Colorful 1620s Plymouth settler family in red, green, blue and violet clothing beside a faded black-and-white buckled costume version

aop3debunks: Pilgrims Wore Only Black? No

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🦃 That buckled costume is a costume

Welcome to AOP3D Debunks, where November's favorite outfit gets a proper fact-check. Picture a Pilgrim and you see head-to-toe black, a tall hat, and big shiny buckles on the hat, belt and shoes.

It is a great costume. It is also an invention — the real Plymouth settlers of 1620 dressed nothing like that, and the records they left behind prove it.

🔍 What the clothing records actually show

Historians know what the Pilgrims wore because wills and inventories listed the clothes people owned and handed down. Those lists are full of color, not black.

  • The colors: red, green, blue, violet, brown and orange garments — including brightly colored breeches, red hats and violet petticoats
  • Black was the fancy option: a deep black dye was difficult and expensive to make, so black was saved for Sundays, formal occasions and portraits — which is why old portraits show everyone in their Sunday best
  • No buckles at all: shoes were fastened with simple leather ties or laces, and hats carried no buckles
  • The timing problem: buckles did not become fashionable in England until the 1660s and later — decades after the Mayflower arrived in 1620

Sources you can check yourself: Smithsonian Magazine — The Myths of the Thanksgiving Story, MEL Magazine — What Clothes Did the Pilgrims Wear? and Velazquez Press — Top Thanksgiving Myths, Debunked.

📜 So where did the buckles come from?

The buckled look arrived much later, on canvas. 19th-century artists painting the Pilgrims reached for whatever looked quaint and old-fashioned in their own day — and by then, buckles were exactly that.

Those Victorian-era pictures also blurred the Pilgrims together with the later Puritan settlers who followed them to Massachusetts. Textbooks, pageants and holiday costumes copied the paintings, and the paintings quietly became "history."

The real wardrobe was more practical: wool doublets and breeches, linen shirts, felt caps and wide-brimmed hats, in the same colors everyone else in early 17th-century England wore.

🧡 Wear the costume — just know it is one

So this November, enjoy the tall buckled hat at the party. Just know you are wearing a 19th-century artist's idea of 1620, not what anyone at Plymouth actually put on in the morning.

Did you believe this one, and what myth should AOP3D Debunks bust next?

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