When men's fashion had a revolution—in medieval times

Plague and war might have blighted the 14th century, but men's couture sparked a fashion revolution. Out went the baggy, amorphous robes that had been swathing people for centuries, and in came startlingly lean, body-conscious styles that revealed the silhouette. The sweeping transformation in European elite clothing is regarded by many historians as the birth of modern Western fashion.

Aristocratic men and wealthy merchants started donning more body-conscious looks: short, tight doublets, brightly colored woolen tights, and elaborate hoods with dangling tails. Men's legs, previously hidden under robes, was now revealed to the public gaze. Known as poulaines, carefully designed leather shoes all the rage, especially for their extremely long pointed toes.

Men's fashion reached a climax of splendor at the court of Burgundy in the mid-15th century. Under the 48-year rule of Philip the Good, the court was famed for its good taste. Fashion, culture, and power meshed: Philip named Flemish master Jan van Eyck court painter, and Flanders replaced Paris as the center of polyphonic music, a flowering that rivaled the emerging glories of Renaissance Italy far to the south.

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Custom made

Advances in garment construction played an essential part in changing couture. Earlier textile manufacture was shaped by rectangular looms, producing large, square, angular material that did not conform to the contours of the body. It was easier to drape than to tailor. 

But in the 14th century, wealthy men’s clothing started to be made from smaller, separate pieces of fabric, which allowed greater construction and more variety in design. Designers began to shift from draping fabric to cutting, sewing, and sculpting it to the body.

“The idea of clothing which, for the first time, was truly custom-made to fit an individual’s body implies a new relationship between the clothing and the wearer,” said Laurel A. Wilson, a researcher in the history of fashion at the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University.

Wilson points to the 1330s as the pivotal decade of change. That’s when various social and economic factors helped redefine fashion. An emerging merchant class was seeking social recognition while, above them, aristocrats were evolving gradations of status, both to distinguish themselves from other aristocrats and from the ever wealthier merchant class beneath them. These status wars were expressed through their clothes. Tailors were in demand, and soon they grew too expensive for people in the lower social orders.

Fast fashion

This sea change in fashion quickly conquered western Europe, likely because of a shared court culture among different states. Expanding choice gave rise to markets and industries in specialized fabrics, ornaments, and garments. Along with Europe’s well established woolens industry, exotic fabrics like silk, damask, and velvet, previously imported, were now manufactured in Italy and northern Belgium. 

With access to greater choice and growing commercialization came another mainstay of modern fashion: rapid change. “During the 14th century, men’s fashion changed as rapidly as decade by decade, when before it was over the course of centuries,” Wilson explained. “That system is still with us, only to a greater extreme.”

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Constant sartorial change was not to everyone’s liking, especially those with more conservative outlooks. In the 1340s, the anonymous English author of The Westminster Chronicle took offense at “changing various deformities of clothing yearly” and abandoning “the ancient honesty of long, loose garments.” The “deformities” was a reference to the variety of tailoring: “short, tight, dagged, cut, laced and tied and buttoned everywhere, with sleeves and tippets of surcoats and hoods too long, in their clothes and shoes.” Such work, he concluded, belonged more to “torturers and demons than men.”

In the 1340s, the French chronicler Jean de Venette added his voice to a chorus of indignation at the shortness and tightness of men’s clothing, noting that men cannot bend or kneel without showing “their underwear and what was inside it.”

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Burgundian chic

Later, in the 15th century, medieval fashion was centered on the courts of the Dukes of Burgundy, based mainly in the wealthy cities of Flanders (modern-day Belgium). As the biggest cloth-making area in Western Europe, Flanders drove fashion trends. Philip the Good (1396-1467), the most important of the Burgundian dukes, made sumptuous black his signature color. In wearing it, he combined style and spectacle with an expression of mourning for his father, killed in France in 1419.

While his personal style might have seemed sedate, Philip’s court was known for its extravagance, as a place where Europe’s best dressed gathered to show off their wares. At court, the silhouettes of men’s and women’s clothing were elongated and pointed, from the tops of women’s conical headdresses to the pointy tips of men’s shoes. The tight doublets of the 14th century changed to an even more exaggerated silhouette, with tightly cinched waists and wide shoulders created by adding padding.

Ladies' looks

Phillip's sister  Anne was also a fashion icon, regularly depicted wearing the day’s latest fashions. Printed in 1430, the Bedford Book of Hours shows Anne at prayer while wearing a long gown, known as a houppelande, made of a richly colored fabric covered with intertwined red branches, green leaves, and blue fruit against a yellow background.

Women wore long gowns with wide V-necks and sleeves with trimming and a band at the hem. This silhouette culminated in a turret headdress, more elaborate even than the hennins of earlier decades, with a scaffolding of linen veils supported by wires (scholars compare it with the late Gothic architecture of northern Europe). A fashionable Burgundian lady of the later 15th century had to have a headdress. Parisian clerics likened them to “ram’s horns” and “bell towers.”

Although the change was less marked for women, a shift in feminine style was also notable. They still wore dresses that concealed their legs, but the garments came in more colors and fabrics. The greatest change for women sat atop their heads. Known as hennins, these headdresses could be a short, flat cap or a tall, pointy cone. Veils often draped off the back, while the hat itself added height and accentuated the wearer’s forehead.

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A futile backlash

Throughout western Europe the sums of money spent on fashion reached such a height that the authorities updated sumptuary laws to regulate what clothing could be worn by whom.

Such laws had been in existence before the 14th century. The earliest, from the 13th-century reign of JamesI of Aragon (modern Spain), prohibited clothing that had been adorned with slashes and fringes. Florentine sumptuary statutes of 1322-25 prohibited “clothes with cut, worked, or superimposed images or likenesses of trees or flowers, animals or birds, or any other figures.”

As clothes became more elaborate, such laws needed refining. Some laws were designed to protect home industries through restrictions on buying foreign products, or to simply rein in spending. Others looked to curtail the social disruption caused by radically new fashions; preambles to sumptuary laws often refer to the loss of traditional virtues. English laws focused on the maximum cost of permissible cloth, rather than the number of garments. They also targeted shoes with pointed toes. As such footwear became longer, Parliament passed a law in the mid-14th century forbidding all but the highest nobles to wear shoes or boots with a point longer than two inches.

In Wilson’s view, the main objective was to preserve class distinctions: “At bottom, sumptuary laws are an expression of social anxiety over the blurring of classes and statuses.”

In practice, European sumptuary laws were rarely enforced, with the exception of Italy, which focused on women’s clothing and ornaments. Elsewhere, there is little evidence that people were dissuaded from sporting the new fashions. The laws were an attempt to affirm the values of those in power and to reinforce group or national identities, but over time, Wilson explained, the popularity and availability of new fashions evaded all controls: “As fashion spread down the social scale, sumptuary laws dwindled, disappearing altogether in the 18th century when fashion had become universal.”

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