ABSTRACT
Fashion at the court of Elizabeth I, Queen of England from 1558 until 1603, was highly political, as it was in all early modern European courts. Clothes, jewels, fabrics, and dress accessories fit into the larger social use of dress as a marker of the wearer’s social status in the hierarchical societies of early modern Europe. England was no exception. At its most basic level, dress and all its accoutrements were meant to present the monarch as the most powerful person at court. Clothing fulfilled this function because it was very expensive. Although the tailors and seamstresses who made the clothes were paid very little, the materials themselves—silks, velvets, fine linen, and lace—were very costly, and the political elites were usually the only ones who could afford to buy such expensive garments. Dress at the court of Elizabeth was also political in the sense that the queen used it to craft a positive political image of a successful female monarch, something many early modern Europeans would have considered an oxymoron. Elizabeth was able to fashion such an image by manipulating the symbolic meanings of colors and employing emblems in the motifs that adorned her dress in terms of jewelry and embroidered decorations. Courtiers and subjects also participated in the construction of Elizabeth’s image by giving her gifts of clothes and jewels that contributed to the queen’s public persona, supporting her monarchical authority. Finally, Elizabeth also employed sartorial gifts as a means of rewarding or inspiring loyalty to her throne. Dress at the court of Elizabeth I was ornate, ever-changing, and replete with political power.
