What does farthingale mean?
A farthingale was a structured undergarment — part cage, part hoop skirt — worn by women in Europe from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth century. Made of whalebone, wire, rope, or wicker, it held the outer skirt out stiffly from the waist and hips rather than evenly around, producing the dramatic wide-hipped silhouette familiar from portraits of Elizabeth I and other Tudor and Spanish court figures. Two main forms existed: the Spanish farthingale, a cone-shaped frame widening toward the hem, and the French or wheel farthingale, which projected like a drum at the hips so that the skirt fell straight to the floor. The garment became a visible marker of rank and wealth, so much so that some courts regulated its size. Today 'farthingale' survives chiefly as a term of costume history and period drama, evoking an era when fashion was architecture.
nounA hooped structure or padded framework of whalebone, wire, or wicker worn under a skirt to hold it out at the hips, fashionable in Europe from the late 15th to the early 17th centuries.
- A hooped or padded understructure worn beneath a skirt to extend it outward at the hips, especially in the 16th and early 17th centuries.
"The portrait shows the queen in an elaborate farthingale that extended her silhouette dramatically at the hips."
"Her court gown was supported by a Spanish farthingale, its rigid hoops giving her skirt a bell-like profile."
"Costume historians reconstructed the wheel farthingale from surviving portraits of Anne of Denmark."
Regular plural; used when referring to multiple garments or to the fashion generally.
"By the 1620s farthingales had fallen out of favor at the English court."
Elizabethan fashion once made it a crime to wear a farthingale wider than your social rank allowed — sumptuary laws literally policed hip width.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of farthingale
The farthingale takes its name indirectly from the Spanish 'verdugado', meaning a garment stiffened with green wood ('verde' being green), which entered French as 'vertugadin' before reaching English in the sixteenth century. The English form was reshaped by folk etymology to end in '-gale', with influence from 'farthing', the old quarter-penny coin, echoing the Spanish root sense of 'fourth'. Cognate terms such as 'verdugado' and 'vertugadin' survive as the names for the same garment in Romance-language costume history.
How farthingale is actually used
The word is now almost entirely historical, appearing mainly in discussions of Tudor and Elizabethan costume, art history, and historical fiction. It carries no figurative use in modern English.
Easily confused with farthingale
A crinoline is a later 19th-century hooped petticoat that expands the whole skirt all around, whereas a farthingale is the earlier Renaissance garment that projects mainly at the sides and hips.