Fashioning the Early Modern


Book Description

Why were beards suddenly stylish in Europe after 1500? Why did the ruff come in and out of use in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries? Why did men from Spain to Sweden suddenly decide to adopt wigs around 1660 only to drop the less than fifty years later? How did manufacturers and merchants encourage and then respond to changing demands for colourful printed patterns and new cuts and styles of tailoring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? As importantly, why were some novelties and innovations quickly adopted while others were unsuccessful? This book, the result of a three-year Humanities in the European Research Area project 'Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500-1800', brings together essays which answer these questions. It explores the means by which fashion ideas were disseminated, through pattern books, gazettes, and early newspapers as well as by barbers, seamstresses, tailors, and weavers. Spanning three hundred years from 1500 to 1800, the book turns to material culture to answer questions about economic and social innovation in Continental Europe, England, and Scandinavia. The essays demonstrate the value of turning to surviving objects, from knitted stockings to silk swatches, and the understanding that emerges when we take fashion seriously. -- from dust jacket.




The First Book of Fashion


Book Description

This captivating book reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, they chronicle how style-conscious accountant Matthäus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the sixteenth century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress – seemingly both ephemeral and trivial – is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and every day culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of sixteenth-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.




Scholarly Self-Fashioning and Community in the Early Modern University


Book Description

A greater fluidity in social relations and hierarchies was experienced across Europe in the early modern period, a consequence of the major political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the same time, the universities of Europe became increasingly orientated towards serving the territorial state, guided by a humanistic approach to learning which stressed its social and political utility. It was in these contexts that the notion of the scholar as a distinct social category gained a foothold and the status of the scholarly group as a social elite was firmly established. University scholars demonstrated a great energy when characterizing themselves socially as learned men. This book investigates the significance and implications of academic self-fashioning throughout Europe in the early modern period. It describes a general and growing deliberation in the fashioning of individual, communal and categorical academic identity in this period. It explores the reasons for this growing self-consciousness among scholars, and the effects of its expression - social and political, desired and real.




Sartorial Politics in Early Modern Europe


Book Description

For women at the early modern courts, clothing and jewellery were essential elements in their political arsenal, enabling them to signal their dynastic value, to promote loyalty to their marital court and to advance political agendas. This is the first collection of essays to examine how elite women in early modern Europe marshalled clothing and jewellery for political ends. With essays encompassing women who traversed courts in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Habsburg Austria, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, the contributions cover a broad range of elite women from different courts and religious backgrounds as well as varying noble ranks.




Fashionable Encounters


Book Description

At the heart of this anthology lies the world of fashion: a concept that pervades the realm of clothes and dress; appearances and fashionable manners; interior design; ideas and attitudes. Here sixteen papers focus on the Nordic world (Denmark, Norway, Sweden Finland, Iceland, the Faroe Isles and Greenland) within the time frame AD 1500–1850. This was a period of rapid and far-reaching social, political and economic change, from feudal Europe through political revolution, industrialisation, development of international trade, religious upheaval and technological innovation; changes impacting on every aspect of life and reflected in equally rapid and widespread changes in fashion at all levels of society. These papers present a broad image of the theme of fashion as a concept and as an empirical manifestation in the Nordic countries in early modernity, exploring a variety of ways in which that world encountered fashionable impressions in clothing and related aspects of material culture from Europe, the Russian Empire, and far beyond. The chapters range from object-based studies to theory-driven analysis. Elite and sophisticated fashions, the importation of luxuries and fashion garments, christening and bridal wear, silk knitted waistcoats, woollen sweaters and the influence of the whaling trade on women’s clothing are some of the diverse topics considered, as well as religious influences on perceptions of luxury and aspects of the garment trade and merchant inventories.




Self-Fashioning and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia


Book Description

In Self-Fashioning and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, chapter authors assert the applicability of Stephen Greenblatt's self-fashioning theory, originally framed within Elizabethan England, to medieval and early modern Iberia in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.




Architectures of Festival in Early Modern Europe


Book Description

This fourth volume in the European Festival Studies, 1450-1700 series breaks with precedent in stemming from a joint conference (Venice, 2013) between the Society for European Festivals Research and the PALATIUM project supported by the European Science Foundation. The volume draws on up-to-date research by a Europe-wide group of academic scholars and museum and gallery curators to provide a unique, intellectually-stimulating and beautifully-illustrated account of temporary architecture created for festivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, together with permanent architecture pressed into service for festival occasions across major European locations including Italian, French, Austrian, Scottish and German. Appealing and vigorous in style, the essays look towards classical sources while evoking political and practical circumstances and intellectual concerns - from re-shaping and re-conceptualizing early sixteenth-century Rome, through providing for the well-being and political allegiance of Medici-era Florentines and exploring the teasing aesthetics of performance at Versailles to accommodating players and spectators in seventeenth-century Paris and at royal and ducal events for the Habsburg, French and English crowns. The volume is unique in its field in the diversity of its topics and the range of its scholarship and fascinating in its account of the intellectual and political life of Early Modern Europe.




Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy


Book Description

The first comprehensive study on the role of Italian fashion and Italian literature, this book analyzes clothing and fashion as described and represented in literary texts and costume books in the Italy of the 16th and 17th centuries. Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy emphasizes the centrality of Italian literature and culture for understanding modern theories of fashion and gauging its impact in the shaping of codes of civility and taste in Europe and the West. Using literature to uncover what has been called the ’animatedness of clothing,’ author Eugenia Paulicelli explores the political meanings that clothing produces in public space. At the core of the book is the idea that the texts examined here act as maps that, first, pinpoint the establishment of fashion as a social institution of modernity; and, second, gauge the meaning of clothing at a personal and a political level. As well as Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and Cesare Vecellio’s The Clothing of the Renaissance World, the author looks at works by Italian writers whose books are not yet available in English translation, such as those by Giacomo Franco, Arcangela Tarabotti, and Agostino Lampugnani. Paying particular attention to literature and the relevance of clothing in the shaping of codes of civility and style, this volume complements the existing and important works on Italian fashion and material culture in the Renaissance. It makes the case for the centrality of Italian literature and the interconnectedness of texts from a variety of genres for an understanding of the history of Italian style, and serves to contextualize the debate on dress in other European literatures.




Moderne


Book Description

Jacques-mile Ruhlmann, Pierre Chareau, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Charlotte Perriand, Eileen Gray: together these designers and their contemporaries pioneered the look of the modern French interior during the 1920s. Their use of sumptuous materials, rich jewel tones, intricate geometric patterns, and complex and varied textures has made this work a lasting favorite among interior designers, architects, and their clients. When it first appeared, the got moderne, or modern taste, was marketed through limited-edition portfolios containing unbound drawings, printed in full color using a traditional process called pochoir. Created in an era before color photography, the vivid gouache and watercolor depictions of interior spaces—complete with coordinated furniture, carpets, fabrics, and decorative accessories—announced the dawn of a new era of French design and set the standards of luxury and taste that still guide us today. Moderne presents the finest examples of this work in more than two hundred plates, selected by Sarah Schleuning, a curator of the Wolfsonian Museum, and faithfully reproduced to preserve their original color palettes. This sumptuous volume is comprehensive in scope, beginning with the early art moderne of Ruhlmann and concluding with the avant-garde work of Gray and Perriand. These and other high-water marks of the period are discussed in an essay by historian Jeremy Aynsley. Designers' biographies and a brief bibliography are also included, making this an inspirational resource for interior designers and architects, and an indispensable reference for historians of the modern era.




A Companion to Textile Culture


Book Description

A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.