Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire by Eugenia Paulicelli (review)

Eugenia Paulicelli has pursued her interest in the history of Italian style through a series of books and edited collections that focus on fashion in Italian literature and film, addressing both the contemporary scene and earlier epochs. Her new book is a study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century advice literature, costume books, and satirical attacks and defences of fashion.

In her opening chapter, Paulicelli revisits a topic she has previously explored with the collection Moda e moderno: dal Medioevo al Rinascimento (Meltemi, 2006), and similarly names this chapter ‘Moda and Moderno’. The chapter introduces themes such as discipline and imitation that will be developed in the remainder of the book. Paulicelli positions fashion as a form of discipline that superseded sumptuary legislation during the early modern period, presenting it as a relatively recent development in an ongoing civilising process that can be traced back as far as the codes of behaviour set out in monastic rules. In discussing imitation, she notes that innovations did not always spread down the social hierarchy, offering the counter-example of slashed clothes, which originated with Swiss mercenaries, later spreading to camp followers, and eventually, aristocrats.

The book is divided into three parts, with the first consisting of this initial chapter and another on Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. In the second part, Paulicelli discusses the costume books of Cesare Vecellio and Giacomo Franco, devoting a chapter to each of these entrepreneurial Venetian authors and image-makers. Finally, she considers approaches to fashion in satires and anti-satires, with a chapter on the works of Archangela Tarabotti, forced to take the veil against her will, and another on those of a Benedictine monk, Agostino Lampugnani, both writers associated with the Academy of the Incogniti in Venice.

Paulicelli explores the way that identity politics, particularly those of gender and nation, play out in these texts, which were written in an era when the Italian peninsula was politically fragmented and often subject to foreign occupation. The texts repeatedly frame political subjugation as the consequence of an earlier sartorial submission. However, the city from which most of the texts issued, Venice, not only retained its sovereignty throughout this period, but was an important centre for both fashion and printing. Surprisingly, Paulicelli seems to ignore this, along with the enormous influence that Italian culture had in seventeenth-century France, as she laments that nation’s success in snatching the crown of fashion from Italy.

The historical emergence of fashion, in the sense that we now know it, constitutes the chief concern of the book. Paulicelli begins with ‘[t]he etymological trajectories of both la moda and fashion’ (p. 5), and their cognates in other European languages. She supplements this, in the second part of the book, with a fascinating discussion of framing, distortion, and mirroring, applied particularly to the images in the costume books. Finally, she identifies a key development in mid-seventeenth-century Italy, the advent of the modanti or foggiani, groups labelled using ‘neologisms … difficult to render into English: “fashionistas” or “fashion victims” do not completely render the nuances’ (p. 209). Paulicelli contends that writings can teach new ways of seeing the world, arguing for ‘the potential of words and language to exceed and transform the world, now seen through a new lens: fashion’ (p. 221).

The book as a whole is aimed at a specialist, academic audience. It studies fashion as a mentality, paying relatively little attention to specific styles, and assumes a general knowledge of the broad developments in the early modern Italian and European fashion and textile trades. Its opening chapter provides an introduction to fashion in early modern Italy, helpfully integrating the English and Italian historiography on this topic. The book also serves to draw attention, in the context of English-language discussions of European fashion, to the importance of the as-yet-untranslated texts...