Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy

From Sprezzatura to Satire

Eugenia Paulicelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134787104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Renaissance Art

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.

PART I

THE CULTURES OF FASHION

1

Moda and Moderno

Fashion is not linked to such and such a particular form of clothing but rather is exclusively a question of rhythm, a question of rate in time.

Roland Barthes¹

If fashion is a paradigm of the capitalist processes which inform modern sensibilities, then it is also a vibrant metaphor for modernity itself.

Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans²

La Moda and il Modo

Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy focuses on clothing and fashion as they are described and represented in literary texts and costume books in the Italy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My aim is to emphasize the centrality of Italian literature and culture for understanding modern theories of fashion and gauging its impact on the shaping of codes of civility and taste not only in Italy but beyond its borders in Europe and the West. Using literature to uncover what Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones have called the “animatedeness of clothes,” my hope is to underscore the political meanings that clothing produces and has always produced in public space. The meanings of Italian fashion in early modernity speak beyond the confines of Italian Studies to reach out towards a broader horizon that connects the local with the global, the intimate with the public.³

As a complex system of codes, as well as a growing manufacturing industry, fashion was textualized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the discourse on dress and style that is elaborated in the texts examined in this study. Italy became the central location in which the codification of dress was accomplished in a modern way. This does not exclude the fact that in other countries such as France and England, as we will see further on, we find sumptuary laws and satires that will focus on dress.

At the core of my investigation is the idea that these texts, starting with Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, act as maps through and with which it is possible, first, to pinpoint the establishment of fashion as a social institution of modernity; and second, to register the meanings clothing had at a personal and political level. My focus on what might be called fashion literature does not imply establishing a hierarchy of the verbal over the visual or to divorce the object from the discourse about it. Rather, my intent here is twofold: on the one hand, to see how through literature and the emotionality in the texts I examine objects come alive; and on the other, to emphasize the key role that literature and texts played in the two centuries I am concerned with (a role they still play in our own age of the digital revolution). Words, and language in general, share with fashion and clothing a world of materiality and practices that are embedded in a network of relationships. These relationships take on material form through the backbone of fashion: namely, image and text.

By the “animatedness of clothes,” I mean how memories and the emotional charge clothing produces are materialized through representation. Objects, then, have both a social life and an emotional one. Taking this into account, one can, as it were, see through the folds of dress and experience clothing at both the personal and the political level. Literally and symbolically, dress has close links with embodiment, connecting it both to the outer world and the most hidden and intimate spaces of the wearer. It is in literature, I argue, that we can observe the textual interplay through which these subtle mechanisms are played out.

The theorization of the dressed body and the recognition of the affective power of objects and clothing come to the fore in early modernity. Italy is the place where the first attempts are made to codify dress and habits. This awareness, combined with the fear and anxiety over dress as unreliable identifiers of self, are visible in the various kinds of writing about clothing and appearance we find in literary texts and in the sumptuary laws. This process is aided and abetted by the technological revolution that, insofar as it introduced the idea of the reproducibility of knowledge in the form of engravings, maps and portraits, had an enormous cultural impact. Reproducibility was also to become a reality for print textiles and the cheaper versions of sumptous cloth that also became available (Lemire, Riello: 2010).

Humanistic culture became a transnational movement that used clothing and fashion as vehicles to transmit the ideology, taste and style with which the European elite forged its various identities and ideals of beauty. Fashion, then, was a powerful medium of cultural translation that had aesthetic, political and economic resonances. Fashion is in a state of almost constant flux. But not only are the particular objects of fashion in flux, so are the words and the discourse that constitute fashion. The cultural and emotional value of a given garment or accessory is destined to change through time, as are its meanings and impact. In fact, what can be a “must have” today could well not be so tomorrow. In her important study Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing, Carole Collier Frick addresses the challenges of knowing the “truth” about the Florentine Renaissance, and refers to Barthes’ attempt to develop a framework for “understanding this ‘mentally indigestible’ subject of clothing.”⁴ She underlines, in fact, the crucial role of the “written” in the process of verbalizing fashion. I extend Collier Frick’s argument to suggest that in the imaginary space created by clothing, fashion’s affective regimes find form and structure in literature.

As a manifestation of a paneuropean linguistic event, the word “fashion” gained currency in various languages between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was linked to the social, economic, religious and technological transformations that were then taking place.⁵ Arjun Appadurai has noted that: “What we know of Europe allows us to watch a society of sumptuary law slowly changing into a society of fashion. In general, all social organized forms of consumption seem to revolve around some combination of the following three patterns: interdiction, sumptuary law, and fashion.”⁶ The “society of fashion” can only come about thanks to the creation of a language of fashion and the establishment of new codes and ideologies.

The two Italian terms moda and moderno share common etymological roots, both deriving from the Latin modus (style, measure, way of doing something).⁷ Moderno derives from the Latin modernus and refers to what is current, present and contemporaneous; moda is the femininized term of the masculine noun modo in the Italian language and means manner, norm, tone, rhythm, time. La moda shares the same etymological roots with the French term mode, and with other languages such as Spanish and Portuguese—moda in both; and German—Mode. In Italy, the word moda has links to change and newness and appears for the first time in the 1640s, precisely in the satirical text La Carrozza da nolo (Of the Rented Carriage), published in 1648 by the Milanese Abbot Agostino Lampugnani (to which the final chapter of this book will be dedicated).⁸ Before then, though, words with similar meanings had appeared such as “nuove foze” (new styles), “habiti” (habits), “la cosa degli habiti“(the matter of clothing), and “varieta’ di costumi” (variety of customs). The English word fashion has been adapted from the Old French term façon that seems to have appeared for the first time between the end of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Façon is in turn derived from the Latin factio, facere (hence the verb “fare” in Italian—to make). The term “factitous” refers to that which is artificial. In the English lexicon the word fashion seemed to have appeared earlier than in Italy and is already present in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing: “See’st thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is?”⁹ The feminine noun, la moda, which appeared during the seventeenth century, has been described by Davanzo Poli as a “modo dell’epoca presente” (way of the present epoch); but containing also the meaning of “way of dressing subject to changeable taste” (Davanzo Poli: 541). Fashion linked to change and newness also makes an appearance in Michel de Montaigne’s 1580 essays where he emphasizes that every new way of dressing firmly refuses the old and uses both the terms “façon” and the French neologism “mode,” which he connects to geographical identity.¹⁰

The etymological trajectories of both la moda and fashion trace a complex and an interesting history that is relevant for a study of fashion and for fashion theory in general. As these etymological roots suggest, there is a doubleness inherent in fashion/moda: on the one hand, fashion and clothing as a material and empirical basis of the phenomenon; on the other, the inception of the concept of fashion as we know it today, linked to change, newness, and both individual choices and the elaboration of a set of collective codes and rules. The doublesideness of fashion is what makes it difficult to find a clearcut definition of the term’s ontological and epistemolgical boundaries. Clothing can be different styles of dress, the empirical, personal and multisensorial realms that define the perception of the wearers, viewers and makers; fashion can be understood beyond clothing as part of wider cultural, economic and political systems including manners, behavior, way of life and taste. Or, as Bourdieu would have it, habitus; or in Gramscian terms, senso comune. But the tensional relationship that emerges with the convergence of la moda and il modo in early modern Italy creates the condition for the formation of fashion as a social institution of modernity. This was, in fact, a gradual process that materialized through language and intersected with the idea of newness. So, the question is not so much to decide when and whether historians agree on the “origin” of fashion in western Europe, as how and why the tensions inherent in the phenomenon of fashion were translated into the literature of early modernity, and Italian early modernity in particular. The body modifications made possible by the tight lacing of the farthingale, hair and wigs, as well as body supplements such as shoes, armour, veils or sleeves are all part of fashion as a phenomenon, but must be separated from the discourse created around them. Both of these inevitably related realms, however, are a part of what becomes fashion as a concept, philosophy and ideology.

There is, though, another term to be added to the discussion: “habits.”¹¹ As we will see, the writings of Cesare Vecellio and Giacomo Franco, both of whose major works contain the term habiti in their titles, offer a cartographic rendition of the clothed body in time and space. The term “habit” derives from Latin. It refers to a way of being and also to external appearance, a mode of clothing oneself. Valerie Traub has noted that “habit” “on maps functions as a static metonym for national character, statute hierarchies, and gender and erotic relations. As an emblem of fixed identity, ‘habit’ works in much the same way as ‘livery’ does in Stallybrass and Jones’s argument: marking and impressing subjects into signifiers of larger social relations” (Traub: 51). As we will see in Vecellio, it is the static dimension of habit that is challenged and transformed. This fixed paradigm will become porous in such a way that it is possible to recognize the features of what Appadurai calls “the society of fashion.” “Habit,” then, contains in itself the tensions and the process of both the ontological and epistemological dimensions of fashion that can be traced in the double feature of its etymology. In fact, apropos of the concepts of change and newness in habiti and clothing, Vecellio will further articulate the relationship between moda and moderno, adding the key concept of the spatiotemporal dimension that defines both the one and the other. As stated in a recent study by Eun Jung Kang:

Only in the spatiotemporal sequence does the concept of newness stand; which is to say, the perception of something new is not possible without reason’s apperception of the comparison between one thing before and another thing after in the temporal sequence. This unraveling is hinged upon Kant’s schematism, according to which human beings have two distinctive cognitive systems: by intuitions and by concepts. In the former, cognitions are achieved by our sensory impressions via our five senses, which are therefore a posteriori or dependent on impressions, while in the latter, we make a judgm...