Ruffing it: kings and poor alike suffered in straits

Aileen Ribeiro's most surprising revelation in this important book is that tailor-made clothes, as we know them, did not exist for the Stuarts. Those radiantly gowned women and immaculate men all had to make their clothes fit by improvising with hooks, points, buttons and ribbons; their shoes came made, not for right or left feet, but as multipurpose "straits" that had to be worn in over several painful weeks. Between her introduction and the book's concluding paragraph Ribeiro poses a question, which she leaves her readers to resolve for themselves, with the guidance of brilliant illustrations and an overwhelming richness of scholarly reference to relevant poetry, prose and drama of a 200-year period. It lies between Roland Barthes's contention that it is not the text, or in this case the garment, that matters, but how it is read, or, more precisely, worn, and Virginia Woolf's claim that "it is clothes that wear us and not we them" - a flat contradiction.

There are more than 140 colour photographs, mostly paintings, with a few forlorn surviving garments, such as the surprisingly tweedy-looking suit of heather-coloured wool that James II, as Duke of York, wore in 1673 for his second marriage to Mary of Modena. But the real excellence of the images is in the way they move from complete portraits, painted when artists were more concerned with what their subjects wore than with their mood and character, to larger than life-sized details of fabric, jewels and embroidery. Readers' judgments can be tested against the author's accompanying text; is Lady Hungerford's necklace and carcanet made of gold and diamonds, as Ribeiro supposes, or is it just rock-crystal costume jewellery?

The reigns of James I and Charles I are covered in two chapters, moving from the high-camp absurdity of Anne of Denmark's farthingales, designed to make women look like well-defended castles, to the casual elegance of Van Dyck. There is an astonishing transformation of Charles, when still Prince of Wales, looking desperately gauche in Daniel Mytens's 1623 painting of him in bulky clothes with his head isolated by a falling ruff, to Charles, the swaggeringly self-confident king of 1635, in Van Dyck's Le Roi à la chasse , with a rakish black beaver, white satin doublet and red knee-length breeches.

Ribeiro is as informed on literature and economics as she is on costume, so the book contains a wealth of memorable information: ruffs could include 20 yards of ribbon, and one survives in the Claydon Collection to prove it.

One of the reasons why we colonised America was that we were running out of European beavers to make handsome hats of beaver fur felt. Pickadills (sold, of course, in Piccadilly) were the wire and pasteboard stiffeners for high lace collars. More seriously, Mytens was paid £66 for a 1631 painting of Charles, but the scarlet, gold and silver suit the King is wearing for it cost £266. Women's clothes were made by male tailors who were notorious lechers. Men took their opportunities with the milliners, who were usually pretty girls up for a flirtation.

Most unexpected of all is the chronology of the periwig. James I's queen, Anne of Denmark, wore false hair, and women copied her blonde locks by spraying their own with Cyprus powder (arum starch). But then it was the Puritans in the Commonwealth who began to wear men's wigs, possibly to compensate for their own close-cropped "round" heads. These had begun to be powdered by 1652, and then the restoration of Charles II, with his wealth of long, natural ringlets, gave periwigs a decisive boost.

Before the end of the Commonwealth, John Evelyn had been complaining about the lack of class markers in dress because it was no longer easy to tell servants from their employers. Ribeiro believes that dress heralds mood changes rather than follows them. Van Dyck's sober costuming of John Hampden's friend, the MP Arthur Goodwin, had been an accurate 1639 prediction of the coming severity of the Interregnum.

It was women's dress rather than men's that responded to the relaxed morality of Charles II's reign. Many of those Lely and Kneller portraits that expose women's bosoms so seductively were, however, created around swaths of studio fabric artfully posed, not real dresses.

Then, in 1666, the King himself effected a dress revolution by wearing a "suit of vestments": a vest with a surcoat worn over the top. Pinched in more sharply at the waist, these suits would serve for the greater part of the 18th century as standard men's wear. By that time the rich were spending 15 per cent, and the poor 8 per cent, of their income on clothes, while the aspirant middle class were lavishing a massive 28 per cent on garments. Does that middle-class expenditure prove that Woolf rather than Barthes was right?

Timothy Mowl is reader in architectural and garden history, Bristol University.