Clothing Queens in Sixteenth-Century England and France 

Clothing in the early modern period was inherently bound up in ideas around status. Throughout the Middle Ages and across Europe, access to the most sumptuous of materials and the richest of hues was carefully controlled by strict legislation that limited what could and couldn’t be worn by the lower echelons of society. Amidst the vigorous, global economic expansion of the sixteenth century, ideas of nationhood and foreignness began, for the first time, to be attributed to the production, selling and wearing of clothing. This was a world in which a person’s worth could ostensibly be gleaned from what they wore. 

Clothing Queens considers the garments created for, worn by, and observed on the queens of England and France in the sixteenth century, at a pivotal point in the history of the two warring nations. Most came from foreign lands to be wed, and with them they brought the customs, cultures and communities of their homelands. These women therefore occupied a unique space within the paradigm of the period, and nowhere was this duality more conspicuous than in their attire.

Much has been made of the relationship between Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England, whose sixteenth-century reigns were characterised by reciprocal fascination and an enduringly ferocious rivalry. When they met for the first time in 1520, both were young men in their prime, bolstered by their respective retinues and dressed from head to foot in their most opulent clothing, each vying for their place in the world order. 

Far less attention has been afforded to the comparative relationship between their queens. Notions of nationhood, inherently bound up in clothing, demonstrably differed for these women, who had close personal ties to their motherlands and allegiances to allies and loved ones scattered across the continent. How, if at all, did these royal women interact with one another, and how did they use their attire to do so?

Who produced the clothing worn by English and French queens, and how did these individuals understand clothing as a form of communication? How did each strata of society perceive the regalia of royal women, and how did conceptions of clothing endure in the afterlife of her reign? Who, in essence, clothed a 16th-century queen? 

Clothing Queens considers the networks of commerce and production that conceived, created and cared for the items worn by royal women, as well as exploring the queen’s own agency and that of her household. This work considers the varying ways in which royal clothing was observed and understood throughout society, and how dependent perceptions of sartorial symbolism were upon the lived experience of the beholder, thus expanding our understanding of queenly clothing beyond the constructions, creations and confines of the royal court and its discerning eye.