The diarist, most well-known for chronicling events such as the Great Fire of London, paid close attention to trends across the Channel
Samuel Pepys once chopped the sleeves from a flamboyant summer suit he felt self-conscious wearing, a study has revealed.
The diarist, most well-known for chronicling events such as the Great Fire of London, paid close attention to trends across the Channel and was enamoured with French fashions, a historian has discovered.
Historian Marlo Avidon has spent months studying Pepys's private collection of fashion prints in the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where the diarist had been a student.
Her research has revealed that Pepys enjoyed a complicated relationship with his choice of wardrobe, once chopping the sleeves off an outfit in which he felt self-conscious.
Although he loved fashion, he also feared being regarded as attempting to dress above his social status.
In 1669 Pepys, who went on to become an MP and dedicated administrator of the Royal Navy, wrote in his diary that he was "afraid to be seen" in a summer suit he had just bought "because it was too fine with the gold lace at the hands".
He finally plucked up the courage to wear it in public, but a socially superior colleague spotted him in the park and told him the sleeves were above his station.
Pepys decided "never to appear in court" again with the sleeves and instructed a tailor to cut them off, "as it is fit I should".
The episode did not appear to dampen his enthusiasm for fashion, however. He went on to buy a print titled Habit Noir (evening wear) which shows an elite Frenchman proudly showing off very similar lace cuffs as well as plentiful ribbons.
"Pepys would have seen this outfit as pretty risky," said Ms 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. This is how fashion worked and still works today - you demonstrate your knowledge of style within your means."
Ms Avidon, who on Monday published eight previously unseen images from Pepys's collection of prints in the journal The Seventeenth Century, added: "Pepys felt he had to walk a really fine line, especially early in his career. His father was a tailor, his mother a washerwoman, and throughout his life Pepys was profoundly worried about how he was perceived and took steps to manage his image.
"The diary shows his anxieties as a young adult. The prints show that his determination to prove himself, using clothes and cultural capital, continued throughout his life."
Ms Avidon's research suggests that Pepys faced a moral dilemma in choosing to wear designs imported from France.
"There was concern about the relationship Charles II was fostering with the Catholic French King Louis XIV and about growing French influence on English culture. This created a sense of moral crisis," Ms Avidon said. "There was particular anxiety in England about popery and its association with vanity."
French clothes, which combined luxurious silks with over-the-top trim and lace, worn with statement accessories, were often viewed by the English as being scandalously excessive.
"Pepys felt under pressure to maintain the moral high ground, not just by wearing clothes appropriate for his own social station but also to uphold what was appropriate for his country morally and economically."
Pepys's library contains his collection of thousands of 17th-century French fashion prints, one of the largest such collections in the world.
This year marks the 300th anniversary of Magdalene acquiring Pepys's private library, including his original diaries.
Ms Avidon, a PhD researcher at Christ's College, Cambridge, focuses on two of its 33 volumes, the Habits de France and Modes de Paris, containing over 100 fashion illustrations printed between 1670 and 1696.
There was also a more sentimental side to Pepys's love of the 17th-century equivalent of the Parisian catwalk.
New research shows he collected dozens of prints of young French women wearing fashionable outfits because they reminded him of his late wife Elizabeth.
Pepys, who had chronicled the Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, began collecting these prints shortly after Elizabeth's death in 1669, aged just 29, soon after a trip to Paris where they had shopped for them together.
Ms Avidon says: "Pepys was distraught by Elizabeth's death. I think these prints of fashionable young women must have reminded Pepys of Elizabeth. The collection could be seen as an homage to her."
Following Eliabeth's death Pepys employed a teenage housekeeper, Mary Skinner, who soon became his mistress. They remained together until his death and she was often referred to as Mrs Pepys.
Pepys took a leading role in Mary's education, moulding her as a refined gentlewoman - as he had Elizabeth - and Ms Avidon suggests that he may have given Mary black and white fashion prints to colour.
"Some of the prints were clearly not professionally coloured, they look amateurish," Ms Avidon said.
"Pepys acquired these prints over the course of his relationship with Mary. It's quite possible that he was teaching her how to colour these prints. We'll never know for sure, but by the time Mary died, she had become a fairly fashionable woman in her own right."
