The Evelyn Family, the Mundus muliebris, and Conceptualizations of Fashionable Female Dress in Late Seventeenth-Century England

John Evelyn (1620–1706), in Tyrannus, or, the mode in a discourse of sumptuary lawes (1661), decried the foreign fashions that threatened the English economy and symbolized Restoration extravagance. He supposedly instilled these beliefs in his daughter Mall (1665–85), with whom he co-authored the Mundus muliebris: or, the ladies dressing-room unlock’d (1690), a remarkable satire that expressed contempt at the frivolous new modes of apparel adopted by elite women. Yet, incongruously, many of thes