In the 1540s men’s doublets begin to emerge from under to outerwear and their hose increase in volume, beginning to assume a melon shape. Womenswear becomes increasing rigid with stiffened bodices flattening the torso and breasts.

Womenswear

In the Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire in this period included Spain, the Netherlands/Low Countries, parts of Italy and Germany, as well as Austria. Catherine of Austria (Fig. 9) was one of the fifteen children of Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor and Anna of Bohemia and Hungary. Her dress includes trends already seen like rigid bodice, the sleeves cut very close to the top of the arm, the chemise/partlet filling in the neckline, the gown opening to reveal a rich forepart, and the girdle. Her sleeves are narrower and involve slashing and puffing out the chemise fabric; this narrower sleeve style with an emphasis on the slightly bulbous upper almost cap-sleeve will become common in the 1550s.

By the 1540s the exuberance of Germanic dress of the 1520s and 1530s began to die down, perhaps influenced by the spreading Protestant Reformation. Sleeves remained narrow, but were more frequently plain (Figs. 10-12), rather than banded and slashed and puffed as they had been before. Colors became more somber and necklines remained high. The portrait of Barbara Kressin (Fig. 10) is striking in its severity—the deep black of her gown draws attention to her golden girdle and necklace, as well as the dramatic blackwork embroidery at her cuffs and collars. She holds leather gloves ornamented with gold and pink embroidered flowers. The unknown girl in the Pencz portrait shares the same decorative details—blackwork on the chemise, embroidered gloves—and maintains the German tradition of wearing multiple rings. Her high chemise collar has a pronounced frill that already begins to resemble the figure-8 of a ruff. A 19-year old woman (Fig. 12) also wears five rings and a modest, high-necked gown.

Fashion Icon: Katherine Parr, Queen of England

We’ve already seen one portrait of Katherine Parr above (Fig. 3), where her love of sumptuous textiles and fashionability is clear. She married Henry VIII in July 1543 and had already been married twice before. She was an involved stepmother to Mary (Fig. 4) and Elizabeth (Fig. 5), whom she convinced Henry to restore to the line of succession.

Tudor Times quotes a description of Katherine in 1544 by de Gante, the Secretary to the Duke of Najera:

“She is of a lively and pleasing appearance and is praised as a virtuous woman. She was dressed in a robe of cloth of gold and a petticoat of brocade with sleeves lined with crimson satin and trimmed with three-piled crimson velvet. Her train was more than two yards long. Suspended from her neck were two crosses, and a jewel of very rich diamonds and in her head-dress were many and beautiful ones. Her girdle was of gold with large pendants.”

De Gante could also be describing her dress in a portrait by Master John (Fig. 1), where Parr wears a “cloth of silver tissue woven with a very large repeat pomegranate design” (Hayward 185). She wears a Spanish farthingale and stiffened bodice the comes to a point such that it almost transforms the silhouette into two intersecting triangles. The cuffs of her funnel sleeves are lined in luxurious lynx fur. Her chemise is decorated with redwork embroidery visible in the open seams and at the cuffs. The dress is at the height of luxury and style of the times, as befits a queen.

Her favorite colors for clothes were apparently crimson, black and violet (Tudor Times) and we see her dressed in crimson in another confirmed portrait (Fig. 2). In the portrait we see a use of gold braid which was common at the time as Ashelford explains:

“The decoration on this lady’s elegant costume is typical of the taste in the mid-to-late 1540s for an interlaced pattern of gold braid or cord set against a darker background.” (51)

She wears a very masculine style black bonnet with halo brim, like that favored by Henry VIII in fact (see Fashion Icon, 1530-1539). This adoption of masculine styling in womenswear would become a fashionable trend. A confident woman, who outlived Henry and would go on to marry a fourth time, Katherine Parr used dress to signal and reinforce her status in a powerful, and typically Tudor, way.

Menswear

Thomas Wentworth (Fig. 4) also served at the court of Henry VIII and Edward VI, for whom he was Lord Chamberlain. His ensemble is monochromatic but luxe as it is lined in what appears to be lynx fur. Such sleeve treatments, where the fur would be puffed out through the open seams which were closed by aiguillettes, were popular for both men and women (Ashelford 54).

In Italy

Another version can be seen in Moretto da Brescia’s portrait of Count Fortunato Martinengo (Fig. 5), though notably Martinengo’s doublet sleeves are dark green rather than black. His jerkin still has a sizable skirt and is ornamented with applied gold cord or golden embroidery, similar to that seen on Katherine Parr (see Fig. 2 in the Fashion Icon section above). He still wears a black bonnet ornamented with a white feather and aiguillettes as indeed many men still do (Figs. 5-7, 12-13).

Henry Howard (Fig. 6), Earl of Surrey, was English but did not conform to English fashions as Ashelford explains:

“Surrey was renowned for his extravagant taste in dress; he wears an Italian fashion and adopts an Italianate pose. One of the charges at his trial in 1547 was that he wore foreign dress. He was found guilty of treason and executed. His spectacular Garter collar was worn by Edward VI at his Coronation.” (57)

He wears an extremely tight-fitting black doublet and hose covered in an elaborate white floriated design. Titian’s portrait of a man holding a book (Fig. 7) shows the Italian model that Surrey was following. Italy, under influence from Spain, had been embracing black for some time. Here the black is broken up by slashing that reveals the white of the shirt and by decorative golden aiguillettes. He has elaborate gold embroidery on the high standing collar of his shirt, which ends in a frill.

Ottaviano Grimani, the Procurator of Saint Mark’s in Venice shares little of that sartorial sobriety, however, as De Marly remarks in Fashion for Men (1985):

“The doublet had crossed over from underwear to outer wear, and here forms part of a leather suit with fur on the inside. The Italians preferred a sloping shoulderline to the northern square one. The breeches are in mi-parti, with even the codpiece in two tones. No wonder Luther and Calvin said the Catholic Church lacked morality and modesty.” (33)

His doublet is also extensively slashed, which also remained quite fashionable in Germany.

In Germany

A very rare surviving set of garments from the 1540s allow us to see what 16th-century menswear was actually like. The parade garments of Elector Moritz of Saxony (Figs. 9, 11) date to 1545-50 and are in a striking yellow silk. The doublet is extensively slashed on the sleeves (Fig. 9) and is paired with trunk hose that is paned (with pinking notching the panes all the way down). The Cunningtons describe this early trunk hose in their Handbook of English Costume in the Sixteenth Century (1954):

“[1540-1560]. The upper stocks or breech, fitting above, were ovally distended from the fork to mid-thigh or lower. The distensions were usually paned. These were the forerunners of the true trunk hose…in which the fulness began at the waist.” (35)

The codpiece remains prominent, as indeed it does in Georg Pencz’s 1544 portrait of a young man (Fig. 10), where the doublet sleeves are slashed diagonally as in the parade garments and the skirted, sleeveless jerkin is more regularly horizontally pinked. Both feature high standing collars and Pencz’s white frill of the shirt would have also featured in the parade dress. The look is completed with the addition of a broad-shouldered gown with hanging sleeves and ornamented with black velvet stripes (Fig. 11). This silhouette is more typical of the 1530s, but parade dress would tend to be more conservative in its cut.

The doublet’s very short peplum or skirt was, however, very on trend for the time as Hill explains:

“Although men’s short, skirted jackets and knee-length bases remained popular in northern Europe much longer than in Spain and Italy, the new silhouettes of German trunk hose (as adapted from the Spanish styles) and cropped, narrow jackets began to supplant the remnants of Gothic styles in the 1540s.” (376)

Indeed, we can see this shift by contrasting the dress of Archduke Ferdinand II of the Holy Roman Empire with that of future English King Edward VI. Ferdinand wears a doublet with a very short peplum, whereas Edward continues to wear a jerkin with a much longer skirt overtop his doublet. As De Marly remarks, there is a shift away from the hypermasculine broadness of silhouette popularized by Henry VIII:

“In the 1540s the width of the square looks begins to modify towards more natural dimensions.” (34)

Both young men wear the very short hair style introduced by the Germans (De Marly 34). But Ferdinand is dressed in what was to be the dominant silhouette of the 1550s:

“doublet with longer waistline, shorter skirts, dropped shoulderline, simplified sleeves, braiding in vertical lines; paned hose, with a little bombast set low.” (Davenport 410)

CHILDREN’S WEAR

As the discussion of Edward VI above should make clear (Fig. 13), there was little notion of children’s wear in the 16th century. Edward at 9 was dressed like his father at 55. Bia de’ Medici (Fig. 1) wears a dress that could be worn in a larger size by her stepmother, Duchess Eleonora (see Fig. 7 above, which also includes a portrait of Giovanni). The chubby-faced Giovanni de’ Medici (Fig. 2) demonstrates that some concessions to childhood (and climate) could be made as he wears no gown or cape as outerwear. He also, as a toddler, does not carry a sword, but this must-have accessory would appear in children’s portraits, as it does in the rich portrait of an unknown Florentine boy (Fig. 3), who does wear a gown and codpiece as well. He wears pumpkin or melon hose, as does the boy in a Moroni portrait of about the same time (Fig. 4). The presumed father and son’s shirt collars are quite similar. Thus, while some concessions could be made to children’s extreme youth—as babies they were typically swaddled and then dressed in gowns no matter the gender—as soon as possible children were dressed as miniature adults.

References:

• Ashelford, Jane. A Visual History of Costume: The Sixteenth Century. London: Batsford, 1983. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/748457696.
• Boucher, François, Yvonne Deslandres, and John Ross. A History of Costume in the West: With 1188 Illustrations, 365 in Colour. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/443676264.
• Cunnington, C. Willett, and Phillis Cunnington. Handbook of English Costume in the Sixteenth Century. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/362761.
• Davenport, Millia. The Book of Costume. New York: Crown Publishers, 1948. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/922657048.
• De Marly, Diana. Fashion for Men: An Illustrated History. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1985. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/752978274.
• Hayward, Maria, ed. Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII. Leeds: Maney, 2007. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/997437672.
• Hill, Daniel Delis. History of World Costume and Fashion. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2011. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/768100950.
• “Katherine Parr: Appearance – What Did Katherine Look Like?” Tudor Times. Accessed July 1, 2019. http://tudortimes.co.uk/people/katherine-parr-appearance.
• Reynolds, Anna. In Fine Style: The Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion. London: Royal Collection Trust, 2013. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/824726826.

Secondary Sources

Also see the 16th-century overview page for more research sources… or browse our Zotero library.