1400-1500 in fashion

Fashion in 15th-century Europe was characterized by a series of extremes and extravagances, from the voluminous gowns called houppelandes with their sweeping floor-length sleeves to the revealing doublets and hose of Renaissance Italy. Hats, hoods, and other headdresses assumed increasing importance, and were swagged, draped, jewelled, and feathered.

As Europe continued to grow more prosperous, the urban middle classes, skilled workers, began to wear more complex clothes that followed, at a distance, the fashions set by the elites. It is in this time period that we begin to see fashion take on a temporal aspect. People could now be dated by their clothes, and being in "out of date" clothing became a new social concern. National variations in clothing seem on the whole to have increased over the 15th century.

With England and France mired in the Hundred Years War and its aftermath and then the English Wars of the Roses through most of the 15th century, European fashion north of the Alps was dominated by the glittering court of the Duchy of Burgundy, especially under the fashion-conscious power-broker Philip the Good (ruled 1419–1469). Having added Holland and Flanders to their dominion, the Dukes of Burgundy had access to the latest fabrics of Italy and the East and to English wool exports through the great trading cities of Bruges and Antwerp. Purchases of fabrics through Italian merchants like the two cousins Giovanni Arnolfini amounted to a noticeable proportion of all government expenditure. Especially in Florence, where sumptuary laws prevented the citizens from wearing the most luxurious cloths on which the city's fortunes were built, the materials of men's clothing in particular often appear plain in paintings, but contemporaries who understood the difference in grades of cloth very well would have appreciated the beauty and great expense of a very fine grade.

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