Rule #12: Dress for success

Queen Elizabeth appreciated fine dress among her senior advisors, but it had to befit their specific ranks, titles, and wealth. “Sumptuary laws” were official dress codes that limited who could wear which fabrics, colors, and furs. Your outfit announced your position in the political and social order of Tudor England. The most frequent violations were related to excessively padded trunk hose (puffy shorts stuffed with padding) and ridiculously large ruffs.

The fashion police

The queen regularly issued dress codes like this one. Worried that gentlemen were bankrupting themselves to follow fashion trends, and that imports of foreign textiles and furs were upsetting the balance of trade, Elizabeth tried to rein in her courtiers’ worst impulses. But the bigger issue was competition: upwardly mobile merchants and tradespeople were starting to dress like the nobility, and clothing was no longer a reliable way to determine power and status.

Fashion emergency

The queen appointed Sir Christopher Hatton (Rule 11) as Lord Chancellor in 1587. To dress the part, Hatton needed the best fabric that money could buy. For two new outfits, he requested 33 yards of “the most excellent velvet, the softest and gentlest in hand that may be found” and three pieces of the best black satin, both in “gloss” and “softness” “the purest that may be had, whatsoever the price be.”

Ruffs gone wild

By the 1570s, floppy collars had transformed into gravity defying and totally impractical neck art, thanks to the introduction a decade earlier of starch paste and wireframes to stiffen linen. Platter-sized cartwheel and figure-eight ruffs were the height of fashion. Ruffs became so large that Elizabeth, who loved a ruff herself, finally decreed in 1580 that anyone wearing “such great and excessive ruffs” should stop attiring themselves in such a “monstrous manner.”

Ruffs beyond the seas

Ruffs were viewed as a sign of excess and vanity not only in England but also across Europe. In this anti-Catholic Dutch print, published at the height of the French Wars of Religion, French Catholics are ridiculed for wearing large ruffs. The ruffs supposedly represent their foolish and arrogant minds.