attire (i.e. political identification through external features) the dynastic-imperial patriotism and its accompanying hungarus identity could be reconciled. (For the sabre as a sartorial accessory, see the article on fencing in Hungary.)

By the early 1800s, clothing had lost many of its feudal functions of signalling social status or occupation and religious or ethnic affiliation. In the urban fashion, increasingly followed by provincial nobility, the English bourgeois fashion started to replace the previous French influence. Indicative of the social dynamic of fashion, items from Biedermeier costume (shawls, bodices, multilayered skirts, puffed sleeves of blouses) were also picked up by peasant women. The increasing embroidering of the male peasant attire (with the previously simply patterned shepherd’s cloak turning into a formal item of the peasant wardrobe) was also due to urban fashion influences. By this cross-fertilization, modern urban styles, ironically, came to influence what later would be registered as traditional (or authentically national) folk dress.

The issue of clothing returned to the forefront of national discourses between the 1830s and the 1850s. Romantic nationalism also cultivated dress, albeit subsidiary to language or the idea of national character. The fashion magazines (Modeblätter, divatlap) of the era, along with advertising the latest Parisian or Viennese models, began to propagate a distinctly Hungarian fashion in their coloured plates and their society columns. The editor of Pesti divatlap (“Pest fashion pages”), Imre Vahot, vigorously insisted that Magyar women of true national sentiment should wear national costumes to embrace and display the national symbols, especially at balls. The Hungarian dress thus propagated, while harking back to the features of Hungarian aristocratic costumes of the previous centuries, was largely reinvented in colours and style by the (ironically, mostly German) tailors of Pest.

While the national costumes propagated by the fashion weeklies were mainly picked up by the aristocracy (even if women wore these costumes less frequently than men), the Romantic nationalism of costume also permeated other layers of society, to the point of triggering some sartorial Avant-Garde extravaganza: whereas Petőfi usually wore an attila (a braided jacket, which, as the name indicates, maintained some of the Hunnish ancestry myth in national dress), his wife, Julia Szendrey, following the female dandies of the age, preferred to put on a pair of trousers when smoking her cigars.

After the failure of 1848-49, Hungarian dress (along with other symbolic signals, like growing a moustache or a certain model beard) was once again put into the service of political protest, or, in the case of black outfits, the expression of mourning. As a response, dress was also utilized in political communication by the Viennese court: when Franz Joseph visited Pest in 1857, he appeared in a Hungarian hussar uniform.

After the 1867 Compromise, the national costumes designed during the 1830-40s became institutionalized and were customarily worn by the nobility at ceremonial occasions. The most emblematic of these was the díszmagyar (“festive-Magyar”) which consisted of a rich, often jewel-bedecked and gold-chained short fur dolman or cape, usually draped around one shoulder, and a fur cap topped by an aigrette. Besides political occasions (like when the Upper House of the Parliament was in session), it was also worn at weddings and funerals. Franz Joseph and his wife (“Sissi”) also appeared in díszmagyar for their 1867 coronation. By the end of the century, when the bourgeois uniformity of European styles of clothing had become ubiquitous, this kind of national self-representation appeared extremely anachronistic. Nevertheless, during the 1896 Millennial Celebrations the county banderiums, like in 1790, once again carried and guarded the Holy Crown in a pompous march all over Budapest in their characteristic outfit.

In Hungarian design, stylistic tendencies in the first half of the century broadly followed wider European trends. One of the most eminent furniture makers of Pest, Sebestyén Vogel (1779–1837), contributed to the Empire-style interior decoration of several public buildings including the German theatre in Pest (1811) and the Reformed Great Church in Debrecen (1817). By the 1830s the Empire style had been eclipsed by the less formal Biedermeier, which became ubiquitous in wealthy and more modest homes alike. The revivalist style known as the “second Rococo”, popular in Vienna from the mid-1830s, was less prevalent in Hungary. In these decades, the preoccupation with creating a specifically Hungarian style had yet to assert itself, but with the founding of Védegylet (“Protection Association”) the support of Hungarian industry came to be regarded as a national cause. In the enthusiastic climate of the 1840s, prominent Hungarian craftsmen were awarded praise of the highest kind, usually reserved for fine artists. One of the most excellent was the goldsmith József Szentpéteri, whose silver vessels and reliefs were mostly adorned with classical scenes and events from Hungarian history.

One of the main areas where National Romanticism in design could manifest itself was in the interior decoration of public buildings. Before the search for national ornament gained impetus in the latter decades of the century, the national character of these spaces was usually visualized through revivalist styles and national symbols. The so-called Széchényi Room of the National Museum – home to its library at the time – was furnished in a classical and neo-renaissance style and decorated with the coats of arms of Hungary’s counties set up in a row at the top of the walls. Conceived in 1859 as a counterpoint to the Habsburg Room of the Museum, the rich furnishings of the Széchényi Room – the wooden overlay of the walls enclosing Ferenc Széchényi’s portrait, the richly carved bookcases, shelves, tables and chairs, ornamental door handles – were funded by the donation of a patriotic women’s society.

Hungarian crafts and industry gained new impetus after the Compromise of 1867. In the age of a general optimism surrounding industrialization, attempts to foster national industry went hand in hand with those to refine industrial production through artistic design. The Hungarian Museum of Applied Arts (Iparművészeti Múzeum) was founded in 1872 with the aim of supportint Hungarian producers by providing them with examples of craftsmanship and new technologies in order to make them competitive on a worldwide stage. At the same time, this new institution also laid great stress on collecting not only the latest products of industry and historical artefacts, but also folk art from Hungary and abroad. The wish to invigorate national industry by drawing on folk art was, again, an international phenomenon. In Vienna, the art historian Jakob von Falke coined the term “house industry” or “cottage industry” (Hausindustrie) to refer to artefacts produced by peasants for their own use, distinguishing them from modern, industrial fashion, but also from commercial “folk art” objects made for tourists.

This concept of cottage industry lay at the heart of the “design reform” movement. In Hungary, folk crafts were perceived both as sources of inspiration for modern design and as preservers of ancient national motifs. Different approaches to folk motifs can be traced in the work of two important figures. The first director of the Museum of Applied Arts, Károly Pulszky (co-author of a collection of ornamental motifs from different parts of the world with the German Friedrich Fischbach), searched Hungarian folk art for universal forms. The ethnographer József Huszka collected folk motifs in order to trace the ancient imagery of the Hungarian nation, linking this to Turanian descent-theories. The two approaches were often indistinguishable in the following decades, as industrialists and designers aimed to create a national ornamental style by building on both Hungarian folk ornament and oriental imagery. The most significant enterprise was the Zsolnay ceramics factory, whose folk-art-inspired Art Nouveau vases earned success at international exhibitions. The Zsolnay factory was closely affiliated with the Museum, and provided the roof tiles of the new building designed by Ödön Lechner. By the turn of the century, the international trend of Art Nouveau was emerging in full bloom in Hungarian visual culture: folk motifs were joined together in sensuous curves in line with the most recent fashion. Art Nouveau combined with “national” imagery appeared in the decoration of public buildings, for instance in the stained-glass windows designed by Miksa Róth. Adopting the technologies developed by L.C. Tiffany and others, Róth nevertheless worked under the spell of medieval stained-glass design, the influence of which is most evident in his church commissions. Róth also executed stained-glass designs by József Rippl-Rónai, the most significant Hungarian Art Nouveau painter, who was also a prolific designer of glass, textiles and other applied art objects. This is also true of János Vaszary, a painter whose designs for textiles combined folk imagery with Art Nouveau forms (e.g. Shepherd boy, 1899). The furniture maker Endre Thék excelled not only in his highly modern Art Nouveau designs, but also at historicist forms: the Romanesque furnishings of the St Stephen Room in the Buda Royal Palace – a festive space decorated with images of Hungarian kings – were produced in his factory.

In the wake of the British Arts and Crafts movement, national ornament, folk art and medievalism gained new prominence and became suffused with utopian social ideas in the work of the Gödöllő artists’ colony. Led by Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch and Sándor Nagy, the artists of the colony believed in the inseparability of the fine and applied arts, and put their skills to test in several areas. They collaborated on several projects of architectural and interior design, the most significant of which was the Palace of Culture in Marosvásárhely (today Târgu Mureş, Romania). In this project, as well as others, the artists relied on a Romanticized concept of Transylvanian folk culture as a source of motifs and inspiration.