Fashion and Self-Fashioning: Clothing Regulation in Renaissance Europe

Introduction In 1378 a ten-year-old girl named Nicolosa was fined fourteen lire for wearing a fine silk gown with tassels on the streets of Florence. In 1398 a prostitute of the same city was prosecuted for failing to wear high-heeled slippers and a bell on her head. All across Italy officials were sent to weddings, funerals and general social gatherings to ensure that the participants were wearing the kind of clothing the law specified they could. The common thread between all of these incidents is the attempt being made by the governing bodies of Renaissance Italy to regulate how people dressed, but the question is...why? Until the last twenty years or so, historians evaluated the role of clothing in history by focusing on the evolution of fashion along a time-line, cataloging the changes that occurred throughout the years but not necessarily analyzing the motivation or meaning of those changes. It is only in recent years that historians like John Styles and Margaret Spufford have advocated for a more analytical approach which aims to put clothing within specific ideological, social, economic and religious contexts. 1 In preparing for this research project I looked at the psychological, economical, sociological and political motivations of dressing well. Everyone has their own explanations; in the early 20th century the first American psychologist to analyze the fashion process, E.A. Ross, theorized that the greatest motivation for fashion is imitation, in which " the inferior asserts his equality with the superior by copying him... ". Another psychologist, J.C. Flugel, elaborated on this concept in his suggestion that the ultimate and essential cause of fashion lies in competition, especially of a social nature, in which members of the higher class are unwilling to relinquish signs of their superiority. 3 the competition between the mistress or prostitute and the wife for the affection of the man as they used fashionable dress to create a stronger attraction. 3 Economist and historian Herman Freudenberger has even cited boredom as a possible motivation for dressing well, noting that Czarina Ann of Russia required her courtiers to appear in a different outfit each time they were in her presence. 4 A common theme that is evident in all of these explanations is the tension that exists where fashion is concerned, specifically in the form of competition between different groups within society. This paper examines these tensions between competitive social groups in Renaissance Italy …