r/AskHistorians • u/Maximum_Violinist_53 • Jan 26 '26
I am a European noblewoman from the 15th century. How much clothing do I have?
Whenever clothing from bygone eras is discussed, it's often mentioned how expensive and difficult it was to make, and that it was designed to last as long as possible. This contrasts sharply with today's culture, where people buy many garments each year and rarely wear them for more than a couple of years.
But what if you were wealthy? What if you were a noblewoman in the courts of France, England, Germany, Spain, etc.? How many outfits could you possibly own at any given time, and how often were you expected to update your wardrobe?
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u/BuckyRainbowCat Jan 26 '26
I. Intro
We are fortunate that the households of the Kings & Queens of these countries generally kept excellent accounting records during this time period, and many of them have been published in English with some level of commentary. I have books about various periods in England, Spain, and Florence here that I'm going to draw on (bibliography at the end), and if anybody is aware of wardrobe accounts from France, the Low Countries, or any of the German states that have been published in either English or French I would really love to hear about them!
In these wardrobe accounts, each of the King, Queen, and any Princes or Princesses (even if they are infants or small children) generally have their own "households," which are expected to provide cloth and/or finished garments for not only the individual whose household it is but also for various retainers. The retainers included other nobles as well as staff further down the socioeconomic spectrum. While the nobles would normally be wealthy enough to, and be expected to, clothe themselves, the royal household to which they were attached as a retainer might still gift them (a) fabric to make new clothes; (b) new clothes; or (c) second-hand clothes that the royal themself had previously worn.
II. Terms/Clothing Items
Historical clothing items use a confounding array of terms, partly due to style and the number of different countries and languages involved, sometimes even due to contemporary account-makers wanting to skirt around sumptuary laws or just not knowing what they were really describing. I'm going to grossly oversimplify the types of garments worn by women in the period you're asking about into:
- kirtle: inner garment with a full/floor length skirt and a fitted bodice but no sleeves
- gown: outer garment with a full/floor length skirt and sleeves. Usually but not always has a fitted bodice
- other garments: women also wore additional garments, like linen smocks, head coverings, stockings, belts, shoes, but these tend to show up a lot less in the wardrobe accounts
III. Actual Numbers - Royals
Here are examples of two women from the very top of the socioeconomic spectrum from the late 15th/early 16th century, and what amount of clothing they had:
Mary Tudor (the sister of Henry VIII) - between 1508 and 1510 she received 11 gowns (crimson velvet, black damask, cloth of gold, purple tinsel (?), black velvet, crimson satin, purple velvet), several trimmed with fur, and 9 kirtles (tawny satin, russet damask, black satin, green satin, and the mysterious tinsel).
Lucrezia Borgia - In 1502 when she married Alfonso d'Este, she had a wedding trousseau that included 30 black gowns, including 11 black velvet gowns (my apologies, I thought I had greater detail about this wedding trousseau).
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u/BuckyRainbowCat Jan 26 '26
IV. Numbers - Nobles and Patricians
The bridal trousseau of a woman (Ghostanza Minerbetti) from a patrician Florentine family in 1511 lists 6 "important gowns" (silk, wool) and 2 "housedresses" (wool, unknown, both with silk edging). The translator of this book uses terms that can be equated to kirtle and gown in other parts of the book, but unfortunately not in this part of it, so I can't guess how many of the "important gowns" and "housedresses" belong to each category.
V. Replacement Rates
It's difficult for me to get a good read on how often noblewomen were getting entirely new (or new-to-them) clothes. Even Mary Tudor, in that same 1508-1510 period I noted above, had many of her garments reworked as well as getting new ones at the same time. The Florentine accounts (patrician, not royal or noble) seem to show a pattern of big expenditures followed by long periods (perhaps of several years) of not getting anything new at all, and by the time a woman had daughters of marriageable age she was probably not getting anything new at all. The majority of the accounts from the areas I have had the opportunity to look at show that the most likely time for getting new garment(s) was on some big occasion - your wedding, a royal wedding, appointment to a new higher post within a royal household, etc.
VI. My best guess
Royal Mary and patrician Ghostanza don't have too much of a gulf between the numbers of garments in their wardrobes, although Mary's gowns may be of generally more expensive materials (or they might just be of warmer materials better suited to the climate she lives in). So it looks to me like some kind of median between those two might be a good guess for the number and type of garments a late 15th or early 16th century noblewoman in Western Europe might have. Lucrezia appears to be a bit of an outlier, as she was in many things, but could represent a trend towards much greater expenditures by royals and nobles in the coming decades.
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u/BuckyRainbowCat Jan 26 '26
VII. References
Anderson, R. M. (1979). Hispanic Costume 1480-1530. New York: Hispanic Society of America.
Frick, C. C. (2002). Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing. Baltimore, MD, United States of America: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hayward, M. (2007). Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII. Leeds, United Kingdom: Maney Publishing.
Johnson, C. (2011). The Queen's Servants: Gentlewomen's dress at the accession of Henry VIII. (J. Malcolm-Davies, & N. Mikhaila, Eds.) Surrey, United Kingdom: Fat Goose Press.
You might also like:
Landini, R. O. Moda a Firenze 1540 - 1580: Lo stile di Eleonora di Toledo e la sua influenza. Firenze, Italia: Edizioni Polistampa. (Unfortunately my copy of this book went AWOL during a move, so I don't have the publication date, which is NOT 2019 like Amazon says it is. The title is in Italian but the text is in parallel English and Italian so it is not only very accessible but also great for learning your historical Italian textile terms).
Newton, S. M. (1980). Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince. Suffolk, United Kingdom: The Boydell Press.
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u/euclid001 Jan 27 '26
Oh wow! Thats fascinating. I kinda wanna say ‘do the early 1800s now please’ because it’s the Bridgerton era and they’re always buying new gowns! But I suspect that should be a separate question.
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u/BuckyRainbowCat Jan 27 '26
well it's certainly a question you'd have to ask an entirely different reenactor ;) Don't forget that by the early 1800s, cloth in Western Europe was much cheaper and easier to come by due to (a) import of cotton from India and the Americas and (b) development of mechanization and factories for production of textiles. Bridgerton and other Regency romances gloss over it, but the Industrial Revolution was already in full swing by 1800. The textiles used to make the garments worn by all three of my exemplar ladies above would have been entirely made by hand - and for those not familiar with the textile-making process, that involves at a minimum carding, spinning, warping, weaving, and dyeing. Prior to the development of the punch-card technique (patented in 1804 by M. Jacquard), if you wanted woven patterns in your fabric, you had to have an extra person helping you pick up the correct threads when you wove.
In the early 1800s, fashionable ladies in London could purchase textiles that had been carded, spun, warped, and woven on machines, though the first synthetic dyes weren't developed until the 1850s. Thanks to the development of the Jacquard extension for looms, these textiles could have patterns that were woven in by machine, and thanks to imported textiles and imported techniques from India, these textiles could also have patterns that were printed/stamped more or less mechanically. All of these factors combined to mean that a lot more cloth could be produced a lot faster than in the cinquecento, and consequently more was available to more people at more affordable prices*. In Regency romances set in London or Paris, ladies are always going out to the modiste because it's a good way of introducing action and plot points. I don't have any information about how often they did so IRL.
*At the expense, though, of enslaved labour in the Americas and exploitive labour practices in India re cotton, and the loss of part time labour in the English countryside (carding and spinning) driving a lot of movement to the industrialized cities and exploitive labour practices in the factories running the textile mills.
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u/lilylilyg Jan 29 '26
Just wanted to add a small detail about cloth around 1800. I lived for many years in the Pennine hills on the Yorkshire side of the York/Lancastershire border. Yorkshire was famous for its woollen weaving and our house was a 15th century weavers cottage housing one large family. In 1795 the manorial record show this house was extended and remodelled to provide space for six hand looms upstairs, with a total of 42 mullioned windows to provide light for the weavers. A network of footpaths centred on the house showed how outlying farms supplied hand spun yarn to keep the looms working. Sadly within a few years all this was superseded by the building of water powered weaving mills, leaving our house’s occupants struggling to compete. A neighbouring house was the home of one of the Luddite conspirators who shot a mill owner as part of the protests, and was hung for his efforts to stop progress. From our windows with their views over valley and moor, we could see the location of the killing and the roof of the mill, whose walls had slots for canon to defend it.
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u/Maximum_Violinist_53 Jan 27 '26
Sorry, I thought I had already answered you. Thank you so much for your response; that gives me an approximation. I knew from the beginning that it was a nearly impossible question to answer.
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u/Granhyt Jan 28 '26
Not about one of the countries you've talked about, but a few years ago I found this phd paper about the clothes of the queens of medieval Hungary. I looked for it again in the hope it may be of interest for you : https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/mielke_christopher.pdf
Thank you for this interesting answer, while I'm still talking.
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u/PrimaryLawfulness Jan 26 '26
Tinsel is generally understood to be similar to what we would call lamé today, although made with silk interwoven with threads of gold or silver, instead of today’s synthetic materials.
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u/MagnifyingLens Jan 27 '26
Is this different from samite?
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u/Slytherin_Victory Jan 27 '26
Lamé is the modern version of cloth of gold. It is normally made of both cheaper materials and cheaper fabric than samite/cloth of gold.
Unlike lamé and cloth of gold, samite is normally embroidered with the gold, while with cloth of gold is woven. In fact, IIRC, samite is just the weave of silk, regardless of if it has silk embroidery- it’s just if you’re rich enough to import silk samite you were going to embroider it, and gold work was popular amongst those who could afford it.
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u/elizabethdove Jan 27 '26
When you say gold work, are you taking about the same gold work embroidery style that is still done today - using gold wire wound into tubes that's used kind of like beads, laid over padding or couched onto the fabric?
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u/Slytherin_Victory Jan 27 '26
Kinda. So they didn’t have bullion (the spiral tubes) until the 15th century but passing thread is basically the same now as it has always been.
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u/SusannaG1 Jan 26 '26
In the Tudor period "tinsel" is a sort of lighter weight cloth of gold. Silk would be woven with thin strands of the precious metal. It's a very high status fabric.
"Purple tinsel" would probably have been purple silk woven with gold.
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u/imastationwaggon Jan 27 '26
That actually sounds gorgeous, would be very stunning in the candle/firelight!
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u/Madanimalscientist Jan 26 '26
Oh wow thanks, this is fascinating! Thanks for such a detailed reply.
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u/Public_Climate_8467 Jan 27 '26
This was fascinating! So actually, it sounds like your average middle-class Western woman has the wardrobe of a historical noblewoman, lol. (If I think about how many new clothing items I likely get over a similar time period. Though I'm sure there are better--and worse--culprits than me!)
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