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.
