Appearance And Clothing In The Canterbury Tales By Geoffrey Chaucer

“At any rate as they appeared to me;/Tell who they were, their status and profession,/What they looked like, what kind of clothes they dressed in” (Chaucer 2). In The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, nothing speaks louder or stronger than clothing. Right from the start, Chaucer uses physical appearance and clothing to characterize social hierarchy. During the 14th century, appearance and clothing categorized people into different social classes and the type of clothing someone wore indicated what class they were in. However, as fashion progressed, fabrics were available to all social classes, allowing the lower class to imitate the upper class. This mimicry sparked laws to prevent movement and mixture of classes (Nanney). Chaucer uses …show more content…
Most commonly, people of a higher class, such as nobility, merchants and clergy wore luxurious, silk tunics and bright dyes, conveying that the quality of a person’s clothing reflected the wealth of the wearer. For example, the upper class wore good quality clothing, which associated them with wealth. Even though silk was really expensive, members of the upper class wore silk tunics. These tunics were embroidered, which took time and effort and were bright colors from bright dyes, which were also costly. They also had long sleeves and long gowns trailing on the ground making the wearer look wealthy because they were able to buy the materials (Johnston). Then, there were the laborers such as peasants and freeholders, artisans, trade workers, or professionals. These people were constantly working to make a living and, since they didn 't have much money, they couldn’t afford the expensive fee of fabrics. This pushed laborers to wear simpler clothing such as coarse-cloth tunics and shades of natural gray and brown, and green and blue from plants (Nanney). In addition to the lack of money, laborers were also working and big, bulky clothing wasn’t an issue for them. They wore cool linen for field work. Lower class tunics were shorter and plainer due to lack of materials. However, around the 14th century, production of fabrics and cloth became more efficient leading to more opportunities for the lower class. Textile factories shifted from a vertical loom to a horizontal loom. The loom was the method the weavers used to make clothes. This shift in looms enabled quicker weaving and increased textile production. By using less fabric and less time, it cheapened the prices of clothing (Nanney). In addition to dropping prices, a mercantile class emerged. These people were peasants that sold