One of the lesser-known details about the trial of Anne Boleyn was that she and her brother were accused of laughing at Henry VIII's clothing. The specifics of their crime were never provided: was it amusing, for example, to see such a portly man in tight silk hose, or was his clothing simply out of date? Whatever the reason, it was clear that the lack of consideration for the king's dress was yet another example of Anne's failure to show respect for her husband and the throne. Eleri Lynn, a curator with special responsibility for the historic dress collections at Hampton Court, offers this anecdote about the importance of clothing in her overview of Tudor fashion. Produced for the Historic Royal Palaces, this slim, well-illustrated book was put together in response to the many questions she receives from visitors about where all the clothing once worn by the Tudors can be seen today.

Her answer is that surprisingly little has survived, at least at Hampton Court itself. The English kings and queens regularly recycled their textiles, using them as gifts, legacies, or simply reusing the fabric for new purposes. Anything that remained then disappeared when Oliver Cromwell disposed of all the items in the royal wardrobe in the seventeenth century. With few exceptions, pieces from the period are to be found in museum collections around the world rather than in the Royal Palaces. In compensation, the archival evidence is surprisingly complete. Extensive records from the Great Wardrobe accounts can be found in the National Archives in Kew and in the British Library. This means that the reconstruction of Tudor wardrobes is possible by combining extant items such as the leather jerkin from the Museum of London and painted, printed, and sculpted images with documentary evidence. Eleri Lynn synthesizes this growing field of research, providing an overview of changes in shape and styles of the clothing worn by the Tudor royal family and their retinues. It is particularly helpful to have a chapter on the often-neglected topic of laundry, demonstrating how important and complex looking after the court's valuable linens actually proved to be.

The book's great strength is its illustrations, which means that one of the surprising elements of the book is the reliance on photographs of reenactors wearing reconstructed Tudor garments. This sets a jarring note, because these images appear without any discussion of what might be learned from doing so. Reconstructions of historical dress, pioneered by Janet Arnold, who took patterns from surviving garments to enable a deeper understanding of how ruffs and farthingales were actually constructed and worn, is a very important technique in dress history. Remaking garments to understand their original manufacture has been used to considerable effect by Maria Hayward in her magisterial work on Henry VIII's wardrobe and by Jennifer Tiramani, whose School of Historical Dress in London now teaches everything from sewing men's breeches to understanding Renaissance leatherworking.

Unfortunately, Tudor Fashion doesn't draw conclusions from its staging of Tudor dress. This seems a missed opportunity, for the book closes with two case studies of surviving sixteenth-century pieces in the Royal Historic Palaces that would have benefited from much closer technical analysis. The first is the so-called Bristowe hat, which was recently given to Historic Royal Palaces by a direct descendent of Nicholas Bristowe, a loyal Tudor courtier. The family told how Henry VIII, triumphant at the fall of Boulogne in 1544, threw his hat in the air whereupon Bristowe caught and kept it. The second case study is of the Bacton altar cloth, first recognized by Janet Arnold as a piece of Tudor embroidery related to Elizabeth I's lady-in-waiting Blanche Parry and now in the care of the Royal Historic Palaces. Parry probably donated this very expensive silver and silk cloth, originally part of a skirt, to decorate the parish church altar where she planned to be buried. But despite Lynn's valiant efforts, she is forced to concede that it is impossible to connect either garment to the court without reservation. Nonetheless, as an introduction to Tudor fashion, the book does an excellent job of ensuring that visitors to Hampton Court and the other Royal Historic Palaces gain a strong sense of how seriously clothing was taken in the past and why it deserves to be studied with care today.