The early modern body was not a neutral or natural being, but a sociopolitical entity constructed through the considered use of apparel, accessories, and movement. In her influential rethinking of the centrality of the body to subjectivity, the feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz powerfully argues that ‘the body must be regarded as a site of social, political, cultural, and geographic inscriptions, production, or constitution’, going on to state that ‘it is itself a cultural, the cultural product’. Indeed, as scholars commonly recognise, the pieces of clothing and jewellery worn on the elite early modern body were fashioned from costly materials that required expert craftsmanship, thereby making manifest the wearer's financial and social position. But further, multiple codes of meaning were tied up in bodily adornment, which could give expression to such constructs as gender, sexuality, authority, piety, purity, or networks of belonging. Importantly for royal and elite early modern women, this was a powerful political tool that they could access and control: by making specific sartorial and jewellery choices, they could legitimise a position, visualise political ambition, or show allegiance, favour, or dynastic membership. Indeed, the recent turn in early modern dress history, pioneered by cultural historians including Eva Andersson, Sylvène Édouard, Isabelle Paresys, Ulinka Rublack, and Laura Oliván Santaliestra, has underscored the ways in which dress was read as a signifier of the wearer’s identity – whether that be economic, social, national, or religious.