Materials for Renaissance Fashion
LONG DENIGRATED AS INTELLECTUALLY superficial due to a pervasive, often moralizing distrust of fashion’s ostensible frivolity, studies of clothing and fashion have emerged as increasingly vibrant forces within the humanities’ material turn and art history’s embrace of material culture. This burgeoning scholarship builds on many decades of painstaking and comprehensive costume history as well as economic historians’ formidable investigations of textile production. Three pioneering explorations of early modern material culture, consumption, and social relations generated intellectual urgency in the first years of the newmillennium: Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, EvelynWelch’s Shopping in the Renaissance, andWelch and Michelle O’Malley’s Material Renaissance. Likewise, ongoing engagements with materiality and its agency have furnished profitable theoretical perspectives for Renaissance clothing and fashion, as have histories of gender and bodies. Concepts of embodiment indebted to Joanne Entwistle’s The Fashioned Body have afforded dynamic accounts of the relations between Renaissance bodies and clothes for scholars includingDenis Bruna,Ulinka Rublack, and SusanVincent. Any study of fashion must reckon with the body, which imbues garments with meaning, thereby providing the literal shape and interpretive fields through which they can be understood. Without the body, clothing is but “a corpse or a mass of lifeless cloth.” That fashion broadcasts signs of status and identity is a familiar refrain, yet we must recognize that its forms and materials simultaneously constitute these identities and even our sense of self. We make clothes, and clothes make us. Bodies are both concealed and revealed by clothes. Changes in the cuts and shapes of Renaissance clothing both induced and were influenced by bodily ideals mediated through expectations of gender, age, and status (and, time and again,