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Fashion High and Low

Sumptuary laws ensured that clothes reflected the age's social stratifications, with more variation occurring in the top ranks of society. Men as well as women were especially aware of the manipulative potentialities in dress and public image, and adorned themselves accordingly, but few did so with such notoriety and effect as Elizabeth I of England. Her astonishing wardrobe was a political expression in its own right, and a useful expedient: because much of her power came from projection—which was especially necessary when she witnessed no small number of threats to her throne, as well as limited funds in her treasury—her gowns were designed to impress with jewels and luxurious fabric, and could even be adapted to international fashion styles, depending on whose court—the French, an Italian city-state—she considered diplomatically useful at any one time. Elizabeth's dress in turn trickled down, at least to ladies of the more elevated class, with its status-enhancing ruffles, complicated bell-shaped sleeves, daunting underpinnings, heavily embroidered gowns, V-shaped waistlines, cinched, tight-fitting bodices, and choices of colors that ranged, in contemporary language, from Bristol Red to Puke and Popinjay Green.