Gable hood

Mary Wotton, Lady Guildenford, wearing a gable hood with pinned up lappets and a hanging veil. Hans Holbein the Younger, 1527.

A gable hood, English hood or gable headdress is an English woman's headdress of c. 1500–1550, so-called because its pointed shape resembles the gable of a house. The contemporary French hood was rounded in outline.

Originally a simple pointed hood with decorated side panels called lappets and a veil at the back, over time the gable hood became a complex construction stiffened with buckram, with a box-shaped back and two tube-shaped hanging veils at 90-degree angles; the hanging veils and lappets could be pinned up in a variety of ways to make complex headdresses.

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  Early gable hood: Elizabeth of York c. 1500

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  Front and back views of a box-backed gable hood of c. 1528–30. Detail of a drawing by Holbein

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  Gable hood with lappets and one side of veil pinned up (engraving after Holbein c. 1535)

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  Gable hood of c. 1543

See also

• 1500–1550 in fashion
• Catherine of Aragon
• Jane Seymour
• Mary Boleyn

References

• Ashelford, Jane: The Art of Dress: Clothing and Society 1500–1914, Abrams, 1996. ISBN 0-8109-6317-5
• Ashelford, Jane: A Visual History of Costume: The Sixteenth Century, Drama Books, 1983. ISBN 0-89676-076-6

External links

• Tudor Gable Headdress: A Portfolio of Images
• Tudor and Elizabethan Coifs