Womenswear

In the 1660s the foundation of any woman’s outfit remained her linen chemise or shift, on top of which she would either wear a boned bodice or a separate pair of stays. Stays were a sort of stiff corset that originally sought to create a smooth surface to prevent the wrinkling of expensive dress textiles, but came to be appreciated for their ability to shape the woman’s body to the desired silhouette of the period. A beautiful pink 1660s pair of stays and busk survives in the Victoria & Albert Museum collection (Fig. 1). The museum explains its construction:

“The stays are made by hand-stitching the watered silk to a layer of linen in long narrow pockets. Thin strips of whalebone are inserted into the pockets to give the stays their shape. Whalebone is in fact not bone, but cartilage from the mouth of the baleen whale. It grows in large sheets in the mouth of the whale and serves as a kind of sieve to filter out tiny krill, the whale’s primary source of food, from the seawater.”

A 1663 painting by Jan Steen (Figs. 2-3) allows a rare glimpse of stays on a 17th-century body. This unknown woman at her toilette wears stays beneath her unfastened pink silk jacket, which is edged in white fur. As this outfit makes clear, the jacket is separate from the petticoat/skirt worn below. The white edge of her chemise is just visible beneath the gold silk petticoat; she is pulling on her stockings, which would have been held up by garters above the knee. We also see her high-heeled mules discarded at her feet—another rare glimpse as 1660s skirts were typically floor-length.

Gerard ter Borch the Younger’s early 1660s painting Curiosity (Fig. 4) gives a fuller picture of different styles of dressing popular in the decade. The seated woman wears a blue velvet jacket trimmed in white fur like that seen in the Steen image, though now she’s fully dressed. Opposite her, the woman in a pink bodice has pink ribbon ties attaching her sleeves like those on the stays (Fig. 1) discussed above. As the Cunningtons explain in their Handbook of English Costume in the Seventeenth Century (1972):

“Close fitting and boned the bodice became again long-waisted, sloping to a deep point in front [1650-1675] some finished with short tabs flaring out over the hips (similar to the corset). Were mainly in vogue from 1660 to 1675.” (170)

The pink bodice comes to a very deep point and has a very low, off-the-shoulder neckline as was typical. As Daniel Delis Hill explains in The History of World Costume and Fashion (2011): “Necklines widened to encircle the shoulders and the sleeve armscye seam dropped onto the upper arm. Sleeves remained short.” (411)

Her white satin petticoat features many cartridge pleats at the natural waistline to create a very full skirt, supported by a bum roll.

The increasing decorative exuberance seen in the 1660s even extended to shoes as a pair of women’s blue velvet latchet-tie shoes with narrow squared toes (Fig. 11) reveals. The velvet is enhanced by elaborate floriate silver embroidery. As Rebecca Shawcross explains in Shoes: An Illustrated History (2014): “Up until this time, styles of women’s shoes had not differed significantly from those of men, yet from the 1660s a division was beginning to grow” (64). Men’s shoes were becoming plainer than women’s; see the black leather heels with pink ribbon latchet ties in figure 7, for example. Women, as we saw in Steen genre scene (Fig. 2), also wore slip-on heeled mules.

In ter Borch’s portrait of an unknown woman (Fig. 12) we see the same satin petticoat trimmed in metallic lace, but also another popular trend of the 1660s: a long line of ribbons down the front of the bodice, with additional ribbon trimmings on the sleeves. Millia Davenport explains in The Book of Costume (1948): “During the period of the beribboned male petticoat-breech, a ladder of ribbon knots, graduated in size, decorates the center line of women’s long unified bodices” (519). Daniel Preisler’s portrait of Justina Katharina Kirchmayr (Fig. 13) features an even larger and more colorful array of ribbons. Adriana Jacobusdr Hinlopen (Fig. 14) wears what appears to be thousands of tiny pale pink ribbons attached to her stomacher, encircling her sleeves and attached to bows in her hair.

Simpler ways of accenting the bodice remained popular as well. In Caspar Netscher’s Woman Feeding a Parrot (Fig. 15) we see the same gauzy fabric edging the neckline that had been popular in the 1650s. Netscher’s Card Party (Fig. 16) just allows us to view the lacing up the back of the standing woman’s bodice with silver ribbon laces tied decoratively at her waist; the seated woman’s dress sparkles with the metallic lace or embroidery trim we saw earlier. 

Some Dutch women paired the new descending bow decoration with the low necklines being worn in France (Fig. 17); as François Boucher explains in A History of Costume in the West (1997), “women’s clothing assimilated a large number of French fashions, particularly in décolletage, after 1660” (273). England had already adopted such styles and Peter Lely’s informal drapery style of portraiture remained popular. His portrait of two ladies of the Lake family (Fig. 18) depicts one in a blue boned bodice, while the other is in a more casual bodice that fastens up the front with clasps.

From a strongly Royalist family, Barbara Villiers (Fig. 1) met Charles II in 1660 while he was living in exile in The Hague. They soon became lovers and she would go on to have six children by him—five of whom were recognized by the surname Fitzroy. She was painted many times and her image became well-known and frequently reproduced.

In the 1660s, she was:

“arguably the most influential woman in Britain at the time. She used her beauty to gain wealth and considerable political power, receiving from the king a generous pension, land grants, and aristocratic titles. Lely’s portrait of Villiers helped establish his reputation as well as her image as the preeminent court beauty.” (North Carolina Museum)

Lely claimed that “it was beyond the compass of art to give this lady her due, as to her sweetness and exquisite beauty” (Ashelford 98). Lely painted portraits of fashionable women at the royal court of which figure 1 is a part; the series became known as the “Windsor Beauties” (NC Museum). She wears a brown satin bodice that appears to be boned, with a matching petticoat as well as Lely’s signature drapery. Notable are the immense numbers of pearls worn at the neck, ears, wrist, center front of the bodice and woven into her hair—presumably gifts from Charles II. 

Her every move at court was closely followed and recorded, as Jane Ashelford notes in The Art of Dress: Clothes and Society, 1500-1914 (1996):

“An experienced and discerning judge of female beauty, Pepys accepted that the King’s mistresses were the undisputed leaders of fashion. Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, later Duchess of Cleveland – from 1670, was Pepys’s favourite, and his diary is full of details of his sightings of her, even keeping a record of those occasions on which he had seen her underwear laid out to dry in the Privy Garden at Whitehall Palace.” (98)

A miniature of Villiers by Samuel Cooper (Fig. 2) shows her wearing a daringly low-cut bodice with open seams on the sleeves allowing her chemise to peek out. Her hair is arranged in the hurluberlu hairstyle and she wears only a single strand of pearls. Her fashion influence seems to have extended perhaps even to Charles II’s new wife, Catherine of Braganza, daughter of the King of Portugal who arrived at the court in 1662 and who appears nearly identically dressed to Villiers in a Cooper miniature (Fig. 3). Against Catherine’s wishes, Charles made Villiers one of the Queen’s ladies-of-the-bedchamber (Historic UK).

She seemed to enjoy playing different roles as she commissioned portraits in various guises, including as the goddess Minerva, as a shepherdess, as Mary Magdalene (Fig. 4) and in perhaps the most daring role, as the Madonna, with her son Charles Fitzroy as the Christ child (Fig. 5). In 1670 she was made Duchess of Cleveland.

The 1660s was a period of transition in menswear from the shrunken doublet and petticoat breeches to the adoption of the long straight-cut coat and vest. This will ultimately result in the adoption of the coat, waistcoat and knee breeches that will dominate men’s fashion for more than a century, but that combination was not firmly established until 1680 (Waugh Men 16).

At the start of the decade one finds men wearing the short bolero-style doublet with a bloused shirt appearing at the open seams, with large ruffled cuffs and often worn buttoned only from the collar to the breastbone; an example can be seen in Quirijn van Brekenkam’s Sentimental Conversation (Fig. 1).

Ribbon loop decorations remained extremely popular at the waist, doublet cuffs and at the sides of the petticoat breeches. Petticoat breeches, so named for their resemblance to women’s skirts, were extremely full-cut open breeches that hung freely down to the knees. They were so capacious it was possible to put both legs into one of the breeches as Samuel Pepys’ Diary records: “1661. April 6. Among other things met with Mr. Townsend, who told his mistake the other day, to put both his legs through one of his knees of his breeches, and went so all day” (Waugh Men 47).

A surviving silk doublet in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection (Fig. 8) shows very similar truncated proportions and ample volume of visible shirt. The very full matching petticoat breeches are too fragile to display but have been faithfully reproduced, giving a good idea of the total look.

As for grooming and hair styles of the day, James, Duke of York (Fig. 9) provides a good example:

“men’s hair is now longer and fuller than was fashionable earlier in the seventeenth century. It is coaxed here into soft waves and ringlets, arranged carefully to fall in symmetrical locks over the chest and back.” (Cumming 93)

Men also favored thin mustaches, which were worn by both Charles II and Louis XIV (Fig. 10).  See another example on painter William Bruce (Fig. 13). Natural-looking wigs were also beginning to be worn; initially styled like normal hair, wigs will become increasingly artificial as the century progresses. As Diana de Marly explains in Fashion for Men: An Illustrated History (1985):

“The early periwigs were very curly around 1660, but those of the 1670s had ringlets. Their introduction was gradual. The naval administrator Samuel Pepys took the plunge in 1663, James Duke of York did so in February 1664 and Charles II not until April when he was going grey. Louis XIV, for once, took even longer, sporting his own abundant locks, of which he was very proud, into the next decade. Wigs proved an excellent illustration of rank, for they cost several pounds, so the peasantry could not copy them.” (55)

While Louis XIV may have lagged in adopting a wig, he did popularize a new silhouette at court, by adopting the justaucorps, which was a type of loose overcoat that had already been worn in military costume; it “had short sleeves and was long and slightly flared at the bottom” (Boucher 258). As Boucher explains: “In 1662, according to Bussy-Rabutin, Louis XIV granted first a dozen, then about forty of his familiars permission to wear clothes similar to his own – a blue justaucorps lined with red ornaments, and a red veste or jacket – when staying at Saint-Germain or Versailles… first example of a codified form of Court costume.” (258)

The courtier at far left in the scene of Louis XIV and Philip IV meeting (Fig. 3) seems to be wearing a long blue justaucorps-style garment. The justaucorps supplanted the doublet, which slowly evolved toward a collarless, sleeveless vest. The justaucorps was very plain in cut as it hung loosely in this decade and was not yet tailored to the body. Duke Maximilian Philipp of Bavaria (Fig. 11) wears a short-sleeved, long, loose-cut justaucorps-style outer garment, which he pairs with a truly impressive amount of ribbon trim and pleated lace cannons. An early Dutch fashion print also features two men in long, loose justaucorps.

Charles II introduced a version of the justaucorps to the English court, where he called it a vest. Like the justaucorps it was a long, collarless coat which hung so low that the petticoat breeches were no longer visible; their invisibility eventually resulted in a simplification of their style (Ashelford 92). Cravats, long strips of linen tied at the neck often with lace at the ends, became fashionable as these collarless coats were adopted. The name for the cravat “is said to be derived from Croat as such neckcloths were first seen on Louis XIV’s regiment of Croat mercenaries” (Waugh Men plate 7). The men in figures 12 and 13 all wear cravats. As the men in figures 4, 7, 9, and 11 especially demonstrate, the long hairstyles favored in the period mostly obscured the fine lace collars that men wore previously over their shoulders. The cravat concentrated the collar/lace at the center front where it wasn’t obscured by the hair or increasingly the periwig. Boucher explains more about the cravat’s adoption:

“it was already worn by soldiers, simply knotted and hanging loosely. Civilian costume gave it greater variety and imagination, with panels of rich lace and a fairly full butterfly bow of ribbon under the chin. Cravats were made ready-tied, mounted on a ribbon which was fastened at the back of the neck.” (265)

The portrait of William Bruce (Fig. 13) shows one other fashionable style of informal dress in this period, namely the dressing gown. While Bruce’s gown may be silk, in the 1660s Indian cottons also become fashionable for dressing gowns:

“In the 1660s the East India Company had introduced the English to chintz, a painted or printed cotton cloth made in India which was used as a furnishing fabric and for the loose informal gowns worn at home. Its brilliant colours, the fastness of the dyes used and the adaptation of native designs to suit English taste ensure the popularity of the materials.” (Ashelford 110)

A rival calico (white or unbleached cotton) printing industry soon developed in England and “by 1700 calico printing was flourishing” (110).

Portraits of children can be more reliable records of fashionable dress as they were less frequently put into imagined or classical informal dress. See, for example, Peter Lely’s portrait of James II with Anne Hyde, Princess Mary and Princess Anne (Fig. 5). While Anne Hyde is in the loosely draped stylized garb Lely specialized in, Princess Mary is dressed in a densely brocaded silk, with the defined waistline fashionable in everyday dress. Note, however, her dress has leading strings attached, which were not a feature of adult dress. Sometimes even children were dressed in Lely’s characteristic fashion for portraiture, however, as in the portrait of Lady Elizabeth Seymour (Fig. 6). David Scougall’s portrait of the young Lord David Hay (Fig. 7) shows the lad in a long justaucorps-style coat, heavily adorned with braid and red ribbon loops.