Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800 ed. by Evelyn Welch (review)

This beautifully produced book, the result of a three-year collaborative research project supported by a consortium of European funding organizations, HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area), and directed by Evelyn Welch, the volume editor, expands costume history in many new directions. This history has tended to be socially disproportionate because it has concentrated mostly on carefully preserved inventories of the clothing and portraits of royal elites. Several essays in this volume, however, help to correct the imbalance.

Paula Hohti, for example, analyzes artisans' dress in Italy, using inventories, account books, and paintings to argue against the assumption that elite fashion trickled down and was absorbed by people at the lower end of the social scale. Rather, she shows that they created their own particular mixtures and adaptations of luxury goods. In addition, other essays focus on middling and lower-ranking populations such as tailors, actresses, peddlers, printers, and amateur and professional knitters.

Hohti's challenge to the assumption that fashion moves directly from elites to lower social orders—the peasant wants exactly what the nobleman is wearing—is also taken up by other contributors, who contest earlier theories on dress. A target of the first two chapters, by John Styles and Giorgio Riello respectively, is the fashion theory first advanced by Roland Barthes and extended by Stephen Greenblatt, whose argument stressed that fashion allows people to create a personal identity, controlling the perceptions of other actors in the social system by displaying themselves in a particular language of dress. In short, what one chooses to wear speaks for who one is.

Several essays counter the argument that fashionable clothing enables and communicates individuality by calling for a broader focus on the economics and politics of fashion. Interested parties in early modern Europe manipulated dress through national and transnational systems of financial profit and social control. Styles investigates the rapid change in textiles, the basis for shifts in fashion from year to year. This new "annualization" (42) enabled entrepreneurs to create a demand for novelties; and then, by rapidly introducing new styles, to shift the previous ones, at less cost, to buyers further down the social scale or farther from the center of production. Riello describes the practices of Colbert, the financial minister of Louis XIV, who established a bureaucracy to design and control the circulation of new fabrics and sartorial styles in order to profit the French state. Regulations on the quality of textiles, fines for infringing them, taxes on the making and selling of fabric, sumptuary laws limiting what men and women of different ranks could wear, and spying on local and international competitors all centralized state power rather than encouraging consumers to choose from new, freely circulating goods.

This collection breaks more new ground by drawing lesser-known regions into the picture. The authors move beyond the Italian, French, and English styles most frequently discussed in histories of dress to incorporate work on northern countries previously understudied, or underrepresented: Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Greenland, as well as Eastern Europe, including Poland and Estonia. A Danish peasant family's pepper grinder, a Swedish king's walking stick covered with cinnamon bark from the East Indies, and an Inuit cap imitating the headgear worn by European sailors all broaden the map of international spaces in which newly fashionable foreign goods circulated.

The book's nine interspaced "objects in focus" (xvi)—specific items of dress or accessories in close-up photographs accompanied by detailed commentary—further support this expanded picture. The textual treatment of each object typifies the close attention paid to material culture generally. Johannes Pietsch presents a gown with a striped bodice and a looped‒up skirt as a "robe à l'anglaise retroussée" (85), a French reworking of an English style. In this case, the loose pleats that would have fallen down the back of an English gown were replaced by...