I’ve blogged before about the outrageous headgear worn by well-dressed European women starting around 1380 or so, and reaching its peak (so to speak) around the 1430s. Towering peaked, ram-horned, or heart-shaped headdresses, often draped with veils, became all the rage. They were called hennins (the one-horned version) and escoffions (the two-horned version) and, in England, “steeple headdresses.” Sometimes the horns could be a yard long.

What I didn’t realize, until I read Accessories of Dress by Katherine Lester and Bess Viola Oerke, was how much these headdresses were despised by the older or more pious sorts. I guess fourteenth century parents of teenagers were as horrified by hennins as modern parents are by So Lows and tattoos. Preachers and moralists urged people to protest these outrageous fashions by shouting “War to the hennin!” and “Beware the ram!” whenever a woman approached them wearing the offending item. (18)

Speaking as the mother of three teenagers, I’m pretty sure this didn’t work.

And just imagine the battles fought between parents and their teenaged boys who sported tunics like these: