The Pilgrims Wore Black Clothes With Big Buckles

The buckles are pure 19th-century invention, and the all-black is wrong too. Buckles were not in fashion in the Pilgrims' time and would have read as fussy and expensive; they laced their shoes and hats. The Pilgrims wore the ordinary clothing of early 1600s English people, in a range of colours, browns, greens, reds, and yellows from natural dyes, reserving black for Sunday best because black dye was costly, the opposite of plain. The stark black-and-white-with-buckles look was painted onto them by later American artists in the 1800s, who wanted the founders to look solemn and pious, and the buckle became visual shorthand for 'olden days'. So the Thanksgiving outfit is a Victorian costume drama, not a 1620 wardrobe. The real Pilgrims were better dressed, and more colourful, than the napkins suggest.