Chapter 2 - Appearance and Clothing in the 1620s and 1630s

Summary

One of the most notorious members of the generation of young men from the 1620s and 1630s was the son of a miller from Leiden, Rembrandt van Rijn. In an early self-portrait from 1629, the young 23-year-old painter illustrated himself with long bushy hair, draped with a lock of hair slightly longer on the left side. His face is bare without any signs of a beard. He is wearing a gorget – a metal coat, hinged at the neck, that covered the upper torso, similar to the ones worn by cuirassiers. In many aspects his portrait is telling about what young men looked like in the early seventeenth century and radiates various messages about masculinity. In this chapter we shall address how young men in the 1620s and 1630s looked physically from head to toe. Did young men have beards, mustaches, short or long hair; what kind of clothes did they wear, which colors were popular, and which styles were imitated? In essence, what was the appearance of a young man of the elite or middle class in the early seventeenth century? In Centuries of Childhood (1962) the French social historian Philippe Ariès argued that children in the Middle Ages and early modern period were often imitations of their parents: ‘as soon as a child abandoned his swaddling- band – the band of cloth that was tightly wrapped around his body in babyhood – he was dressed just like other men and women of his class’. He further remarks that a change came in the seventeenth century when children of the nobility and middle class started to dress differently than adults did. However, the situation in Holland and the Dutch Republic was different from most European countries in regards to fashion. First of all, there was no real nobility to speak of. With its elected stadtholder, Holland did not have a court culture equivalent to the grandeur of Paris and London. Not until Frederik Hendrik ascended to the post of stadtholder in 1625 did the stadtholder's court in The Hague become more court-like. Frederik Hendrik and especially his wife Amalia van Solms, who had been a lady-in-waiting for the court of Queen Elisabeth, the wife of the Winter King, became a driving force in elevating the court culture in The Hague.