Illuminations made for Christine de Pizan’s manuscript for Queen Isabeau of Bavaria show women wearing prominent horned headdresses (often called escoffions). These images help document how structured headwear could signal elite status in early-15th-century France and set the stage for later, taller and more rigid forms.
From about 1430, conical and truncated-cone hennins became a recognizable high-status style, especially associated with Burgundy and northern France. The typical look combined a stiffened cone with a veil that could fall behind the wearer or be arranged in different ways.
A famous frontispiece showing Jean Wauquelin presenting a book to Philip the Good reflects the Burgundian court’s role as a European fashion center. Although the scene emphasizes men’s dress, it represents the broader court culture in which dramatic headwear styles (including hennin-related fashions for women) spread through elite networks.
By mid-century and later, hennin-related styles diversified, including shorter, truncated shapes and other structured forms. This shift made the general silhouette more adaptable to different ages, settings, and levels of wealth, while still keeping the idea of the headpiece as a key status marker.
Late in the 15th century, women’s head-dresses in northern Europe generally became smaller and less extreme than earlier decades. This change helped open the way for new structured hoods that framed the face more closely, instead of relying on very tall cones and long veils.
Around 1480, the gable hood developed into a recognizable English headwear form with a pointed outline. Over time it could become a stiff, multi-part construction worn over a coif, shaping a more angular silhouette than the rounded French hood that followed.
The Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany was illuminated between 1503 and 1508 for Anne, Queen of France. It is an important visual record of elite dress at the French court, including headwear associated with Anne and her circle.
In France, the headdress later called the French hood in English was associated with Brittany and with Anne of Brittany, and it developed a rounded outline. Compared with the gable hood, it typically sat further back and could show some hair at the front, changing the balance between display and modest coverage.
A well-known marriage portrait of Mary Tudor (Henry VIII’s sister) dated to about 1516 shows her wearing a French hood. This matters because it suggests the French style was visible at the English court early, even before it became widely adopted there.
Records noted in later summaries report that Catherine of Aragon bought a French hood for her daughter Mary in March 1520. This kind of purchase shows how headwear circulated through court supply chains—via makers, merchants, and royal wardrobes—not only through portraits.
Although known earlier, the French hood did not become widely popular in England until the 1530s and 1540s. As it spread, the French hood and the older English gable hood coexisted as competing silhouettes, each carrying different ideas about tradition, display, and court identity.
In September 1537, Lady Lisle requested “many hats” like those worn in France, noting that English ladies were following French fashion. This kind of written evidence helps confirm that headgear styles were discussed, ordered, and copied as part of everyday court and household decision-making.
Around the same period, reports linked to Queen Jane Seymour describe objections to French-style clothing and the French hood among her attendants. The episode shows that headwear could be politically sensitive: choosing a hood style could signal loyalty, taste, and alignment with a queen’s preferred image.
By about the 1540s, hats became more common in England as alternatives to traditional hoods, while close-fitting linen coifs continued as a base layer under hoods, caps, and hats. This shift marks a clear outcome of the 1400–1550 arc: towering fifteenth-century forms gave way to lower, more layered headwear systems that could be mixed and matched with changing Renaissance fashions.
Headgear: the French hood, coif, and hennin across Europe (c. 1400–1550)
