doublet

Old French doublet was a diminutive of double. The garment was literally 'a little doubled thing' — two layers of fabric stitched together with padding between them. The construction provided warmth and, in military contexts, some protection. The doublet appeared in the fourteenth century as a close-fitting garment for the male torso, worn over the shirt and under an outer gown or cloak.

The doublet dominated men's fashion from roughly 1400 to 1670. Its shape changed constantly — long-waisted, short-waisted, padded belly (the 'peascod belly' of Elizabethan fashion), slashed to show the shirt beneath, buttoned, laced, hooked. But the basic concept remained: a fitted, structured, doubled garment for the upper body. The doublet was to Renaissance men what the suit jacket is to modern men — the garment that defined male formality.

The phrase 'doublet and hose' was standard: the doublet covered the torso, hose covered the legs. Together they constituted male dress for centuries. Shakespeare refers to doublets repeatedly. Hamlet, Rosalind, Viola — his characters are dressed in doublets or disguised in them. The word was so common in Elizabethan English that it needed no explanation.

The doublet disappeared from mainstream fashion in the late seventeenth century, replaced by the waistcoat and coat combination that would evolve into the modern suit. Charles II of England promoted the new style around 1666. The doubled garment was un-doubled. The two layers separated into waistcoat (inner) and coat (outer), each worn as a single layer. The doublet's function survived in two garments; its name survived in linguistics — a 'doublet' in etymology means two words from the same root.