Royals are known for being trendsetters, but new research into the fashion choices of the Stuart Queens suggests their influence helped women break into the 17th century London fashion trades.
Dress historian Dr Sarah Bendall from Australian Catholic University studied the surviving bills and inventories of female fashion traders and makers who clothed the six Stuart Queens between 1603 and 1714.
Her world-first research shows the patronage of the Queens and courtiers of the Stuart House helped legitimise women workers in a male-dominated fashion marketplace.
“Sixteenth and 17th centuries outer dress was predominantly made by male tailors however over the course of the 17th century you have a rise in women working professionally in the fashion trades,” Dr Bendall said.
“The surviving bills and paperwork preserved by employees of the Stuart Queens show that it was the patronage of elite women – especially Queens and courtiers – that enabled women to thrive in the fashion trades.
“You could say they were the ‘OG influencers’ who promoted women in the fashion marketplace, propelling some of them into celebrity status.”
The fashion choices of Anna of Denmark, Henrietta Maria, Catherine of Braganza, Mary of Modena, Mary II and Queen Anne, are recorded in thousands of surviving bills generated by female fashion retailers and makers working in 17th century London.
During the Stuart dynasty, shopping bills were preserved by the Office of the Robes, an administrative department that managed a Queen’s most valuable asset: her clothing. The best-known Mistress of the Robes is Sarah Churchill, famously portrayed by Rachel Weisz in The Favourite with Olivia Coleman as Queen Anne.
Dr Bendall is the first historian to write a comprehensive history of the women who rose to the top of London’s fashion marketplace under the influence of the Stuart Queens.
She reveals the lives of the women who billed the Stuart Queens, and the social networks that legitimised their work, in her new book The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens.
Her research also offers a comprehensive look at the emergence of the West End as the go-to for fashionable Londoners – giving rise to the term ‘the ton’ made famous in alternative history series, Bridgerton.
Among the fashion heroines featured in Dr Bendall’s research is Jane Potter. The owner of an Indian teahouse, Jane Potter used her business connections to climb the social ladder, to her demise.
In the early 1680s she played matchmaker to the coveted Lady Elizabeth Percy and wealthy politician Thomas Thynne, who sometime after the marriage was found violently murdered at Pall Mall.
Six months later Lady Percy became the Duchess of Somerset and eventually Queen Anne’s second Mistress of the Robes.
But Jane Potter’s most covert affair is mentioned in a scandalous letter penned by Daniel Finch, the Earl of Nottingham. The letter describes a shopping trip around London undertaken by Queen Mary II and implies that Potter provided a secret hideout in her tea house for the Immortal Seven to plot the Glorious Revolution.
“We can never say with certainty but the implication in the Earl of Nottingham’s letter is that the plot by the so-called Immortal Seven to send a letter to William and Mary to invade England happened at Mrs Potter’s India House,” Dr Bendall said.
