Contents:
PART I: THE CULTURES OF FASHION: Moda and moderno; The Book of the
Courtier and the discourse on fashion: Sprezzatura, gender, ‘national
identity’. PART II: THE FABRIC OF CITIES: NATIONS, EMPIRE IN COSTUME BOOKS
BY CESARE VECELLIO AND GIACOMO FRANCO: Mapping the world: dress in
Cesare Vecellio’s costume books (1590, 1598); Power, history and
dress in Giacomo Franco’s costume plates (1610–1614). PART III:
BEYOND SPREZZATURA: FASHION AS EXCESS: Sister Arcangela Tarabotti:
hair, wigs and other vices; La moda and its technologies: Agostino
Lampugnani’s La Carozza da nolo, ovvero del vestire e usanze alla
moda (The rented carriage or of clothing and fashionable habits,
1648–1650). Bibliography; Index.
Includes 8 color and 48 b&w illustrations
June 2014 278 pages
Hardback 978-1-4724-1170-9 $109.95 $87.96*
ebook PDF 978-1-4724-3603-0
ebook ePUB 978-1-4724-3604-7
www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472411709
“Eugenia Paulicelli presents a convincing argument for the crucial
signifi cance of clothing and fashion in the mentalities of early modern
Europe; her book is richly informed by the research of economic,
social, and feminist historians, historians of dress, and by her own
alertness to the links between past and present in the ways that dress
is presented today. Her narrative incorporates close readings of a wide
and interesting array of early modern writings, and offers a wealth of
intriguing examples—the fashionable rosary, the mustachioed gallant,
the revolver-toting Frenchwoman—as well as possibilities for further
work in the fi eld.”
—Ann Rosalind Jones, Smith College
“In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fashion came to
characterize a ‘modern’ new world, one in which changes in shapes,
materials, colors and manners had to be recognized and understood.
Eugenia Paulicelli’s book is a spectacular investigation of the discourse
of fashion in early modern Italy, from Baldassarre Castiglione toz Cesare
Vecellio, to Arcangela Tarabotti. In this book you will fi nd yourself
immersed in an early modern society obsessed with civility, love, vice,
dissimulation and, of course, fashion.”
—Giorgio Riello, University of Warwick
The fi rst comprehensive study on the role of Italian fashion and Italian
literature, this book 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,” the author explores the political
meanings that clothing produces in public space.
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