FASHION BLUNDERS
OF THE 17TH CENTURYDeciding on an outfit required
considerable care to avoid
a fashion faux pasLooking like a whore
Early modern women tried to strike
a balance between being fashionable
and attractive, but not showing too
much flesh. In 1628, Catherine Baker
was brought before the church courts
for defaming Christian Nevell as a
“button-smock whore”, an insult which
suggests that Catherine thought
Christian’s outfit was too revealing.Wearing what you like
Jane Martindale wanted to move to
the capital because she would have
more freedom of choice in which
clothes she could wear. Her brother
Adam claimed that, in their home
county of Lancashire, any woman who
wore a fashionable hood, scarf or
gown “would have beene accounted
an ambitious foole”.Plagued by the wrong outfit
In 1616, the pamphleteer and
playwright Thomas Dekker wrote
of how one “young handsome maid,
in very good apparel” visited her sister
in Kent, but was driven out of the town
because the local people noticed her
fashionable clothes and assumed that
she had come from London where the
plague was raging.Getting carried away at
the shops
In 1657, Margaret Harlakenden bought
£120 worth of wedding clothes in
London. Her father, Richard, was
unhappy that his daughter had spent
such a large sum, but he “paid the
scores”. Weddings were opportunities
for celebration and extravagance, and
Richard knew he could not risk being
seen to be a miser.Dressing up and falling down
In 1665, Samuel Pepys described how
“Mrs Jennings, one of the duchess’s
maids dressed herself like an orange
wench and went up and down and
cried oranges – till falling down or by
such accident... her fine shoes were
discerned and she put to a great deal
of shame”.PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES, ALAMY X2
“One young woman got a job
as a servant because she was
‘a pretty young wench, and
handsomely apparelled’”
A painting by Jan Griffier
(1652–1718) showing the
outskirts of London, whose
female inhabitants were
thought to be far more
fashionable than their
counterparts in the provincesABOVE: An illustration
of typical 17th-century
attire of a gentlewoman
(left), burgher’s wife
(middle) and a
countrywoman (right)
LEFT: A collection of
buttons from the periodThe Laton jacket: worn by Margaret
Laton and made between 1610 and 1615