Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (review)

Dressing Up delves into the cultural, economic, and personal meanings of individual appearances and appurtenances and is in a class of its own. There are few books on this topic that are so well-researched and clearly written because the sources themselves require a well-honed insight and expertise based on scholarship that extends in many directions, because these source materials are often disregarded as insignificant or ephemeral due to their highly personal nature, and furthermore because the artifacts themselves are prone to wear and distress. The text and images document cultural, religious, and economic approaches towards dress and clothing, bodily movement and attitude, adornment and perception; most pertain to Germany and Italy in the sixteenth century as well as some seventeenth century examples. The contents are outlined in a logical and lucid progression that tracks individual expression, religious concerns, national identity, international awareness, commercial matters, and fashion and style. Throughout the book, the author’s discussion is supported by contemporary letters, drawings, paintings, prints, and other documentary evidence as well as illustrations of actual items of clothing and accessories. The images are lavish and invaluable in explicating her thesis.

The chapter “Looking at the Self” is based on an Augsburg accountant for the Fugger company, Matthäus Schwarz, who documented himself in a series of 136 portraits throughout his lifetime, the first one being a double full-length nude illustration with two views, one from the front and one from the back. (These portraits quite literally illustrate the performer RuPaul’s dictum that “We are all born naked and the rest is drag.”) This chapter alone brings to light a rich resource that seems modern in its attitude toward self-regard and correlates to our own era’s personal self-observation by the now ubiquitous phone-camera. This chapter is of great value as a resource regarding the growth of self-admiration (and the acknowledgment of the validity of that viewpoint represented in a visual manner rather than in a literary format), and it expands on art historical commentary in the context of the early sixteenth century’s more well-known artworks such as Albrecht Dürer’s self-portraits.

Another chapter, “Looking at Others,” is concerned with visual and textual representations from a perspective outside the psychic and cultural frameworks of parochial attitudes. Dürer is topical in this chapter as well but we are given a greater awareness beyond the received credentials of high art through drawings and other examples that are less familiar and more attentive to a broad range of people that sixteenth century Europe was becoming acquainted with and more connected to through trade and discovery, within Europe as well as beyond Europe to other continents. The contextualization of dress from an ethno-graphical standpoint highlighted by the various newly explored global environments expands the discussion beyond the personal by showing the growth of these influences in attire both materially (fabrics, dyes) and structurally (style, design). It also delineates prejudices that were defined religiously or morally and the beginnings of the breakdown of these biases through expanding global contact.

Dressing Up is a storehouse of information about period clothes and the details of dressing. The chapters “Clothes and Consumers” and “Bourgeois Taste and Emotional Styles” detail aspects of articles of clothing including fit, fabric, and construction. Fashion trends, including do’s (cleanliness, light colors) and don’ts (stripes, codpieces), articulate the formation of taste for the growing bourgeoisie. Desire for social distinction as well as comfort is seen in the mid-sixteenth century correspondence of a mother and her son. Clothes-making and details of the makers are explored as well and the appreciation for quality workmanship and the maker that the correspondence portrays is salient.

Rublack’s argument brings an awareness of what it was like not just to live, but to truly inhabit Renaissance Europe in the deeper etymological sense of the word which conveys demeanor and appearance. Her epilogue discusses other scholarship in the field and argues against previous interpretations of this period...