Fashioning the Self in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Consumption, and Material Culture

“Clothes make the woman, clothes make the man: the costume is of the essence.”

—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (c. 1600-01)

The quip about the importance of costume in determining identity seems even more pertinent now than during Shakespeare’s era. The significance of today’s fashion is easy to comprehend: it is a multi-billion dollar global industry. Fashion magazines, reality shows, and the internet all offer advice on how to achieve personal perfection with fashion tips, examples of celebrity styles and designer knock-offs, and other essentials to consider when shopping. How did we get here? Fashion has been a growth industry for centuries and, as Shakespeare implied, men and women have long constructed their identity and projected their status through their attire. The six books under review here suggest that contemporary fashion has its roots in the early modern period, however strange and distant that may seem. These books demonstrate how an examination of consumption practices, fashion, and the body can lead to a reassessment of our notions of past and present gender and social issues, the role of material culture in identity formation, and even historical periodization.

With their focus on the early modern period, the authors challenge modernist assumptions about the associations of consumption and fashion with women: these realms became feminized in the modern era, but this had not always been so. Men dominated display culture for centuries. The state often played a role in the consumption of fashion via sumptuary laws, which were most lenient regarding adult elite men, the major purchasers and wearers of fashion; women, male youths, and the non-elite had more limited access. But the exclusivity of fashion only increased its appeal and men and women alike challenged the rules in their quest to be stylish, and eventually the laws gave way to market demands. In addition, the early modern body was more than just the object on which to hang fashion—the body itself was fashioned and outward markers such as clothing or hair-styles had deep ramifications for determining one’s sex. In making their arguments, these authors all look “beyond words,” and engage material and visual culture in their interpretations of the past.¹

By examining trends in consumption and fashion and by boosting the source base to include the material alongside the textual, several of these authors rethink the typical periodization of their respective times and places. All see fashion as closely related to larger political and economic structures, but trends in early modern consumption do not always fit into periods established by political histories. Nor do they follow a smooth trajectory of development and improvement. The periodization of western European consumption depends on one’s focus: an Italianist might locate the birth of early modern consumption practices in the fifteenth century whereas the scholarship on England discussed herein argues more for the seventeenth century, in contrast to earlier works on the country that emphasized the eighteenth. Hallmarks of the rise of consumer...