Oh, I could write a sonnet about your Easter bonnet…

Irving Berlin, Easter Parade (1933)

Built around Irving Berlin’s song of the same name, the classic musical Easter Parade begins and ends with the famed titular event, as the who’s who of early twentieth-century New York City stroll down Fifth Avenue in new bonnets, top hats, suits and dresses. The movie actually has little to do with Easter or its parade (similarly, this post has little to do with the movie!), but it does convey the pageantry of the occasion in an unparalleled way, through Berlin’s music, Judy Garland’s singing, Fred Astaire’s dancing, and superb costuming. The last aspect in particular highlights the centrality of new clothing and fashion to this Easter tradition.

According to Leigh Eric Schmidt (1994), the Fifth Avenue parade developed as a distinct event in the late nineteenth century, out of a ‘hybridized commingling of faith and fashion’. By the time the movie musical was released in 1948, the event had become a major cultural touchstone for American celebrations of Easter, but also a source of controversy. To some, it was both result and epitome of ‘schlokified’ Christianity – faith consumed by consumerism. Schmidt traces such criticisms, visible from the early days of the parade, but argues persuasively against these mono-causal (and cynical) views. Though certainly co-opted and perpetuated by NYC fashion retailers, the Easter parade was for many a ‘modern synthesis of piety and display’ – aided and abetted by churches and embraced by churchgoers as a material manifestation of spiritual and seasonal renewal. Not only this, it tapped into deep roots of European Christian tradition.

Indeed, analogous and antecedent traditions of Easter finery aren’t hard to find, but they are especially well documented for the British Isles. Folklorists Peter Opie, Iona Opie and Moira Tatem (1964; 1996), have collected several examples illustrating the connection between Easter and clothes, ranging in date from present day to the Elizabethan era.

In the 1960s and 70s, newspapers in urban areas such as London and Bath ran advertisements like, ‘Only 2 weeks to Easter—It’s lucky to wear something new!’. In the 1950s, a boy from Dumfries, Scotland communicated a similar idea, with the twist that new Easter clothes were not so much good luck as they were a ward against ill fortune:

On Easter Monday if you do not have on something new it is supposed to be bad luck for you.

According to various nineteenth and twentieth-century accounts, this bad luck could take bizarre forms: crows pecking out your eyes, bird droppings splattering you, dogs spitting in your face, and other pleasantries. This description of Norwich in the 1850s is prototypical:

Rustics returning from Tombland fair … carry new hats, not on their heads, but in boxes, &c. They are worn for the first time on Easter Day; and by so doing, the bearer is secured from any bird’s dropping its ‘card’ upon him during the ensuing year. Indeed, it is very unlucky not to wear some new … clothing on Easter Day.

These localized and oddly specific warnings were variations on a theme equating Easter attire with good or bad fortune, first expressed in the eighteenth century, in an edition of the parody almanac Poor Robin: ‘At Easter let your clothes be new Or else be sure you will it rue’. This in turn seems to have grown out of an even more general social imperative. Direct allusions to this idea can be traced back as far as the 1590s, and they proliferated in the seventeenth century. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, Mercutio teases Benvolio: ‘Did’st thou not fall out with a Tailor for wearing his new Doublet before Easter?’ (Opie and Tatem, 1994).

Although the old imperative (and certainly the luck component) are no longer commonplace, other aspects of the Easter finery tradition still survive in the modern world. Today, many individuals and families switch to their summer wardrobes around Easter season, especially in northern climes where temperatures are only just starting to become reliably warm. For devout Christians, Easter Sunday service remains a perfect occasion to debut nicer items from this wardrobe, some of which may have been given as Easter gifts. From a religious point of view, Easter clothes make sense as the epitome of one’s ‘Sunday best’. Since Christ’s death and resurrection are the defining events of the Christian faith, their commemoration represents the height of the ecclesiastical year – the Sunday of Sundays.

Attempts to trace the origins or rationale behind Easter finery have usually alighted upon this second (religious) explanation. Leigh Schmidt, for example, offers that distinctive clothes for Easter – as for other sacred occasions like baptisms, weddings, and funerals – had long served as ‘material markers of holiness and celebration’. Turning to early modern sources, we find some evidence for this general practice, but slightly less evidence for pious motives behind it.

In one fictitious dialogue penned by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1671), a knight complains of his wife’s expensive ‘Bravery’ (i.e. her finery), professing that if she would wear her ‘Silk-Gown’ only on ‘Sundays and Holy-days, (I mean, only at such Good-times as Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, or so)’, the garment would last them seven years and save much expense. The knight’s grumbling gives us enough to know what we might suspect, that it was customary to dress finely on sacred occasions. Writing a few decades later, however, the preacher Robert South expressed the opinion that ‘bravery’ had come to supplant, rather than honor, the original purpose of Easter (1694):

There is a great Festival now drawing on; a Festival, designed chiefly for the Acts of a joyfull Piety, but generally made only an occasion of Bravery. I shall say no more of it at present, but this; That God expects from Men something more than ordinary at such times, and that it were much to be wished, for the Credit of their Religion, as well as the Satisfaction of their Consciences; that their Easter Devotions would, in some measure, come up to their Easter Dress.

Richard Stafford similarly seized upon the custom as a timely metaphor for spiritual renewal in his Easter sermon, rather than an appropriate pious act in and of itself (1698):

There is an Old, Common and Proverbial Saying, That People should have somewhat new upon them at Easter. Which tho it be commonly understood of Cloaths and Garments, yet there is some Divine and Serious Truth contained therein, and to be gather’d from it…now at this time our Thoughts are taken up with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead, we should also examine and prove our selves, whither we be risen with him; and then question further, and look about, or rather from within our selves, whither we have any thing new on us, or rather within us.

Clergyman and poet Joseph Beaumont, on the other hand, had little trouble tying pious purpose and motivation directly to the custom, referencing it in his poem Psyche (1648) to describe the revelation of Jesus after his resurrection:

But chiefly at the Angels Presence They
Were seiz’d with their intoletable Fright:
His shining Roabs were glorious as the Day,
And partners with the driven Snow in white;
For ’twas his Easter Suit, the Suit he had
To honor this bright Feast on purpose made.

And yet the Lustre which kept Holiday
Rejoycing in his delicate attire,
Could not such wealthy floods of rays display
As streamed from his aspects fairer fire,
For in the Majesty of his sweet face
A spring of living lightning bubling was.

The analogy to the natural world found in the last line was taken further by other authors, some making a three-way connection between Easter clothes, resurrection, and spring’s awakening.

Henry Grenfield wrote of spring as the time when Earth’s ‘Divers-colour’d Easter-Cloaths appear…with new Life they grow, / A Resurrection in Effigie show’ (1686). Nicholas Hookes used the spring metaphor for more secular reasons, in an ode to his sweetheart, Amanda (1653):

Look at yon flower yonder, how it growes
Sensibly! how it opes its leaves and blowes,
Puts its best Easter clothes on, neat and gay!
Amanda’s presence makes it holy-day:

Clearly, preachers and poets could put Easter finery to work for the diverse purposes of their pens. It’s more difficult to get at what early moderns actually thought of the custom in day-to-day life. Thankfully, Londoner Samuel Pepys provides a helping hand here, giving several descriptions of the traditional practice in his diary (1660-1669) .

In 1662 he wrote:

(Easter day). Having my old black suit new furbished, I was pretty neat in clothes to-day, and my boy, his old suit new trimmed, very handsome. To church in the morning, and so home…

And similarly the next year:

(Easter day). Up and this day put on my close-kneed coloured suit, which, with new stockings of the colour, with belt, and new gilt-handled sword, is very handsome.

Most of Pepys’s entries about Easter clothes, however, revolved around provisions for his wife, Elizabeth. In 1662, he spoke with Elizabeth as early as Shrove Sunday (9 February) about the £20 he ‘had long since promised her to lay out in clothes against Easter for herself’. Twenty pounds was a huge sum at the time, and in other years Pepys complained profusely and often about the cost of his wife’s Easter finery. When Elizabeth received her newly laced gown about two weeks before Easter in 1664, Samuel opined: ‘[it] is indeed very handsome, but will cost me a great deal of money, more than ever I intended, but it is but for once’. Apparently, this passive aggressive grace did not survive the next morning…

Lay long in bed wrangling with my wife about the charge she puts me to at this time for clothes more than I intended, and very angry we were…

Despite this, the couple were ‘quickly friends again’, so that Elizabeth later chatted happily ‘of her clothes against Easter’. The big day finally arrived a week later, though it did not go as planned:

(Lord’s day). Lay long in bed, and then up and my wife dressed herself, it being Easter day, but I not being so well as to go out, she, though much against her will, staid at home with me; for she had put on her new best gowns, which indeed is very fine now with the lace; and this morning her taylor brought home her other new laced silks gowns with a smaller lace, and new petticoats, I bought the other day both very pretty.

Due to Samuel’s bad bout of flatulence (no joke), the long-suffering Elizabeth had to wait until Easter Tuesday to make her debut.

The Pepys family were not exactly the seventeenth-century norm, being from what historians might term the upper crust of the ‘middling sort’. Nonetheless, the dynamics between husband and wife were true to form in many respects, especially concerning Easter clothes. One contemporary piece called The modern and genteel way of wooing and complementing (Phillips, 1699), described a fictional proposal where the doter promised his beloved to ‘come up every year after Easter to buy thee Pins, Gloves and Ribbands, and a new Gown’. Similarly, in a dialogue ‘between a proud Woman and her Husband about Apparrel’ (Parker, 1682), the wife complained that, though she’d received ‘a pair of hose & shooes at Easter’, she’d had nothing since, and it was almost Midsummer.

In all of these examples, literary and literal, it was the responsibility – an expectation – of the husband as head of household to provide new clothes to wife and children at Easter. This particular aspect of the tradition points to its deeper origins in the medieval period.

From as early as the twelfth century, and probably reaching back further, members of great medieval households, be they servants or family, were typically entitled to the benefits of board, bed, and ‘livery’ – clothes or money/materials needed to make them. Livery was usually doled out only a few times a year. Just as now, winter, spring and summer warranted different attire, and the major festive occasions marking their turning points (e.g. All Saints, Christmas, Easter and Whitsun) were logical times for distribution (Woolgar, 1999; Wild, 2012) .

Social and religious aims were also interwoven into these material practicalities. For medieval lords and ladies, distributing festive livery was an act of largesse, a visible sign of their generosity to, and acceptance of, those within their household (their familia). The quality of the clothing likewise broadcasted the lord’s wealth and status, while its heraldry staked his ‘claim’ to that particular servant. In the words of Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybras (2000):

Livery was a form of incorporation, a material mnemonic that inscribed obligations and indebtedness upon the body. As cloth exchanged hands, it bound people in networks of obligation.

Clothing given at Christmas and Easter within households often came alongside other offerings such as feasts and monetary rewards – these were voluntary gifts nonetheless duly expected at such seasons (and which gradually became codified) in exchange for loyal service throughout the year (think of today’s Christmas bonus). Such markers of generosity and good house-keeping could also double as pious charity in these holy settings. One story connected to the tenth-century Saint Oswald of Worcester, for example, tells of his kind treatment of twelve poor men, to whom he ‘at Easter…gaue new cloathes, and retayned…in his hall as…principall guests for certaine daies’ (Porter, 1632). During the medieval period, then, Easter clothes could be at once a pious expression of charity, a reciprocal sign of the benefits and obligations of household membership, and a practical necessity for the onset of warmer weather.

Over the course of the sixteenth century, some aspects of the medieval livery system – such as heraldic markings – began to decline, but its importance to household cohesion and patronage remained. In the royal household of James I of England (r.1603-1625), for example, the King’s Men (Shakespeare’s playing company) received every second Easter ‘a livery consisting of three yards of bastard scarlet for a cloak and a quarter yard of crimson velvet for a cape’ (Jones and Stallybras, 2000). Despite this continuity, a shift seems to have occurred in the early modern period which added to the social dynamics of the medieval custom and perhaps elevated Easter above other occasions (e.g. Christmas, Whitsun) in its symbolic significance to clothes. This shift is neatly suggested in the oldest known direct reference to Easter finery, from Thomas Lodge’s Wits Miserie, printed in 1596 (Opie and Tatem, 1994):

The farmer that was contented in times past with his Russet Frocke & Mockado sleeves, now sels a Cow against Easter to buy him silken geere for his credit.

Thus the old custom of changing to new clothes at times like Easter was no longer purely practical or solely an expression of piety and household economy and cohesion – it was an opportunity to flaunt an individual’s status (not just a lord’s) and even gain more of it in the eyes of peers. Fashion – something that had been largely the provenance of nobility and gentry for centuries – was becoming more accessible to the ‘lower orders’ (Currie, 2017).

By Pepys’s time, Easter was inextricably bound up with the yearly force of fashion. In 1667 his wife informed him of a London wedding which had been held in private because it was right before Lent, ‘and so in vain to make new clothes till Easter, that they might see the fashions as they are like to be this summer…’. In other words, Easter was for the debut of new summer clothes; it would be pointless to tailor them earlier for a wedding or other event because they would not then be in tune with the latest styles.

Multiple contemporary references from Poor Robin’s Almanac, like Lodge’s reference to farmers above, suggest that chasing trends and displaying them proudly come Easter was not limited to genteel and wealthy Londoners. Writing fondly of the tradition among young country folk outside London in 1670:

On Easter Munday after noon,
To Islington do walk up soon.
When Doll is drest up very neat
And full of love as Egg of meat
She casts a simpering look on Dick,
Then Richard he her lips must lick:

Writing less fondly in 1691:

Now shall a whole Shipful of new Fashions come out of the Isle Lunatick, wherewith many young Lasses shall so adorn themselves, that they shall be like to the Cinamon Tree, the bark more worth than all the whole body:

Writing downright snidely in 1685:

In this month against Easter-Holy-days many women shall fall very sick, but more of Modishness than any other Malady; the best remedy for their distemper is to have them to the shop and buy them a new Gown, and by such time as the Taylor hath made it, they will be perfectly recovered; or buy it ready made, and they are well in an instant.

Tangled up in its patronizing patriarchal tones, one can detect in this last quote the same critique of Easter consumerism and vanity visible in the contemporary sermons quoted earlier. Together, these all sound very similar to criticisms of New York’s Easter Parade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – flippant greed running amok over Christian tradition and piety. Looking at the larger history of Easter finery and clothing, however, shows us that the material, religious, and social were always intertwined in this tradition.

As long as it has been recorded, the giving, receiving and wearing of Easter clothes has served diverse purposes and held different meanings depending on context and circumstance. Despite this relativism, three strands appear continuously woven into the thread of the cultural practice, running through the medieval, early modern, and Victorian periods, down to the present day: people’s material and emotional need to respond to the advent of springtime, their desire to synchronise such practicality with religious devotion, and their drive to creatively embrace the rhythms of the festive year to their social advantage, even using something so simple as a new bonnet.

Happy Easter!

Sources

Primary (accessed through Early English Books Online, unless otherwise noted)

Edward Phillips, The beau’s academy, or, The modern and genteel way of wooing and complementing after the most courtly manner (London, 1699).

Nicholas Hookes, Amanda, a sacrifice to an unknown goddesse, or, A free-will offering of a loving heart to a sweet-heart (London, 1653).

Poor Robin’s Almanac, various editions (London, 1670, 1685, 1691).

Richard Stafford, The observation of the three great festivals asserted in the Christian church and that objection answered, from Gal 4. 10, 11., and also the right manner of the observance of them made known, in a sermon, preach’d on Easter-Day (London, 1698).
Robert South, Twelve sermons preached upon several occasions (London, 1694).

Samuel Pepys, Diary, ed. Henry B. Wheatley (London: Bell and Sons, 1893), accessed in annotated form on The Diary of Samuel Pepys website.

Secondary

Currie, Elizabeth, ‘Introduction’, in A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Renaissance, ed. Elizabeth Currie (London, 2017).
Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybras, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge, 2000).

Opie, Iona, and Moira Tatem, ‘EASTER: new clothes’, in A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford University Press, 1996) Accessed Online.

Opie, Peter, ‘Proposals for a Dictionary, Arranged on Historical Principles, of English Traditional Lore’, Folklore, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Summer, 1964), 73-90.
Schmidt, Leigh Eric, ‘The Easter Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display’, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), 135-164.

Wild, Benjamin, ‘Livery (uniform)’, in Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles eds. Gale Owen-Crocker, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Maria Hayward (Brill, 2012) Accessed Online.

Woolgar, Christopher, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (London, 1999).