How unfashionable were the medieval poor?

April 22, 2023 9:53 AM

How fast did fashion spread in, say, medieval times, or Tudor times? Would people living in remote areas perhaps wearing be clothes that were 100 years or more out of fashion? Or would fashions evolve at similar speeds to today?
posted by iamsuper to Science & Nature (12 answers total)

I don't think fashion was on their radar. Maybe servants in castles and big houses would come into contact with nicer clothes and have a sense of what the wealthy were wearing, but your average rural peasant would wear the same monochrome wool clothes their parents had worn, and only put on some – probably traditional – finery when they got married.

(I'm assuming a European setting for your question because of the wording.)
posted by zadcat at 10:09 AM on April 22, 2023

Fashion in today's sense probably requires mass media and globalization. Illiterate servants would hardly have been following the costume choices of the affluent or those around the world. Or, if they did, they would not have had current information on what the fashionable were wearing.
posted by sindark at 10:16 AM on April 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

A lot of what was fashionable was off-limits to them because of sumptuary laws - laws that dictated how people could dress depending on their station, to prevent eg rich peasants or rich merchants from being mistaken for nobility.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:33 AM on April 22, 2023 [29 favorites]

Servants would actually get cast offs, so they'd be like a decade behind the wealthy (clothes wore out slowly), but villagers often had their own distinct culture and didn't pay that much attention, plus had both financial and practical constraints. Depends on the region and country (but do note that current "ethnic clothing" of most of Central and Eastern Europe, for example, only evolved in its current codified form in the late 19th century, so it was in no way static). People in cities definitely picked things up faster - sumptuary laws are a good way to track trends. Cracow style pointy boots (poulaines) spread across Europe in 20 years or so from their invention around 1360, becoming ultra fashionable by 1400 and taking eight more decades to fully die out

The other dramatic fashion change I'm familiar with is the abandonment of traditional kontusz and other Turkish-inspired clothing in the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania in favour of French inspired wear. It entered the upper crust in the early 18th century with the Saxon kings, but nearly a century later in Pan Tadeusz, village nobles are complaining about fancy French wear and the abandonment of traditions. In Russia it went a little faster but only because Peter the Great literally forced the nobility to conform on pain of death. So even much later you have people walking around sticking to fashion a century out of date.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 10:38 AM on April 22, 2023 [24 favorites]

Medieval peasants absolutely did not wore drab clothing. They wore bright colors. Think about how much work went into merely having clothes in the first place - every single thread making up the fabric had to be spun by hand, often by a woman in the family. Women were basically constantly spinning fiber into thread when not busy with other tasks. And the cloth had to be woven by hand, the outfit sewn by hand. If you think about it, boiling a few plants and spending a couple days bleaching and soaking the fabric was relatively speaking, not that much added effort. Though the palette was limited by what plants were locally available to use as dyes, they likely would have done their best to manage the local styles, even if they wouldn't have had access to the imported finer fabrics and dyes of the more wealthy.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:43 AM on April 22, 2023 [41 favorites]

Sounds like a great question for AskHistorians.
posted by terrapin at 11:32 AM on April 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

AIUI Fashions even among city and castle folk (possibly very different groups!) spread differently than now — no publications or clothing manufacturers— more like imitating your cool older cousin or someone you met at camp or something you saw on your trip to a port. More so for people who travel less. And occasionally something took in a region or village long enough to be a local marker or tradition. (Which, as above, often got hyper-formalized in the 18th , look up French and Belgian traditional women’s headdresses frex).

The rich sometimes imitated things they’d seen villagers doing or wearing, so I don’t think we have to write off invention by farmers at all.
posted by clew at 11:45 AM on April 22, 2023

Book recommendation: Fashion in the Middle Ages. Medievalists.net has some tidbits from it.
posted by gudrun at 3:36 PM on April 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

Fashion trends spread via fairs.

"Because it took so very long to hand-spin, hand-weave, and hand-sew clothing, peasants could not afford to continually make new clothes to follow changing trends. However, they could, [historian Margaret] Scott [author of "Fashion in the Middle Ages"] says, have 'a passing acquaintance with high fashion in the shape of accessories such as belts or shoes'. Belts would be something that could be bought at an annual fair, where peasants could also see how the most fashionable people were now wearing their belts (high up, at the waist, or low on the hips)." - 10 Fun Fashion Facts from the Middle Ages at a fun site, medievalists.net
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:41 PM on April 22, 2023 [23 favorites]

In a post "What did medieval commoners wear?(An overview of medieval fashion for common people in the 11th to 16th century) Sidsel on the site "Postej & Stews" affirms, "While the fashion of the nobles changed quite a lot between 1000 and 1550, the clothing of the common people, particularly the peasants, changed but slowly. There were however changes both the the male and female dress. This post is mostly peasants and workmen and other country dwellers."

Here's an interesting post on homemade fabrics and the use of color on the same site, and there are lots of other good informational pages here, plus many other useful related links sourced at the bottom of individual posts.
posted by taz at 2:29 AM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

The medieval Icelandic sagas, mostly written in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, have plenty of descriptions of clothing and people's reactions to them. From there it's clear that people in that era were very aware of what was fashionable and sought out nicer clothing. There are also items of clothing that are stored away for special occasions, and usually these are fine clothes that came from abroad.

Iceland is far away from continental Europe, and so fashion trends would take a while to get there, but clothing is relatively easy to transport, and there are plenty of scenes in the sagas where a merchant offers fine clothes, or an Icelander brings a particularly splendid bit of clothing to Iceland. So it wouldn't have been 100 years out of date, but more like a few years.
posted by Kattullus at 3:56 AM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Just a guess, but tinkers or peddlers repeating news about change in clothing regarding style and color, as well as selling novel small trinkets, ribbons, braids, and beads, might drive fashion change in isolated areas.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:10 AM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]