Historical story

Male and Female Fashion from the Late Middle Ages to the Modern Age

Late medieval men's fashion

In the Late Middle Ages , starting from the Three-Fifteenth Century , fashion, which until then had not known strong differentiations between the two sexes, began to emphasize gender identity and became a distinctive trait for men and women.

The males abandoned the long, loose and draped clothes, now reserved only for certain categories of people, namely clergy, the elderly and children, while the females began to wear almost exclusively skirts and long dresses.

The typical men's clothing of the time was the doublet, a short, padded dress, and breeches, two tight-fitting tubes of fabric that covered the legs up to the crotch, attached to the doublet with pins, ribbons and loops; socks, joined the aforementioned items often equipped with foot and sole, also very useful for protecting yourself from the cold in the coldest months of the year.

The shirts they remained more or less the same for men and women during the 1300s, but from the 1400s they also began to differentiate.

An absolute novelty was represented by the birth of specific clothing for the night :the richest slept wearing a shirt used only and exclusively during the hours of sleep.

The poorest?

In the less well-off classes, where there were not enough means to afford a well-stocked wardrobe and where one was taken by more pressing daily needs, they continued to sleep naked or wearing the same shirt put on during the day.

For specific clothing designed specifically for the needs of the little ones, we will have to wait until the eighteenth century.