Download or read book Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence written by Elizabeth Currie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dress became a testing ground for masculine ideals in Renaissance Italy. With the establishment of the ducal regime in Florence in 1530, there was increasing debate about how to be a nobleman. Was fashionable clothing a sign of magnificence or a source of mockery? Was the graceful courtier virile or effeminate? How could a man dress for court without bankrupting himself? This book explores the whole story of clothing, from the tailor's workshop to spectacular court festivities, to show how the male nobility in one of Italy's main textile production centers used their appearances to project social, sexual, and professional identities. Sixteenth-century male fashion is often associated with swagger and ostentation but this book shows that Florentine clothing reflected manhood at a much deeper level, communicating a very Italian spectrum of male virtues and vices, from honor, courage, and restraint to luxury and excess. Situating dress at the heart of identity formation, Currie traces these codes through an array of sources, including unpublished archival records, surviving garments, portraiture, poetry, and personal correspondence between the Medici and their courtiers. Addressing important themes such as gender, politics, and consumption, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence sheds fresh light on the sartorial culture of the Florentine court and Italy as a whole.

Download or read book Dressing Renaissance Florence written by Carole Collier Frick and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2005-08-26 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence written by Elizabeth Currie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dress became a testing ground for masculine ideals in Renaissance Italy. With the establishment of the ducal regime in Florence in 1530, there was increasing debate about how to be a nobleman. Was fashionable clothing a sign of magnificence or a source of mockery? Was the graceful courtier virile or effeminate? How could a man dress for court without bankrupting himself? This book explores the whole story of clothing, from the tailor's workshop to spectacular court festivities, to show how the male nobility in one of Italy's main textile production centers used their appearances to project social, sexual, and professional identities. Sixteenth-century male fashion is often associated with swagger and ostentation but this book shows that Florentine clothing reflected manhood at a much deeper level, communicating a very Italian spectrum of male virtues and vices, from honor, courage, and restraint to luxury and excess. Situating dress at the heart of identity formation, Currie traces these codes through an array of sources, including unpublished archival records, surviving garments, portraiture, poetry, and personal correspondence between the Medici and their courtiers. Addressing important themes such as gender, politics, and consumption, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence sheds fresh light on the sartorial culture of the Florentine court and Italy as a whole.

Download or read book The First Book of Fashion written by Ulinka Rublack and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This captivating book reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, they chronicle how style-conscious accountant Matthäus 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 sixteenth 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 every day culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of sixteenth-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.

Download or read book Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy written by Eugenia Paulicelli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive study on the role of Italian fashion and Italian literature, this book analyzes clothing and fashion as described and represented in literary texts and costume books in the Italy of the 16th and 17th centuries. Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy emphasizes the centrality of Italian literature and culture for understanding modern theories of fashion and gauging its impact in the shaping of codes of civility and taste in Europe and the West. Using literature to uncover what has been called the ’animatedness of clothing,’ author Eugenia Paulicelli explores the political meanings that clothing produces in public space. At the core of the book is the idea that the texts examined here act as maps that, first, pinpoint the establishment of fashion as a social institution of modernity; and, second, gauge the meaning of clothing at a personal and a political level. As well as Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and Cesare Vecellio’s The Clothing of the Renaissance World, the author looks at works by Italian writers whose books are not yet available in English translation, such as those by Giacomo Franco, Arcangela Tarabotti, and Agostino Lampugnani. Paying particular attention to literature and the relevance of clothing in the shaping of codes of civility and style, this volume complements the existing and important works on Italian fashion and material culture in the Renaissance. It makes the case for the centrality of Italian literature and the interconnectedness of texts from a variety of genres for an understanding of the history of Italian style, and serves to contextualize the debate on dress in other European literatures.

Download or read book Forbidden Friendships written by Michael Rocke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-03-05 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a superb work of scholarship, impossible to overpraise.... It marks a milestone in the 20-year rise of gay and lesbian studies."--Martin Duberman, The Advocate The men of Renaissance Florence were so renowned for sodomy that "Florenzer" in German meant "sodomite." In the late fifteenth century, as many as one in two Florentine men had come to the attention of the authorities for sodomy by the time they were thirty. In 1432 The Office of the Night was created specifically to police sodomy in Florence. Indeed, nearly all Florentine males probably had some kind of same-sex experience as a part of their "normal" sexual life. Seventy years of denunciations, interrogations, and sentencings left an extraordinarily detailed record, which author Michael Rocke has used in his vivid depiction of this vibrant sexual culture in a world where these same-sex acts were not the deviant transgressions of a small minority, but an integral part of a normal masculine identity. Rocke roots this sexual activity in the broader context of Renaissance Florence, with its social networks of families, juvenile gangs, neighbors, patronage, workshops, and confraternities, and its busy political life from the early years of the Republic through the period of Lorenzo de' Medici, Savonarola, and the beginning of Medici princely rule. His richly detailed book paints a fascinating picture of Renaissance Florence and calls into question our modern conceptions of gender and sexual identity.

Download or read book Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance written by Carolyn Springer and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Italian Wars of 1494 to 1559, with innovations in military technology and tactics, armour began to disappear from the battlefield. Yet as field armour was retired, parade and ceremonial armour grew increasingly flamboyant. Displaced from its utilitarian function of defense but retained for symbolic uses, armour evolved in a new direction as a medium of artistic expression. Luxury armour became a chief accessory in the performance of elite male identity, coded with messages regarding the owner's social status, genealogy, and political alliances. Carolyn Springer decodes Renaissance armour as three-dimensional portraits through the case studies of three patrons of luxury armourers, Guidobaldo II della Rovere (1514-75), Charles V Habsburg (1500-58 and Holy Roman Emperor from 1519-56), and Cosimo I de'Medici (1519-74). A fascinating exposition of male self-representation, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance explores the significance of armour in early modern Italy as both cultural artefact and symbolic form.

Download or read book Dressing Renaissance Florence written by Carole Collier Frick and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Re membering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence written by Allison Levy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pliny to Petrarch to Pope-Hennessy and beyond, many have understood the obvious connection between portraiture and commemorative practice. This book expands and nuances our understanding of Renaissance portraiture; the author shows it to be complexly generated within a discourse of male anxiety and pre-mortuary mourning. She argues that portraiture could defer memory loss or, at the very least, pictorially console the subject against his own potentially unmourned death. This book recognizes a socio-cultural anxiety - the fear not merely of death but also of being forgotten - and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. To explore this phenomenon, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally art historical project merges early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body. The author examines an extensive selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, in and against both historical writings and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, and critical theories of race and disability. Re-membering Masculinity generates new ideas about both male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even more questions about the experiences and representations of widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of masculinity - from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man' to postmodern manhood.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Renaissance written by Elizabeth Currie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spurred by an increasingly international and competitive market, the Renaissance saw the development of many new fabrics and the use of highly prized ingredients imported from the New World. In response to a thirst for the new, fashion's pace of change accelerated, the production of garments provided employment for an increasingly significant proportion of the working population, and entrepreneurial artisans began to transform even the most functional garments into fashionable ones. Anxieties concerning vanity and the power of clothing to mask identities heightened fears of fashion's corrupting influence, and heralded the great age of sumptuary legislation intended to police status and gender through dress. Drawing on sources from surviving garments to artworks to moralising pamphlets, this richly illustrated volume presents essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, and visual and literary representations to illustrate the diversity and cultural significance of dress and fashion in the period.

Download or read book A Companion to Textile Culture written by Jennifer Harris and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-16 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.

Download or read book Dressing Up written by Ulinka Rublack and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-11-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses an astonishing array of sources to imagine the Renaissance afresh by considering people´s appearances: what they wore, how this made them move, what images they created, and how all this made people feel about themselves.

Download or read book The Suit written by Christopher Breward and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully tailored history of this fashion staple—at once a garment of tradition, power, and subversion. The Suit unpicks the story of this most familiar garment, from its emergence in western Europe at the end of the seventeenth century to today. Suit-wearing figures such as the Savile Row gentleman and the Wall Street businessman have long embodied ideas of tradition, masculinity, power, and respectability, but the suit has also been used to disrupt concepts of gender and conformity. Adopted and subverted by women, artists, musicians, and social revolutionaries through the decades—from dandies and Sapeurs to the Zoot Suit and Le Smoking—the suit is also a device for challenging the status quo. For all those interested in the history of menswear, this beautifully illustrated book offers new perspectives on this most mundane, and poetic, product of modern culture.

Download or read book The Lure of Perfection written by Judith Bennahum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-08 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE LURE OF PERFECTION: FASHION AND BALLET, 1780-1830 offers a unique look at how ballet influenced contemporary fashion and women's body image, and how street fashions in turn were reflected by the costumes worn by ballet dancers. Through years of research, the author has traced the interplay between fashion, social trends, and the development of dance. During the 18th century, women literally took up twice as much space as men; their billowing dresses ballooned out from their figures, sometimes a full 55 inches, to display costly jewelry and fine brocade work; similar costumes appeared on stage. But clothing also limited her movement; it literally disabled them, making the dances themselves little more than tableaux. Movement was further inhibited by high shoes and tight corsets; thus the image of the rigidly straight, long-lined dancer is as much a product of clothing as aesthetics. However, with changing times came new trends. An increased interest in natural movement and the common folk led to less-restrictive clothing. As viewers demanded more virtuosic dancers, women literally danced their way to freedom. THE LURE OF PERFECTION will interest students of dance and cultural history, and women's studies. It is a fascinating, well-researched look at the interplay of fashion, dance, and culture-still very much a part of our world today.

Download or read book The Right to Dress written by Giorgio Riello and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first global history of dress regulation and its place in broader debates around how human life and societies should be visualised and materialised. Sumptuary laws were a tool on the part of states to regulate not only manufacturing systems and moral economies via the medium of expenditure and consumption of clothing but also banquets, festivities and funerals. Leading scholars on Asian, Latin American, Ottoman and European history shed new light on how and why items of dress became key aspirational goods across society, how they were lobbied for and marketed, and whether or not sumptuary laws were implemented by cities, states and empires to restrict or channel trade and consumption. Their findings reveal the significance of sumptuary laws in medieval and early modern societies as a site of contestation between individuals and states and how dress as an expression of identity developed as a modern 'human right'.

Download or read book Brilliant Bodies written by Timothy McCall and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italian court culture of the fifteenth century was a golden age, gleaming with dazzling princes, splendid surfaces, and luminous images that separated the lords from the (literally) lackluster masses. In Brilliant Bodies, Timothy McCall describes and interprets the Renaissance glitterati—gorgeously dressed and adorned men—to reveal how charismatic bodies, in the palazzo and the piazza, seduced audiences and materialized power. Fifteenth-century Italian courts put men on display. Here, men were peacocks, attracting attention with scintillating brocades, shining armor, sparkling jewels, and glistening swords, spurs, and sequins. McCall’s investigation of these spectacular masculinities challenges widely held assumptions about appropriate male display and adornment. Interpreting surviving objects, visual representations in a wide range of media, and a diverse array of primary textual sources, McCall argues that Renaissance masculine dress was a political phenomenon that fashioned power and patriarchal authority. Brilliant Bodies describes and recontextualizes the technical construction and cultural meanings of attire, casts a critical eye toward the complex and entangled relations between bodies and clothing, and explores the negotiations among makers, wearers, and materials. This groundbreaking study of masculinity makes an important intervention in the history of male ornamentation and fashion by examining a period when the public display of splendid men not only supported but also constituted authority. It will appeal to specialists in art history and fashion history as well as scholars working at the intersections of gender and politics in quattrocento Italy.

Download or read book The World of Renaissance Italy 2 volumes written by Joseph P. Byrne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-06-22 with total page 843 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Students of the Italian Renaissance who wish to go beyond the standard names and subjects will find in this text abundant information on the lives, customs, beliefs, and practices of those who lived during this exciting time period. The World of Renaissance Italy: A Daily Life Encyclopedia engages all of the Italian peninsula from the Black Death (1347–1352) to 1600. Unlike other encyclopedic works about the Renaissance era, this book deals exclusively with Italy, revealing the ways common Italian people lived and experienced the events and technological developments that marked the Renaissance era. The coverage specifically spotlights marginal or traditionally marginalized groups, including women, homosexuals, Jews, the elderly, and foreign communities in Italian cities. The entries in this two-volume set are organized into 10 sections of 25 alphabetically listed entries each. Among the broad sections are art, fashion, family and gender, food and drink, housing and community, politics, recreation and social customs, and war. The "See Also" sources for each article are listed by section for easy reference, a feature that students and researchers will greatly appreciate. The extensive collection of contemporary documents include selections from a diary, letters, a travel journal, a merchant's inventory, Inquisition testimony, a metallurgical handbook, and text by an artist that describes what the author feels constitutes great work. Each of the primary source documents accompanies a specific article and provides an added dimension and degree of insight to the material.