Fashion reflects the spirit of the time, and an examination of the fashion of a given era should reveal certain attitudes and prevailing social concepts held by the people of that time. The fashion of the Seventeenth Century reflects the spirit of the age, a period of change, with political and social shifts that are reflected as well in the way fashion developed for both men and women.
Davenport (1948) notes a number of the major shifts taking place during the Seventeenth Century. She notes that this was a period of alteration and realignment as royal prerogative gained over feudal power so that the lord's responsibility for his people was weakened, shifting responsibility to the people themselves to a much greater degree. This was the era of the rise of new types of guild. The old, vertically-composed craft guilds broke into separate entities of merchant-employers and journeymen hired-help. This was also the era of the rise of Protestantism, another force tending toward greater personal responsibility, a form of individualism fueled by such democratizing forces as the invention of printing. Previously, the bible had been a possession of the higher levels of the Church alone, and a monk, who might read his breviary, had to have permission of a superior to read the Bible. A layman could neither hope to own nor read a manuscript Bible, but with printing it was possible that anyone could own a Bible. When people could read on their own, they could also come to their own conclusions about what they had read, and Protestantism was benefited by this change (Davenport, 1948, 504).
France rose to particular prominence in the Seventeenth Century, as Davenport notes:
Least impaired by religious conflicts, she rises under the increasingly absolute rule of adroit Bourbon kings; her finances are established, agriculture and roads improved; industry, especially luxury industries, encouraged (1948, 504).
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