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Why were beards suddenly stylish in Europe after 1500? Why did the ruff come in and out of use in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries? Why did men from Spain to Sweden suddenly decide to adopt wigs around 1660 only to drop the less than fifty years later? How did manufacturers and merchants encourage and then respond to changing demands for colourful printed patterns and new cuts and styles of tailoring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? As importantly, why were some novelties and innovations quickly adopted while others were unsuccessful? This book, the result of a three-year Humanities in the European Research Area project 'Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and In...
Considering silk as a major force of cross-cultural interaction, this book examines the integration of silk production and consumption into various cultures in the pre-modern world.
Uncovers sources from the parish pauper to the gentlewoman to consider relationships with clothing across the social hierarchy in the long eighteenth century.Descriptions of women's clothing increasingly circulated across textual genres and beyond in eighteenth-century England. This book explores the significance of these descriptions across a range of sources including wills, newspapers, accounts, court records, and the records of the old poor law.Attention has rested on women literate and wealthy enough to leave behind textual or material traces, but this book ranges from the parish pauper to the gentlewoman to consider descriptive languages, rhetorical strategies, and relationships with c...
Tracing the development of Venetian fashion and their appearance in contemporary works of art, this book discusses the unique attitude of the Venetian Republic to the dress of its patricians, its citizens and its women, as well as to the dress of foreigners. It relies extensively on the views of the Senate on dress, and considers Venice's contempt for the current fashions in the rest of Italy. There is also a discussion of the position of the tailors of Venice and their methods of work as well as an invaluable appendix detailing the textiles then in use at the time.This book is essential to students and teachers of the history of art, the history of dress and the theatre as well as to those interested in Venetian social life during the period covered, and in Italian renaissance studies.
This inventive and lucid book sheds new light on topics as diverse as crime, authority, and retailing in eighteenth-century Britain, and makes a major contribution to broader debates around consumerism, popular culture, and material life. The material lives of ordinary English men and women were transformed in the years following the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Tea and sugar, the fruits of British mercantile and colonial expansion, altered their diets. Pendulum clocks and Staffordshire pottery, the products of British manufacturing ingenuity, enriched their homes. But it was in their clothing that ordinary people enjoyed the greatest change in their material lives. This book retrieves...
Sample Text
Volume I surveys the long history of fashion from the ancient world to c. 1800. The volume seeks to answer fundamental questions on the origins of fashion, challenging Eurocentric explanations that the emergence of fashion was a European phenomenon and shows instead that fashion found early expressions across the globe well before the age of European colonialism and imperialism. It sheds light on how fashion was experienced in a multitude of ways depending on class, gender, and race, and despite geographical distance, fashion connected populations across the globe. Fashions flowered and were reseeded, through entanglements of empire, forced and voluntary migration, evolving racial systems, burgeoning sea travel and transcontinental systems.
During the medieval period, people invested heavily in looking good. The finest fashions demanded careful chemistry and compounds imported from great distances and at considerable risk to merchants; the Church became a major consumer of both the richest and humblest varieties of cloth, shoes, and adornment; and vernacular poets began to embroider their stories with hundreds of verses describing a plethora of dress styles, fabrics, and shopping experiences. Drawing on a wealth of pictorial, textual and object sources, the volume examines how dress cultures developed – often to a degree of dazzling sophistication – between the years 800 to 1450. Beautifully illustrated with 100 images, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, visual representations, and literary representations.
The popular fashion for Indian calicos in the seventeenth century and the genesis of the British cotton industry in the eighteenth century reflected new consumer forces at work within Britain. The East India trade encouraged new patterns of domestic demand in Britain, patterns which were not eradicated even with the prohibition of most Indian fabrics in 1721. Parliamentarians and clergy decried the spread of popular fashions that diminished visible social distinctions and undercut traditional manufactures.