Fashioning the Royal Court: The Women Who Clothed The Stuart Queens with Dr Sarah Bendall

Preserved in surviving wardrobe accounts of six English queens are the names and signatures of women who forged successful careers via their needles and scissors. Together, they offer an extraordinary window into the changing world of women’s work in early modern England.

In the seventeenth century, London became a centre for luxury consumption, fuelled by global trade and the influence of French fashion. At this time, elite women’s patronage helped legitimise professional occupations such as milliner, mantua-maker, petticoat-maker, tirewoman and “Indian woman” for women.

In this talk, Dr Sarah Bendall will discuss the lives of some of these remarkable women, whose labour helped create the enduring image of royalty and fashions that defined the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sarah's new book The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens (Bloomsbury, 2026) will be available for purchase at the lecture.

Dr Sarah A. Bendall is an historian of fashion, material culture and women. Her work focuses on the production, trade and consumption of global commodities and fashionable consumer goods, particularly during the long 17th century. She also has expertise in historical dress recreation methodologies. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australia Catholic University and was appointed as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2023. She is the author of Shaping Femininity (Bloomsbury, 2021) and The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens (Bloomsbury, 2026), and co-editor of Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).

Your ticket includes tea or Market Lane coffee served before the presentation, and time to browse our exclusive range of books, gifts, and homewares at TJC Emporium.

This event is presented on-site at The Johnston Collection. Please see your ticket for details. NOTE: Tickets for this event do not include access to our house museum, Fairhall. Guided tours of the current exhibition can be booked separately.

This event is supported by The Colin Holden Charitable Trust.

Image: Nicolas Arnoult, La Bonne Couturierre, 1692. Private Collection.