page_title: Supportasse
hierarchical_section_title: Supportasse
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of a lady in a black dress with a lace collar.
context_page_description: A supportasse or underpropper is a stiffened support for a ruff or collar. Essential items of courtly fashion in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, supportasses are sometimes called piccadills, whisks, or rebatos, terms used at different times for both the supporters and the various lace or linen collar styles to which they were attached.
  I pray you, sir, what say you to these great ruffs, which are borne up with supporters and rebatoes, as it were with post and rail?
  — Arthur Dent, The Plain Man's Pathway To Heaven,
  Decorative supportasses were often made of wire fashioned in loops and scallops, covered over with colored silk, gold, or silver thread. Supporters stiffened with cardboard or pasteboard and covered in silk or linen were also popular. They were held in place with ties or points fastened through worked holes at the back of the collar. Examples of both types of supportasse survive in the costume collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Musée national du Moyen Âge.
context_section_description: A supportasse  or underpropper is a  stiffened support for a ruff or collar. Essential items of courtly fashion in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, supportasses are sometimes called piccadills (picadils, pickadills), whisks, or rebatos, terms used at different times for both the supporters and the various lace or linen collar styles to which they were attached.
  I pray you, sir, what say you to these great ruffs, which are borne up with supporters and rebatoes, as it were with post and rail?
  — Arthur Dent, The Plain Man's Pathway To Heaven (1631), 
  Decorative supportasses were often made of wire fashioned in loops and scallops, covered over with colored silk, gold, or silver thread.  Supporters stiffened with cardboard or pasteboard and covered in silk or linen were also popular.  They were held in place with ties or points fastened through worked holes at the back of the collar.   Examples of both types of supportasse survive in the costume collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Musée national du Moyen Âge (formerly Musée de Cluny).
caption: A red supportasse is visible beneath this stiffened lace collar.  Follower of Robert Peake the Elder, Portrait of a Lady.
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