Sumptuary laws, dress and female social regulations in the Queen Charlotte series

Abstract

Based on the Netflix television series Queen Charlotte (2023), this article proposes an analysis of the historical conformation of clothing as a mechanism for maintaining hierarchies and imposing strict social regulations, especially on women. The plot, based on the story of England’s Queen Consort from 1761 to 1818, transports us to a time that, although idealized by fiction, sketches the quality of female drama in European court societies. In particular, it looks at how the fixations and permanences of the logic of sumptuary norms come about. Dress is a determining social act for women who try to reinvent their spaces of existence in the gaps of the aristocratic system. The interpretative analysis is based on the case study suggested by José Luiz Braga and the heuristic method proposed by Carlo Ginzburg, in order to capture clues offered by the diegesis for the reconstruction and understanding of the historical narrative and from the perspective of authors such as Georg Simmel and Alan Hunt.