This innovative and breathtakingly detailed book from the V&A presents dress patterns, construction details, embroidery, and making instructions (including a knitting pattern and lacemaking) for 15 garments and accessories from a 17th-century British woman's wardrobe. Step-by-step drawings of the construction sequence and scale patterns for each garment enable readers to accurately reconstruct them. There are scale diagrams for making linen and metal thread laces, silk braids, and embroidery designs. Multiple photographs, close-up construction details, and X-ray photography reveal the hidden elements of the clothes, the number of layers, and the stitches used inside. This first book in a new series takes the physical examination and study of historical clothing to a new depth and degree of detail, using the expertise of designers, tailors, and makers from London's Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.

Book Two in the V&A's groundbreaking new series presents 17 patterns for garments and accessories from a seventeenth-century woman's wardrobe. It includes patterns for a loose gown, a jacket, a pair of stays and a boned bodice, ivory and wooden busks, shoes, a hat, a stomacher, linen bands and supporters, a bag and a knife case. It also features a description of the stay-making process. Full step-by-step drawings of the construction sequence are given for each garment to enable the reader to accurately reconstruct them. There are scale patterns and diagrams for making linen and metal thread laces and embroidery designs. Multiple photographs of the objects, close-up construction details and X-ray photography reveal the hidden elements of the clothes, the precise number of layers and the stitches used inside.

"Quite simply the most fascinating record of a '[fashion] victim' one could hope for." The Spectator This captivating study reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, it chronicles how style-conscious accountant Matthaus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the 16th century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress - seemingly both ephemeral and trivial - is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and everyday culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of 16th-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.