As portraits, private diaries, and estate inventories make clear,
elite families of the Italian Renaissance were obsessed with
fashion, investing as much as forty percent of their fortunes on
clothing. In fact, the most elaborate outfits of the period could
cost more than a good-sized farm out in the Mugello. Yet despite
its prominence in both daily life and the economy, clothing has
been largely overlooked in the rich historiography of Renaissance
Italy. In Dressing Renaissance Florence, however, Carole Collier
Frick provides the first in-depth study of the Renaissance fashion
industry, focusing on Florence, a city founded on cloth, a city of
wool manufacturers, finishers, and merchants, of silk dyers,
brocade weavers, pearl dealers, and goldsmiths. From the artisans
who designed and assembled the outfits to the families who amassed
fabulous wardrobes, Frick's wide-ranging and innovative
interdisciplinary history explores the social and political
implications of clothing in Renaissance Italy's most
style-conscious city.
Frick begins with a detailed account of the industry itself --
its organization within the guild structure of the city, the
specialized work done by male and female workers of differing
social status, the materials used and their sources, and the
garments and accessories produced. She then shows how the driving
force behind the growth of the industry was the elite families of
Florence, who, in order to maintain their social standing and
family honor, made continuous purchases of clothing -- whether for
everyday use or special occasions -- for their families and
households. And she concludes with an analysis of the clothes
themselves: what pieces made up an outfit;how outfits differed for
men, women, and children; and what colors, fabrics, and design
elements were popular. Further, and perhaps more basically, she
asks how we know what we know about Renaissance fashion and looks
to both Florence's sumptuary laws, which defined what could be worn
on the streets, and the depiction of contemporary clothing in
Florentine art for the answer.
For Florence's elite, appearance and display were intimately
bound up with self-identity. Dressing Renaissance Florence enables
us to better understand the social and cultural milieu of
Renaissance Italy.
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