Fashion and Self-Fashioning: Queenly Sartorial Bodies in England and France, 1486-1603

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Dress was historically used by royal women in a myriad of ways: power manifested itself in visual culturethrough the display of material opulence and ceremonial ritual, whilst various clothing controls sought tomaintain a sense of courtly superiority. But delving deeper into surviving sources reveals that queenlyfashion did more than simply uphold the status quo. Through her sartorial body - a social skin, formed byfashion and able to move unpredictably through societies, places and genders - a queen could deployclothing to speak out where she could not; a type of style statement that remains every bit as pertinenttoday (Crane, 2012).This cross-cultural exploration uses both textual and material sources to consider queenly clothing inEngland and France, during the transitional period of 1486-1603. Investigation of the style and materialconsumption of these royal women, each living through wholly unique social and political circumstances,can expose a wealth of information: about clothing, about queenship, and about how each individualwoman sought to be perceived. The discernible implications of queenly style statements for their sartorialreputations and representations in contemporary cultural depictions will also be explored, as publicappreciation for costume dramas and period pieces continues to reign supreme.Scholarly explorations of historic queenly fashion are surprisingly scarce, despite tangible contemporarypublic interest. In 2018 alone, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the CatholicImagination exhibition broke all records, whilst thousands signed up to complete A History of RoyalFashion, Historic Royal Palaces' virtual course. These figures alone are demonstrative of the value ofcontinued academic and collaborative research into royal clothing culture, as the fashioning of the Britishmonarchy and its global counterparts continues to fascinate: thus 'the frivolity of fashion does notnecessarily deny its historical importance' (Gibbons, 2012).