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.