During the late sixteenth century 'fashion' first took on the sense of restless change in contrast to the older sense of fashioning or making. As fashionings, clothes were perceived as material forms of personal and social identity which made the man or woman. In Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory Jones and Stallybrass argue that the making and transmission of fabrics and clothing were central to the making of Renaissance culture. Their examination explores the role of clothes as forms of memory transmitted from master to servant, from friend to friend, from lover to lover. This 2001 book offers a close reading of literary texts, paintings, textiles, theatrical documents, and ephemera to reveal how clothing and textiles were crucial to the making and unmaking of concepts of status, gender, sexuality, and religion in the Renaissance. The book is illustrated with a wide range of images from portraits to embroidery.
Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; Introduction: fashion, fetishism and memory in early modern England and Europe; Part I. Material Subjects: 1. The currency of clothing; 2. Composing the subject: making portraits; 3. Yellow starch: fabrications of the Jacobean court; Part II. Gendered Habits: 4. Arachne's web: Velazquez's Las Hilanderas; 5. The fate of spinning: Penelope and the Three Fates; 6. The needle and the pen: needlework and the appropriation of printed texts; Part III. Staging Clothes: 7. The circulation of clothes and the making of the English theater; 8. Transvestism and the 'body beneath': speculating on the boy actor; 9. (In)alienable possessions: Griselda, clothing and the exchange of women; 10. Of ghosts and garments: the materiality of memory on the Renaissance stage; Conclusion: the end(s) of livery; Notes; Index.
