Dressing Up shows why clothes made history and history can be about clothes. It imagines the Renaissance afresh by considering people's appearances: what they wore, how this made them move, what images they created, and how all this made people feel about themselves. Using an astonishing array of sources, Ulinka Rublack argues that an appreciation of people's relationship to appearances and images is essential to an understanding of what it meant to live at this time - and ever since. We read about the head accountant of a sixteenth-century merchant firm who commissioned 136 images of himself elaborately dressed across a lifetime; students arguing with their mother about which clothes they could have; or Nuremberg women wearing false braids dyed red or green. This brilliantly illustrated book draws on a range of insights across the disciplines and allows us to see an entire period in new ways. In integrating its findings into larger arguments about consumption, visual culture, the Reformation, German history, and the relationship of European and global history, it promises to re-shape the field.

Table of Contents

Prologue; 1. Introduction; 2. Looking at the Self; 3. The Look of Religion; 4. Nationhood; 5. Looking at Others; 6. Clothes and Consumers; 7. Bourgeios Taste and Emotional Styles; Epilogue: An Old Regime of Dress?; Notes; Select Bibiliography; Index

Reviews

this highly original, beautifully illustrated book, teeming with ideas and written with insight and historical imagination, shows hoe investigation of one facet of a culture can shed important new light on the spectrum of early modern cultural and social life. It will be of great interest far beyone the field of the history of dress. Andrew Morrall, English Historical Review Rublack wants to place German vernacular art on the Renaissance map, reconfigure notions of Protestant sobriety, and recalibrate the generally accepted view that Germans were uncouth, had little sense of a cohesive national identity and imitated 'superior' Italian humanism ... Dressing Up takes the argument about material culture and the language of clothes to compelling territory. Marina Warner, London Review of Books