For men, the 1630s was an age of leather, long locks and lace, while women shimmered in soft satins and plenty of lace of their own.

Womenswear

As figure 4 reveals, bodice sleeves were set deep into the back of the bodice. For more on English fashion of the 1630s, see the “Fashion Icon” section below on Queen Henrietta Maria.

A painting by Louise Moillon (Fig. 5) gives us a rare side-by-side view of elite and common dress as it shows an elegant woman selecting produce from a fruit and vegetable seller. The woman at left is richly dressed in black satin, with virago sleeves, a standing lace collar, and a lace-trimmed stomacher. The merchant woman is wearing humbler garments that mimic the silhouette of the time, with fuller sleeves and a low-squared neckline, here filled in with her linen chemise, but in far less expensive materials and without the decorative details of the dress of her customer.

Rubens’ young wife Helena Fourment (Fig. 6) is dressed in the latest French fashions as well, again in black satin; notably her neckline is not filled in by lace or her chemise, with her bust prominently on display, nearly spilling over the top of her stiff stomacher.

Other Dutch women adopted the French style of dress, but retained their much beloved ruffs, long after women in other countries had discarded them (Brown 124). Rembrandt’s portrait of a woman (Fig. 7) shows the fashionable virago sleeves and high waist of the period, but here paired with an enormous cartwheel ruff—demonstrating that not all fashions were adopted uniformly across cultures. And, indeed, not all people of a time dressed in the latest fashions, as a portrait by Jan van Ravesteyn (Fig. 8) attests. Some chose, then as now, to dress in older styles whether due to personal aesthetic preferences, financial limitations, or group membership.

Maria of Austria (Fig. 9), Queen of Hungary, presents another interesting case in terms of fashion history. She wears a version of the now elliptical-shaped Spanish farthingale, with the deep U-shaped bodices popular a few decades earlier. Conventionally this is treated as a conservative look, maintaining past traditions, rather than as cutting edge in its style. Yet that elliptical skirt shape would become the must-have silhouette of the 18th-century—more than 70 years later. Is she ahead of her time? Or mired in the past? It’s all a matter of perspective!

Fashion Icon: Henrietta Maria, Queen Consort of England

Henrietta Maria (1609-166) was the youngest daughter of King Henri IV of France and Marie de’ Medici and was named after both her parents. Her brother, Louis XIII, became King when she was only a child. She married King Charles I of England in 1625 and became Queen Consort of England, Scotland and Ireland, although she was never crowned due to her Catholic faith.

Upon her arrival at the English court, she “exerted a strong influence on court fashion and protocol, and introduced continental fashions and Italianate gardens to England” (NGA). She spent lavishly on dress—attracting criticism from Puritan moralists—and had her clothes made by a French tailor, as François Boucher notes in A History of Costume in the West (1997): “After 1630, Queen Marie-Henriette of France wrote to her friend Madame de Saint-George to arrange for Pin the tailor to come to Great Britain to make her bodices and underskirts” (274). Fashion: The Definitive History of Costume and Style (2012) describes the impact of the young queen:

“She had grown up in the French court and imported grace, style, and imperial grandeur, along with a vast trousseau of clothes and jewelry. Immediately, her youth, French background and vivacious personality introduced a new sophistication to court culture, as well as the shock of the new.” (Brown 126)

After a rocky start, her marriage to Charles became a happy one and they became quite close, as an unusual double portrait by Daniel Mytens attests (Fig. 1). Both wore French fashions (see a discussion of Charles’s style in the Menswear section below) and even spoke French at court. An early portrait by van Dyck (Fig. 2) features the same dress as the Mytens’ work. The Royal Collection Trust notes that:

“In his early English portraits Anthony van Dyck includes fashionable details of dress (such as the spiky lace cuffs seen here) that he later tended to omit or simplify. The queen’s bodice and skirt have been pinked with wavy lines to produce a decorative effect in the lustrous silvery-blue silk, while the ‘carnation’ pink ribbons add warmth to the cool palette.”

This pinking effect was also used on the surviving bodice (Figs. 3-4) discussed in the Womenswear section above.

Another double portrait (Fig. 3) shows the royal couple setting out for a hunt. In the portrait Henrietta Maria wears virago sleeves and one can see that skirts have returned to being floor-length. On her head she wears a black Cavalier style hat ornamented with a white ostrich plume, nearly identical to that worn by Charles. The same hat reappears in a van Dyck portrait of the Queen also dressed for the hunt (Fig. 4), in which she wears a blue satin bodice and skirt trimmed in gold lace, with the same spiky lace cuffs worn at the elbows seen in figure 2. A love lock hangs down on her falling lace collar. Note that women’s sleeves have become quite shortened exposing much of the forearm.

Two other van Dyck portraits record Henrietta Maria’s famous love of pearls. One portrait from 1636 (Fig. 5) shows a long strand of pearls accenting the neckline of her bodice and forming a loop tied in a black bow at center front. The queen’s ringlets frame her face and indeed launched a fashion for ringlets at the English court. Pearls also feature prominently in a frontal 1638 portrait, which was apparently commissioned in the hopes that the Italian sculptor Bernini would carve a portrait bust like that he had done for her husband Charles I (the unusual triple portrait of Charles I by van Dyck was painted for the same reason—see figure 2 below). Anna Reynolds notes in In Fine Style (2013) that

“in day-to-day life this garment would always have been worn with a falling collar of lace that here is notably absent.” (172-73)

Henrietta Maria dressed in the latest French styles and set fashions at the English court; she would loyally campaign in support of her husband during the English Civil Wars in the next decade, but the 1630s were a happier (and more fashionable) time.

Menswear

Henry Peacham lamented the French influence on English fashion in his Truth of our Times (1638):

“I have much wondered why our English above other nations should so much doat upon new fashions, but more I wonder at our want of wit that we cannot invent them ourselves; but when one is growne stale run presently over into France to seeke a new.” (Waugh 45)

Henry Rich, 1st Earl of Holland, wears styles similar to the King, but here with the addition of boot hose, which “were worn over the stockings; they could be full-footed or fitted only with instep straps, flaring out at the top into wide funnels trimmed with lace which spread over the boot tops” (Boucher 255). This added lace perhaps became fashionable because the large glove gauntlets now worn often covered lace cuffs at the wrists. Boots also began to feature a large butterfly-shaped latchet at the front, which was used to support the spur at the back of the boot, but also became quite prominent and decorative (Figs. 1, 4-6, 9-10).

Rich’s boots also feature slapsoles, which were “thick pieces of leather attached to the toes of shoes and boots but left loose at the heel; as the wearer walked the sole slapped against the heel” (Hill 401). Slapsoles also appear in the portrait of Lord John Stuart and his brother, Lord Bernard Stuart (Fig. 6).

Over the course of the decade the size of falling lace collars worn slowly expanded, perhaps to remain visible with such long hair cascading down onto the shoulders. These larger collars can be seen on a member of the Fownes family (Fig. 5) and on the Stuart brothers (Fig. 6). Breeches also narrowed and lengthened, likely due to French influence as King Louis XIII sports much longer and narrower breeches in his 1636 portrait (Fig. 9).

The portrait of the Stuart brothers (Fig. 6) also introduces an air of aristocratic negligence in that it became common late in the decade to begin to leave buttons unbuttoned. The doublet of the Stuart facing us is left two-thirds unbuttoned, exposing a great deal of his shirt at the center front. A great deal of exposed shirt is also visible in the portrait of Thomas Killgrew and William, Lord Crofts (Fig. 7). Notably the buttons up the back of the doublet here are left undone. As the Royal Collection Trust notes, “While the rather untidy appearance of the two sitters has been interpreted as a symbol of their grief, in fact they are actually following the prevailing trend for an artfully dishevelled and ‘undone’ style of male dress that was fashionable during the 1630s.”

Another fashionable (and practical) trend towards the end of the decade was the wearing of leather jerkins and even leather doublets. These were called buff coats, alluding to the undyed color of the natural hide. Montjoy Blount, 1st Earl of Newport, wears a leather jerkin over a white satin doublet (Fig. 8), which is pinked in much the same manner as the woman’s bodice seen above (Figs. 3-4 in Womenswear). His compatriot, Lord George Goring, wears a leather doublet with an open seam that reveals his shirt. Both wear baldrics to support their swords and military sashes. This form of dress would become very common among royalists during the English Civil War.

In France, fashion assumed a longer, sleeker line, as discussed above. Paned leg-of-mutton sleeves were abandoned in favor of narrower sleeves with open seams; breeches became longer and extended over the knee, as can be seen in a 1636 portrait of King Louis XIII (Fig. 9). Boucher notes that under Louis XIII it became more difficult to discern social rank by what a person was wearing: “The different ranks were equally well dressed and everyone aspired to carry a sword. A contemporary observed that the Parisians no longer seemed above to live without ribbons or laces or a mirror” (254).

While it is not obvious from this portrait, Louis XIII began to wear a wig in the 1630s—originally out of necessity—as Boucher explains:

“when the King lost all his hair as the result of an illness, about 1633, a new accessory appeared, the wig, initially limited to switches mingles with the wearer’s own hair, then complete. In fact, it was then worn only in cases of necessity… Natural and curled hairstyles remained in vogue… the manufacture of wigs for purposes of fashion became general only towards 1655.” (263-4)

Wigs will become much more important (and obvious) in the 18th century, when they begin to be powdered.

The longer line of dress is evident in the portrait of Ohn Belasyse (Fig. 10), 1st Baron Belasyse, as is the higher waistline that became common as well, much as in womenswear. Indeed, “By the 1630s, men’s fashions were dramatically different from styles of the early seventeenth century. Doublets were constructed with a raised waistline and a fuller, looser fit. Hooks and eyes replaced laces and points for attaching the breeches to the doublet” (Hill 399). Ribbons ending in points still adorn Louis XIII’s doublet, but do not feature on Ohn Belasyse’s. A doublet and breeches in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (Fig. 11) also exhibit that higher waistline and are again decoratively pinked all over.

In the Netherlands, as in womenswear, some adopted the new French trends while others maintained earlier dress styles. Rubens portrays himself in a fashionable satin doublet with paned leg-of-mutton sleeves (Fig. 12) and a Cavalier style hat; whereas a member of the Van Beresteyn family (Fig. 13) when painted by Rembrandt chose to dress in fashions of the 1620s. The rest of Europe was increasingly consumed by the incredibly destructive Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) and thus witnessed slower fashion change.

CHILDREN’S WEAR

References:

• Royal Collection Trust. “Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) – Charles I (1600-1649).” Accessed January 16, 2020. https://www.rct.uk/collection/404420/charles-i-1600-1649.
• Royal Collection Trust. “Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) – Queen Henrietta Maria (1609-69).” Accessed January 16, 2020. https://www.rct.uk/collection/404430/queen-henrietta-maria-1609-69.
• Royal Collection Trust. “Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) – Thomas Killigrew and William, Lord Crofts (?).” Accessed January 16, 2020. https://www.rct.uk/collection/407426/thomas-killigrew-and-william-lord-crofts.
• Victoria and Albert Museum. “Bodice,” January 16, 2020. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O115754.
• Boucher, François, Yvonne Deslandres, and John Ross. A History of Costume in the West. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/443676264.
• Brown, Susan, ed. Fashion: The Definitive History of Costume and Style. New York: DK Publishing, 2012. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/840417029.
• Hill, Daniel Delis. History of World Costume and Fashion. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2011. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/768100950.
• National Gallery of Art. “Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson.” Accessed January 16, 2020. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.41651.html.
• Royal Collection Trust. “Lady Bowes (1607?-1653), Wife of Sir Thomas Bowes.” Accessed January 16, 2020. https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/exhibitions/in-fine-style/the-queens-gallery-buckingham-palace/lady-bowes-1607-1653-wife-of-sir-thomas-bowes.
• Reynolds, Anna. In Fine Style: The Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion. London: Royal Collection Trust, 2013. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/824726826.
• Waugh, Norah, and Margaret Woodward. The Cut of Women’s Clothes, 1600-1930. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1968. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/894728161.

Secondary Sources

Also see the 17th-century overview page for more research sources… or browse our Zotero library.