12th-13th Century Wool Pendant Sleeve Gown

About our Pendant Sleeved Gown

The Twelfth Century was an era of cultural and technical innovation that has been called both the High Middle Ages and the Little Renaissance. In southern France, troubadours wrote a new form of music that sang of courtly love, while the rough-and-ready knightly class adopted a new ideology of its own: chivalry. The brutality of the Crusades not only caused the birth of new, distant kingdoms and the new knighthood of the Knights Templar and Hospitallers, but reopened a gateway to the East that brought an influx of new ideas, technologies and materials. The great, Gothic cathedrals, universities, and the reopening of the silk trade were all children born of this new cultural flowering. It was also an age of legendary personalities, whose names have survived the centuries: Henry Plantagenet, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart, William Marshal, Saladin and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

This era was also an age of innovation and elegance in civilian dress. One such example was a new, elegant back-laced gown that replaced the bliaut over the second half of the 12th century, and was made popular throughout the courts of England and France by such famed ladies as Queen Eleanor and her daughter, the renowned Marie de France. These new, fitted gowns adopted a variety of both simple and dramatic sleeve shapes, and although they fell out of fashion in the 13th century, were forerunners to the fitted dresses that would reappear in the 14th. We have chosen a unique, beautiful design from the later decades of the 12th century for its combination of style and comfort. The long, fitted dress has narrow sleeves that flare out into dramatic, streaming cuffs that almost reach to the ground. This gown is the height of High Medieval fashion! Based on contemporary artwork, and made in 100% Linen, our pendant sleeved, back-laced gown is available in our new pallet of rich, jewel tones with a contrasting sleeve lining. Four sizes and the historical back-laced closure allows for near perfect fit for most body types. Our standard lace is a natural color or you can get black for an additional charge. This gown shows that nobility doesn't just have to be stately, it can be sexy!