Queen's Gallery: Fashion in the Tudor and Stewart Dynasties

Beginning as early as 1562, Queen Elizabeth I levied a series of statutes referred to as the Sumptuary Laws which constituted regulations on the appropriate attire of men and women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The laws were primarily enforced due to increasing anxiety and fears that "the excess of apparel and the superfluity of unnecessary foreign wares thereto belonging now of late years is grown by sufferance to such an extremity that the manifest decay of the entire realm," was a palpable possibility. (June 1574) These laws were also utilized as a means in which to distinguish between social status and more specifically, gender.

As David Cressy acknowledges in his article "Gender Trouble and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England," many literary scholars assert that "Cross-dressing, we are told, upset patriarchal values, assaulted cultural boundaries, and unraveled sexual separators of ambivalence, androgyny, and eroticism" (Cressy 3). As Cressy develops his counter argument to the above statement, it becomes apparent that cross-dressing was much less tolerated when practiced by women who dressed in the apparel of men as opposed to men who humorously garbed themselves in the apparel of women. Contrary to the assumptions literary scholars make concerning Renaissance transvestism and "a sex-gender system in distress" (Cressy 3), the portraits displayed in the Queen's Gallery reflect ways in which women in particular, subverted the Elizabethan Sumptuary Statutes for reasons other than petty exploitation and potential advancement within the social/engendered hierarchy that was supposedly advocated during Elizabeth I's reign.

The Portrait of an Unknown Woman painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger c. 1590-1600, reveal a women who is most certainly not abiding by the strict dress codes that encouraged propriety and modesty in women's garments. The information accompanying the painting revealed that the unknown woman in question is dressed in a costume that is most likely attributed to the performance of a Court Masque. Masques were a popular form of entertainment that were usually performed for private audiences such as the reigning monarch and incorporated allegorical references and other performance techniques to account a story; in many ways, similar to plays acted on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. The information also reveals that Ben Johnson, famous contemporary of Shakespeare and premier composer of such Masques, associated the color white/carnation as the most appropriate female attire when performing Masques.

The portrait of Eleanor Needham, Lady Byron painted by Sir Peter Lely c. 1664, depicts another possible exception in which women were able to subvert Elizabeth's Sumptuary Statutes. This particular portrait of Lady Byron, depicts her in a draping garment that would have been most closely associated with the apparel commonly portrayed in biblical paintings. Despite the loose garment and rather sensual pose, it was surprisingly ordinary and suitable for a women to model and adapt themselves  to  the personas of prominent religious figures. Lely's painting of Lady Byron is most likely a tribute to Saint Catherine of Alexandria.  Saint Catherine in particular, was an especially popular guise for wealthy female courtiers throughout the 1660's.

As demonstrated in the paintings of the Unknown Woman and Lady Byron, Cressy's assertion that "Cross-dressing, I argue, was not as transgressive as critics and scholars have suggested," (Cressy 3) appears to be accurate. Rather, it is perhaps probable that women who actively subverted Elizabethan Sumptuary Laws were not deliberately challenging the established gender and social hierarchy but expressing themselves and the sumptuousness unique to their female sex.