Theatre Costume Essay, Research Paper

In order to understand the clothes the Elizabethans wore, you must understand why they wore them. To do this, you need to know how their society worked. The Elizabethan social world was based on a concept known as “The Great Chain Of Being.” This was the idea that everyone had their own, God-ordained position in society. The top of the chain was God, directly below God was the Queen and everyone else was below her, in descending degrees of importance. While this social order was beginning to break down, it still held true in general. People had their rigidly ordered stations in life, and their clothing reflected who they were.

The social order is often broken into peasants, middle class, and nobles. Peasants were the agricultural laborers and their families. They usually lived their entire lives in one small village, working the land owned by the nobleman of the area. They had little leisure time and almost no cash. Their clothing was limited and

designed for practicality.

Middle class people were the artisans, craftsmen, servants, and small merchants. Their clothing was still practical but also reflected that they had a bit more leisure time and a bit of money to spend on clothing. Servants of this class were likely to wear

livery uniforms provided by their employers.

The wealthy middle class were the prosperous merchants, the highly skilled artisans, and the servants of nobles. They had money to spend on clothing, and they were the one social class with overriding ambition to climb the social ladder, so their

clothing was often very fashionable. There were legal restrictions on what they could wear, called “Sumptuary laws”. Sumptuary laws set fines for people who wore clothing above their station. They were usually ineffective because they added the additional status of having been able to afford to pay the sumptuary tax on the garment in question!

Nobles were the high status knights, earls, countesses, etc, who comprised “high society”. Since they were often in attendance on the Queen, their clothing reflected their wealth and their respect for her position. Clothing at that time held approximately the

same value that cars do today for reflecting social and financial status. Some noblemen’s suits were literally covered with jewels, and might have a value equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars today.

The highest person in the land, and therefore the best dressed, was her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I. Elizabeth’s clothing reached an unprecedented level of artifice and onament. One reason for this was simple propaganda. Her claim to the throne was uneasy, and needed to be shored up. One of the ways she did this was to represent herself as beyond human– the Faery Queen. The outrageous styles she affected helped convey the impression. Men’s clothing, in particular, reached its ascendancy with Elizabeth’s reign. When the Queen is a single woman who is known to be fond of handsome men, catching her eye becomes very important. All these factors led to one of the most clothes conscious cultures ever. To a costumer, few periods offer the range of challenges that this one does.

Dress in this period covers the transition from the relatively softly constructed linear fashions of the Late Gothic (Northern Europe) and Early Italian Renaissance styles, into the far more rigidly constructed, padded and rather more blocky looking Tudor or Northern European Renaissance style Because this is one of the major “transition periods” (like the French Revolution or W.W.I eras) where style took a major shift in a short period of time, there are an unusual number of fashion anomalies as people were rapidly rooting about for the new style. Fashion change in this period becomes so rapid that a pejorative expression forms to describe those dressed in outdated fashions: “they look like like figures in Arras”. Arras refers to the figured woven tapestries that reached their zenith in this era. A typical tapestry of this type took seven years from design to completion, and so the dress of human figures in a tapestry was seven years out of date even when the tapestry was brand new.

At right one can see an example of the rapid alteration ofdress that occurred in this era. This image is a copy of a Holbein painting originally at Windsor Castle that showed Henry VIII and his third wife along with portraits of Henry’s deceased parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, based on earlier portraits. Left to right it shows Henry VIII in dress of 1530’s-40’s, his father Henry VII and mother Elizabeth of York in dress of about 1500-1520, and his third wife, Jane Seymour in dress of the 1530’s. The Father and son’s dress could hardly be more different from one another, and the women’s dress although similar in overall line, is clearly of much more stiff construction in the later dress.

This rapid fashion change is typical in any society which is undergoing rapid social, economic, political or religious change. This era occurs at the point in history when the world was discovered to be round, not flat, when America was “discovered” by Europeans, when guns went into general use in warfare, when Protestantism ripped

apart the previously solid Catholic church in Western Europe, when the printing press very suddenly made ideas spread, when plague level syphilis first ran unchecked

through Europe’s population, and when a mini ice age weather pattern assailed Europe.

When people are undergoing these kinds of changes they tend to rapidly adopt and discard fashions. However when change becomes so rapid that it seems highly threatening, the tendency is to choose more and more conservative fashions: fashions that emphasize class differences, fashions that are physically restrictive, fashions that make the wearer look more formidable than relaxed, fashions that contain and control the appearance of natural female sexuality. 16th Century fashions over the whole of the Century do this to greater and greater degrees, the sharpest shift occurs in the “transition period” of the first third of the Century.

Typical features of this transition period are continued linearity in women’s dress while stiffening the internal structure, development of the stiffened gabled headdress in England, and the French hood which containerize women’s hair, slashing and puffing increasingly popular as decoration, especially in Germany, continuation of parti-colored dress in the beginning of this era, and expansion of the codpiece with extreme padding.

These are some of the main elements of Elizabethan costume (By the term “Elizabethan”, I mean the dress worn by the English) during Queen Elizabeth’s reign (1550-1600). Occurring between the middling poor and nobility, there is a bewildering variety in English Elizabethan womenswear, French gowns, round gowns, loose gowns, night gowns, doublets, Italian gowns, and Flemish and Polish gowns, just for starters. So

Putting on an English Elizabethan gown is a complicated process, and when you include hair and makeup, can take half an hour or more. Any undies, stockings, shoes, earrings, etc. go on first. Dress your hair and do your makeup before starting; once you’re

dressed, it’ll be nearly impossible. Although Elizabethan women didn’t wear underwear per se, they did wear stockings. These usually came to just above the knee, and were held in place by a garter at the top of the calf. There is evidence that Englishwomens’ shoes during Elizabethan times were usually thin-soled with leather soles, and had uppers of leather, velvet or other fabrics lined (by the nobility, at least) with scarlet , taffeta, or satin. They were for the most part simple, slipper-type shoes, cut low on the top and round-toed, although heeled shoes became more popular from the 1560s onward.

To protect their shoes from the muck and mud of an average English street, women wore pattens, or chopines. Pattens were wooden soles, usually 1/2 to 1 inch thick, hinged at the ball of the foot with leather straps that were strapped on over the shoes,rather like sandals. Chopines, also called pantobles or mules, ranged from sturdy-soled shoes with heels to high, discoesque platforms.

A man’s basic undergarment was his shirt. The peasant shirt was made of linen, thigh length, and was, like the woman’s smock, cut in rectangular pieces.It pulled on over the head and had a mid chest opening with a neckband, with or without a collar which tied or buttoned, and long, fairly full sleeves with cuffs. do not close the front opening with lacing: that’s a Hollywood invention. Colored shirts are seen, but unbleached white is most likely to have been worn. Breeches, or nether hose, were the trousers of the peasant class. They were most often knee length, gathered or pleated into a waistband, and tapered to gather or pleat into legbands which tied or buttoned. They could have a plain fly front, but many still retained a triangular flap opening called a codpiece, which fastened with buttons or ties. While the style is rarely seen at modern reenactments, some netherhose were much shorter, to the upper thigh, and often worn under a long jerkin so that they barely showed. the peasant jerkin was a loose, unstructured vest, often made of leather. It was usually thigh length, and could have either a high round or a deeper V neck. It lace,. tied, or buttoned up the front, or was simply held closed by a belt. Jerkins were often made of leather. Sleeves were separate garments, that fastened to the jerkin with ties. They were worn in cool weather. Cloaks were made of wool. They were probably not full length, but more likely mid calf or knee length. Full length cloaks

worn in wet, muddy weather are not practical.

So amidst all the technical jargon, Elizabethen dess was complicated and often delicate. Modern reenactments rearely mimic the 16th century accurately. But, it is a form of costuming that has always been fascinating.