Pepys’s library contains his collection of thousands of 17th-century French fashion prints, one of the largest such collections in the world.
This year marks the 300th anniversary of Magdalene acquiring Pepys’s private library, including his original diaries.
Ms Avidon, a PhD researcher at Christ’s College, Cambridge, focuses on two of its 33 volumes, the Habits de France and Modes de Paris, containing over 100 fashion illustrations printed between 1670 and 1696.
There was also a more sentimental side to Pepys’s love of the 17th-century equivalent of the Parisian catwalk.
New research shows he collected dozens of prints of young French women wearing fashionable outfits because they reminded him of his late wife Elizabeth.
Pepys, who had chronicled the Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, began collecting these prints shortly after Elizabeth’s death in 1669, aged just 29, soon after a trip to Paris where they had shopped for them together.