Fashion in Early Modern Europe

Catalog description

This seminar charts the rise of fashion consumption and its links to artistic and material culture in early modern Europe. This seminar brings dress and bodily adornment into conversation with notions of technological advancement, global encounters and trade, emergent colonialism, and cultural cross-fertilization. Students will examine extant garments and textiles in relation to painting, drawing, sculpture, print, and literary imaginings of dress to assess the impact of different artistic media on the rendition of dress. Students will consider the historiographical question of artistic mediation and its impact on contemporary understandings of historical clothing. Operating across the intersections of race, gender, class, and religious identities in early modern Europe, this seminar investigates how clothing and artistic production functioned in tandem to materialize markers of diverse identifications.