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No, Isabeau of Bavaria did not have pierced nipples and she did not make it a trend in fifteenth-century Europe. The details in

The paragraph was patched together by Mr. Duerr using three sources, some written over 60 years apart and in different languages

are significantly less relevant as far as judging validity of claim than the fact that the two German sources, which are digitized on archive.org, categorically do not say what he claims they say. The first observes that at the end of the Middle Ages, the necklines of women's dresses displayed as much of their chests as did the dresses of the Louis XVI and Napoleonic eras; the third is about satirical portrayals of women and, furthermore, begins with the sixteenth century.

I know we always say it's impossible to prove a negative, but there's just no way medieval European women were walking around with their breasts hanging out of their dresses, their nipples decorated like Alan Cumming's in Cabaret. Even the iconography of adultery typically permits only one breast to be bared to the viewer. It's true that over the course of the 15th century, mostly after Isabeau's day, women's necklines dropped, and that the outer dress would eventually feature a very deep V-neck. But the V-neck merely revealed the solid kirtle underneath. Women's clothing was apparently so frustratingly concealing that prostitutes in London were sometimes arrested for wearing men's clothing--the way they could display their bodies to attract customers.

With respect to Isabeau herself, then, we're dealing with the end result of a centuries-long smear campaign that began in her own lifetime. But that's okay from a historian's standpoint, because it makes all the more interesting the questions of Isabeau's own taste in fashion and how influential it became.

Hundred Years' War chronicler Jean Froissart relates that when teenage Isabeau arrived at the French court to marry Charles, her sense of style developed in Bavaria was anything but trend-setting. She actually had to learn how to dress in a royal, or even basic noble, manner from her great-aunt!

Isabeau proved to be a quick study in at least one respect: the importance of splendor, even ostentation, to creating an aura of power and authority for herself and (at first) more importantly, the king. The account books from Isabeau's household survive starting from 1393, right after Charles' first terrifying bout of insanity--in other words, just as the queen's visibility and importance began to tick up. They don't give us details of finished garments that she actually wore, unfortunately; it's not a wardrobe inventory. Instead and predictably, the accounts detail expenditures--relevant here, on the material textiles (wool, silk, gold, fur) and the labor (draper, tailor, etc) that went into her garments.

Rachel Gibbons argues that the relatively small (relatively) amount Isabeau spent on the construction of her dresses suggests that tailoring-wise, she maintained some of the sense of simplicity she had brought with her from Bavaria. Where she more (way more) than made up for it was in textiles. Isabeau invested dearly in type of fabric, quality of fabric, origin of fabric, color of fabric, and decoration of fabric.

Silk, which had to be purchased abroad, did comprise some of her wardrobe, especially in the 1390s. A lot of silk taffeta, much of it embroidered in gold and silver, was imported to France from Italy and Cyprus. It might surprise you at first to learn that the much of the fabric purchased by her household was wool. However, as I've discussed earlier, "wool" is an expansive category in terms of quality--and price. The finest-quality wool was actually more expensive, therefore prestigious, than silk! The purchase locations for Isabeau's consumption of wool reflect known sources of highest-quality wool. And then, of course, there's velvet. A single piece of her black velvet (probably about three feet or one meter) would cost the most skilled craftsman 25 days of pay; the white velvet lined with silk, 160 days; the black velvet embroidered in green and white, an entire year. And she purchased three lengths of that! Furthermore, she was also a fan of fur trim, in keeping with contemporary style. In 1404, she spent 800 livres on fur, or eleven years of pay for a skilled tradesman.

Isabeau combined her own sense of styling with the display of power-via-wealth when it came to color of fabric. While there is some violet and blue attested, she preferred to dress her children and herself in black, white, deep green, and red. Red dye in particular amped up the initial cost of the fabric astronomically.

Accessorize, accessorize, accessorize, they say, and the account registers show that Isabeau did plenty of that. The stereotypical conical "princess hat" that she is sometimes depicted in was actually not known until the mid-15th century. The queen favored an earlier evolution, a "heart-shaped" headdress with two shorter, rounded points set a little bit to the sides of her head. Isabeau's preference was for gold net to be the outer covering.

Isabeau also understood the power of a good sparkle accent. She bought gilted shoe buckles and buttons for herself (and her children), adorned her hands and collar edge with jewels, had the clasps on one of her headdresses switched to a tiger shape studded with diamonds, rubies, and pearls. In fact, her taste for gemstones and precious metal ornamentation is one of the most visible elements of Isabeau's personal taste as opposed to the requirements of a queen--by 1405 and 1410, she was spending anywhere from a quarter to almost half of her style expenditures on jewelry!

Isabeau's elaborate fashions did not go without opprobrium in her own time. The chronicler known as the Monk of St. Denis asserts that court preacher Jacques Legrand gave a sermon in 1405 to the effect:

Moving on to the dissoluteness of their clothing, of which the queen had been a principal instigator and whom he reproached in many ways, he carried on: “This and many other things, oh Queen, are said about your court to its disgrace. If you do not want to believe this, if you put on the clothes of a poor woman and walk through the streets of the city, you will hear it from many people.” (trans. Tracey Adams)

In other words, Legrand asserts that not only does he as a preacher have a problem with the sinful vanity of her clothing, but the people of France are unhappy with the obvious expense that, in the end, they are shouldering (though it would not have been first of all the people of Paris; the core of the queen's income came from the lands attached to her dower).

Legrand's criticisms combined with the numerical evidence seem to set up Isabeau to deserve at least some of the later disgust directed at her by French historians and polemicists, who crafted her the reputation of an earlier Marie Antoinette (as well as, of course, a flagrant adulterer and destroyer of French morals &c &c &c). Does Isabeau, specifically, deserve it? Was her taste in fashion so ornate, expensive, and influential on others to be just as "bad" to merit the creation of a black legend?