Dress, or “habit,” is therefore the opposite of fashion

Another form of identification system, a sort of Renaissance ethnography,

emerged in the numerous costume books printed in Europe

from the early sixteenth through to the seventeenth century. Movable type

placed clothing in a “world in motion” whereby costume book writers like

the Venetian Cesare Vecellio, travel authors, mapmakers, and tailors’ books

recognized the “other” or the “exotic” by deciphering the language of clothing

as the making of the human subject in relation to his or her geographical

place and time.

Dress, or “habit,” is therefore the opposite of fashion. trumpet wedding gowns .Dress works

to affirm the persistence of social patterns and to consolidate cultural ways of

life, despite the ways clothing can be transferred from subject to subject. In

addition, costume books encouraged viewers to focus on faraway places and

regional dress for its novelty and strangeness, yet this appeal to ethnographic

curiosity was not merely linked to a desire to change one’s personal style

by adopting international fashion. From the mid-sixteenth through to the

seventeenth century, costume books articulated a language of national and

regional identity formation, even though fixed notions of place were being

called into question. Social distinctions, regionalized textiles, and accessories

no longer could define a single national identity. A person’s garment was

a complex patchwork of dress derived from multiple nations. Yet the rapid

print circulation of images of dress often served to reinforce rather than to

break open strict codes. flower petal dress , And itinerant artists literally carried with them new

artistic conventions that circulated in manuscript form or as albums of drawings

available to the public.

472 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 39.3 / 2009

The unprecedented speed whereby information was disseminated

and ideas and practices spread slowly began to erode sharp social and

national distinctions between countries and social groups. Nonetheless,

individuals were not always free to dress as they pleased. Sumptuary laws

controlled the use of fabrics, their colors, their weaves and cuts, not only

in order to enforce equality among citizens, affirm gender prescriptions,

and curtail excessive spending, but also to protect precarious economies. As

Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli claims in her essay, “Reconciling the Privilege

of a Few with the Common Good: Sumptuary Laws in Medieval and Early

Modern Europe,” this legislation was an instrument used to maintain and

reinforce social barriers and, therefore, provides an important source for

understanding the complex hierarchical structures of past societies.

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