Funerary dress code can be powerful when it makes royalty look, at first blush, like one of us. In contemporary England, as well as in the United States, the donning of subdued black clothing can be an equalizer. In its best moments, it is a common costume for people unified in grief. But black mourning attire, simple and accessible as it appears now, has a long history of being neither.
More than 400 years ago, the body of the first Queen Elizabeth was brought to Westminster Abbey in a largely dark-hued procession. Her coffin was accompanied by statesmen in black gowns and imposing hats. Even the horses were draped in fine black velvet. The color black’s use at funerals had some precedence: Since the sixth century, it had been deployed in the Christian Church for its suggestion, according to the 19th-century artist and professor F. Edward Hulme, of “the spiritual darkness of the soul unillumined by the Sun of righteousness.” By the 14th century, it was widely associated with death. But white and brown were also among the colors long considered suitable for mourning in the Anglican world—white because it was easily approximated by sun-bleaching undyed wool and linen, brown because it was similarly practical to produce; in multiple accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries, the latter was referred to interchangeably as “sad colour.”
What set black apart—and helped solidify its status as the shade of mourning by the time of Elizabeth I’s 1603 funeral—was its expense. Achieving a luxurious hue, coaxed from the red roots of the herb madder and the small bluish leaves of the flower woad, required multiple rounds of costly dyeing. Black-clad royal funerals were political theater, intended not just to console the bereaved but to put on a show so over the top that it reified the cultural crevasse between commoners and the ruling class. Funerals were the red carpets of the early modern era.
Extravagant displays of funerary excess weren’t just unattainable for common people; they were, for centuries, illegal. Beginning around the 1300s, England, and much of Europe, was governed by “sumptuary laws.” The laws made unorthodox fashion literally a crime by dictating the colors and fabrics that one could wear based on rank in society, making one’s social status evident upon first sight. Laborers, for instance, were permitted to wear linens and most lower-quality wools, but were barred from embroidered silk, tinseled satin, finer furs, certain buttons, and threads of gold, purple, and silver.