Samuel Pepys’ fashion plates: Instagram for the 17th century

Samuel Pepys is famous for keeping an extremely detailed diary from 1660 to 1669, giving historians a fascinating view into middle-class life in 17th Century England.

But he was also a lifetime admirer of fashion and clothes.

His private library, which has been stored at the University of Cambridge, UK, for the past 300 years, has a large collection of elaborate French fashion plates.

According to a historian at the university, these plates provide insights both into the fashion of the time, and Pepys’ later years.

Eight of the prints are published for the first time in a paper in the journal The Seventeenth Century.

“I had 2 full day appointments in the Pepys Library last summer to try to look through all the fashion prints,” study author Marlo Avidon, a PhD candidate at Cambridge, tells Cosmos.

“The Library doesn’t allow photography, so I had to take detailed descriptions of each image that I could look back on as I was starting to draft my article, and to help me figure out which pictures I wanted to use.”

Pepys, the son of a tailor, wrote extensively about clothing in his diary – including one embarrassing episode where a colleague told him the gold lace at the sleeves of his summer suit was too fine for his station, after which he resolved “never to appear in Court” with the sleeves.

Avidon connects this diary episode to a print titled Habit Noir, or evening wear. This print shows a beribboned Frenchman wearing similar lace cuffs.

“Pepys would have seen this outfit as pretty risky,” says Avidon.

“This was for a French courtier, and was probably well beyond his budget. But Pepys probably did own suits with these kinds of ribbon loops, just not so many as this.”

But the prints, which date from 1670 to the 1690s, also help to give some indication on what was on Pepys’ mind after his poor eyesight stopped him from writing in his diary.

Some of the prints have been hand-coloured, and Avidon believes the colouring was done by an amateur. It may have been Mary Skinner, Pepys’ long-term housekeeper who became his mistress while she was still a teenager, or another member of his family.

“While all the prints are incredibly fascinating, I think the one that stood out to me the most is the Habit de Ville print, which is from around 1670,” says Avidon.

“It’s the print that I think has the most interesting pattern of colouring. There’s so many different pigments used, including pink, red, gold, and green, and they all appear incredibly vibrant still.

“You can also see that whoever filled it in tried to create a pattern that wasn’t a part of the print initially. They added these interesting squiggled lines, as well as what looks like a floral pattern. Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing for sure, but I would speculate that this design might be supposed to resemble a real floral silk from the period!”

Avidon says that this print is “the most emblematic example of what women were actually wearing in this time period from head to toe”.

“She has an elaborate hairstyle with ribbon loops and a veil, and she is wearing several beauty patches on her face.

“Her gown is incredibly elaborate, with the lace and detailing, and she’s holding a fan painted with a landscape.”

Avidon says that Pepys’ French wife Elisabeth, who died in 1669 aged 29, may have influenced his buying of fashion prints. His diary mentions Elisabeth’s interest in prints, as well as worries about her overspending on clothes, despite him wanting her to dress well.

“I think these prints of fashionable young women must have reminded Pepys of Elizabeth. The collection could be seen as an homage to her.”

Avidon says that, when she started this project, she didn’t like Pepys.

“My first exposure to Pepys came from the Diary, and particularly many of the entries where he documents his inappropriate behaviour towards women,” she says.

“Even though that sort of behaviour was fairly common-place in the late seventeenth-century, it was uncomfortable to read about. I also thought that the fact Pepys chose to write about some of his indiscretions in a foreign language to hide the details showed that he knew his behaviour was wrong.”

But having pored over his diary again, as well as his collections and correspondence, she says she now has a “bit of a soft spot” for him.

“I realised that not only was Pepys funny, but so many of the anxieties and concerns he dealt with on a day-to-day life felt incredibly modern.

“Certainly, he’s no saint, but ultimately, he was human just like us, and his life and feelings were far more complex than I had initially assumed.”

Avidion is now looking at some of Pepys’ contemporaries, to glean more about elite fashion in the 17th Century, including diarist John Evelyn.

“Evelyn was Pepys’s closest friend in his later life, and it seems that while the two had a shared interest in collecting print, their attitudes towards clothing were quite distinct,” she says.

“I’d also love to look more closely at elite women at Court in this period – I’ve always been fascinated by some of Charles II’s mistresses, especially Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine.”