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

A RECENT REVIEW ESSAY FOR RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY by Timothy McCall, "Materials for Renaissance Fashion" (vol. 70, 2017, pp. 1449–64), includes more than four pages of references, testament to a rapidly expanding bibliography on early modern fashion. Readers of the Bulletin of the Comediantes will find in McCall's essay some key titles related to the Spanish world, not least José Luis Colomer and Amalia Descalzo's two-volume collection Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe(Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2014; published simultaneously in Spanish as Vestir a la española en las cortes europeas). The volume under review here contains only one contribution by a Hispanist, Amanda Wunder's "Innovation and Tradition at the Court of Philip IV of Spain (1621–1665): The Invention of the Golilla and the Guardainfante." Nonetheless, the innovative ways of approaching the subject and the models of archival research on display in the essays will prove valuable to anyone interested in early modern European fashion and material culture more generally.

The book is the product of a three-year research collaboration led by the editor, Evelyn Welch, entitled "Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800," which brought together historians, art historians, museum curators, and conservators; their collective conversations come across in the way many of the articles speak to each other, whether directly or implicitly. The volume comprises an introduction plus twelve amply illustrated essays, grouped within two parts: "Innovation" and "Reputation and Dissemination." Nine shorter studies of individual artefacts, "Objects in Focus," complement the main essays, creating a virtual museum of early modern European fashion history. Welch's introduction lays out the problematics of fashion addressed in the book and its geographical parameters, considering Sweden and Denmark in addition to France (which not surprisingly receives the most attention), Italy, Spain, and England. As Welch explains, dynastic alliances and bellicose conflicts as well as emerging national interests contributed to the spread of fashion and the development of new technologies for textile design, color, and composition. The movement of people and information, especially through print, not only disseminated materials and modes of dress but also the discursive tropes associated with them. Attentive to the circulation of commonplaces about fashion, Welch introduces a cautionary note for scholars: a sermon by a late seventeenth-century Swedish priest claiming that the fontage headdress produced monstrous stillbirths may have more to say about the travel of sensationalist metaphors (and their use for self-interested assertions of rectitude) than that of actual fashions.

What, more precisely, did fashion mean in the early modern period? While the etymological roots of the English word fashion in the Latin facere point to its association with manufacture, Welch reminds us that the term also, and perhaps above all, implied novelty, as did the French la mode and its equivalents in the other Romance languages. Fashion novelty encompassed changes in the shape of clothing (through supports such as farthingales and hoops), the colors and patterns of fabrics (e.g., lighter and brighter cottons and silks), and accessories and alterations to the skin and hair (such as the application of beauty patches discussed in "Object in Focus II"). Fashion meant being in the know and "up to date" (29). According to Giorgio Riello, the newness in fashion was not only a function of time, but also of space, of "a process of adoption of goods coming from 'somewhere else'" (67). Both these aspects of fashion's novelty—rapid change and foreign influence—alarmed moralists who saw it as a threat to social order and traditional identities of class and nation. However, as Welch and the other contributors make amply clear, fashion innovation also created new opportunities: commercial and economic, scientific and technological, social and familial. Moreover, as fashion crossed borders, it inevitably met with local adaptations.

If preachers and satirists decried the constantly changing nature of fashion, in his article "Fashion and Innovation...