Renaissance Rules: The Unexpected Connection Between ‘The Tudors’ and the 2022 Runways

“The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England,” which recently opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, speaks to popular culture’s fascination with fashion, royalty, and fame, as well as image making, and so-called content.

The show follows on the heels of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, with all its attendant pomp and circumstance, but even before her passing, designers were mining times distant. Nostalgia is nothing new in fashion; what’s unusual is that some designers are now reaching all the way back to the 15th and 16th centuries. It seems unreal that a farthingaled Queen Elizabeth I, as depicted in The Ditchley portrait currently on display at The Met, would have counterparts on the runways, but so it has transpired.

So why are constricting garments like corsets being revived at a time when women’s rights are threatened? Cocurator Elizabeth Cleland, of the department of European sculpture and decorative arts, suggests that taking on such garments or underpinnings “is almost like building up an armor around one’s self, fashioning this very distinctive silhouette.”

The Tudors had reason to be concerned with appearances. As the curators write in their wall text, the family “was painfully aware that their claim to the throne was tenuous and that the prospect of a return to civil war loomed around every corner. The Tudor monarchs devoted vast resources to crafting their public images as divinely ordained rulers.” So successful they were at doing so that their traditions, though altered, have carried on. “We’re very aware of the fact that we’re opening this exhibition just a few weeks after the death of Queen Elizabeth II,” said cocurator Adam Eaker, of the department of European paintings. “A lot of the coverage was noting how consistent she was in her fashion choices—the fact that she would always be dressed in a single color, that she would be immediately recognizable in a crowd. That very careful tailoring, so to speak, of image is something we see already in the portraits of Elizabeth I or Henry VIII. There is a very consistent, very recognizable silhouette. There’s a visual brand, and it’s something that you see within the exhibition.”

The idea of self-creation is familiar to anyone who is online, where the distinction between real and fake and physical and digital continues to blur. “It’s just interesting to bear in mind when we are discussing a dynasty like the Tudors,” notes Cleland. Certain objects and symbols in Tudor portraiture work not unlike logo’d garments in selfies, though in the former they are used to communicate associations with religion and nobility rather than personal branding. Indeed, the portraits in “The Tudors” function a bit like the self-taken snaps today. Says Eaker, “One of the things that I love about the 16th century that scholars have argued is that the self was really externalized. Slowly over the course of the 16th century, this idea of interiority, of lyric poetry, of a hidden self who other people don’t get to see [developed], but one thing we see over and over again in these portraits, in the garments and the jewels, the armor, is how much of identity was meant to be visual, legible, and read on the body.” Sound familiar?