How did the poor womens clothing differ from the rich womens clothing in the renaissance period?
Well, rich women would have been able to afford clothes made with more expensive fabrics. People of all classes would wear linen shifts next to the skin, and outer garments would mostly be made of wool. However, rich people would have access to more expensive fabrics, like silk for instance, and other expensive fabrics were damask (a decorated cloth from Damascus) baldachin (a mixture of silk and gold made in Baghdad) and velvet. In the course of the middle ages sleeves became more elaborate, and colours more vivid. Noble women would also wear quite elaborate headdresses, whereas common women would probably just wear a simple wimple (a linen scarf wrapped around the head) and perhaps a broad-brimmed hat to shade them from the sun. there were laws known as sumptuary laws which restricted the kind of clothing that lower-class people could wear, to prevent wealthy commoners (like merchants for instance) imitating the nobility in their dress.
