The First Book of Fashion makes headlines

In addition to being featured in the Guardian, The First Book of Fashion has been making headlines. 

Image from the Independent on Sunday courtesy of Rebecca Unsworth

Click below to view some of the press:

The Independent:

German accountant Matthäus Schwarz prefigured the selfie blogger craze by 500 years with his fashion diary

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/features/german-accountant-matth-us-schwarz-prefigured-the-selfie-blogger-craze-by-500-years-with-his-fashion-a6677841.html

The Atlantic:

The First Book of Selfies
A 16th-century German accountant compiled a book of personal fashion that rivals today’s Instagrammers in detail and dedication.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/11/first-book-fashion-selfie-king/413047/

Sophie Pitman

The First Book of Fashion – in pictures

Ulinka Rublack has explained her fascination with Matthäus Schwarz to the Guardian Newspaper. 

“I was astonished to find a vibrant world of sartorial experiment far removed from our dark impressions of the Renaissance”

The photo feature includes a stunning array of images from the book, of Jenny Tiramani’s reconstruction, and ‘A Young Man’s Progress’ by Maisie Broadhead and Isabella Newell:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2015/nov/12/renaissance-selfies-the-first-book-of-fashion-in-pictures

A Young Man’s Progress

A Young Man’s Progress is a collaboration of art work by London photographer Maisie Broadhead and fashion designer Isabella Newell, with Cambridge cultural historian Ulinka Rublack. 

This work responds to images of a Renaissance man’s fashion styles recorded by Matthäus Schwarz (1497-1574), head accountant of a merchant firm in Augsburg, who put together 137 images of himself in the First Book of Fashion. 

Chris Breward talks with Ulinka Rublack

Professor Christopher Breward, Vice Principal for the Creative Industries and Performing Arts and Professor of Cultural History at the University of Edinburgh, is a leading cultural historian. His work has explored men as consumers of dress and ideas of fashion, modernity and memory. Here he talks with Professor Ulinka Rublack about Renaissance male fashion, contemporary re-imaginings and our work with Schwarz’s Book of Fashion.

Ulinka Rublack: To what extent, would you say, has male fashion design drawn on inspiration from the Renaissance?

Chris Breward: From concepts of magnificence and sprezzatura, to the courtly uses of black, Renaissance ideals have become a perennial feature of contemporary menswear design. It is difficult to conceive of late twentieth-century Italian fashion culture without noting the debt that designers have owed to their princely forbears. Gianni Versace in particular developed an aesthetic of excess and extreme glamour that was directly related fifteenth and sixteenth century precedents. The language, tone and presentational style of many recent menswear fashion publications also find their roots in earlier tracts on deportment and noble behaviour – it is surprising how prescriptive and conservative fashion journalism is in its approach to male readers. And in street fashion, swagger and a subversive engagement with luxury are practices originally finessed in the Renaissance city.

Which aspects, do you think, have been neglected - in colours, cuts or accessories?

It’s surprising just how many Renaissance styles have been re-incorporated into the contemporary young man’s wardrobe, from ‘meggings’ to furs, and heavy jewellery to facial hair. Though the international trade in feathers for women’s hats peaked in the early twentieth century, there have perhaps been fewer recent reprises of plumes for men. Swords, daggers and other accessories have for obvious reasons fallen out of public view, though their status as objects of desire and accoutrements to power remains undiminished amongst various subcultures and groups of young men.

Which fashion designers in your view most encourage men to express themselves emotionally and in experimental ways, rather than to use fashion merely as a tool to power dress for status assertion?

The Antwerp designers, Dries Van Noten, Martin Margiela and others, have offered much more subtle opportunities for sartorial expression amongst their male followers. Christopher Nemeth, an under-appreciated London-based designer of the 1980s, also produced experimental approaches to dressing that were entirely radical, and not a little medieval in their re-fashioning of rags and surprising juxtaposition of textiles. And while Westwood’s collections for women have often asserted status, her menswear has tended to subvert assigned gender symbolism whilst also drawing heavily on historical (sometimes Renaissance) models. Of more recent generations, Hedi Slimane, the young Italian Fabio Quaranta and others push a boyish interpretation of masculinity that either prioritises an ephebic asexuality or a geeky refusal of power ideals that is frankly refreshing.

Schwarz aged 29 ½. The Renaissance male leg was highlighted and enhanced with shape, colour and texture.

Matthäus Schwarz, Book of Clothes, 79 from the 1704 copy in The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek, Hannover, available online

What do you take from Maisie Broadhead’s and Bella Newell’s work on Schwarz, and what do you like best about this re-fashioning of the Renaissance?

These are fascinating images that aside from highlighting stylistic synergies between past and present (in padding, cut and colour), also demonstrate haunting continuities in terms of the event, body posture and social context. Because fashion is so bound up with concepts of temporality, these slippages between the renaissance and contemporary ‘moment’ that Broadhead and Newell conjure up so evocatively, cause us to pause and wonder about the linear nature of costume history itself. Though Matthaus Schwartz inhabited a very different world, we get some sense of shared impulses, desires and sartorial emotions that also anchor him in the twenty-first century.

Did male insecurity and the German Reformation invent the codpiece?

With Wolf Hall on our television screens, media attention has turned our gaze towards the codpiece. Here Jane Hugget suggests that the codpiece was a powerful status symbol for men during the turbulent period of reformation. 

Ulinka Rublack

1503

In his 2010 project entitled 1503, artist Christian Tagliavini was inspired to bring advanced photo manipulation techniques to recreate Bronzino’s paintings. Tagliavini was not only interested in the reconstruction of Bronzino’s portraits themselves, but spent 13 months fashioning everything his models needed to assume the poses of Florentine nobles.

“It’s important to me to make the props and costumes I use in my photos myself,” Tagliavini explains. “I spend a lot of time researching and creating all the elements, such as the clothes, the wigs, and the hats.”

For more, see Tagliavini’s portfolio here 

Sophie Pitman

Nude men, front and back

Some years ago, conservators unveiled perfectly restored portraits of Cosimo de Medici´s dwarf Morgante, painted by Bronzino in 1552. Bronzino depicted Morgante completely nude from the front and from behind. Later generations added vine-leaves, but these have now gone.

Agnolo Bronzino - Ritratto del Nano Morgante (front after restoration), 1552, Uffizi, Firenze. Image from Wikipedia Commons 

Agnolo Bronzino - Ritratto del Nano Morgante (back - before restoration), 1552, Uffizi, Firenze. Image from Wikipedia Commons 

This links them to one of the most startling features of the First Book of Fashion. In 1526, aged 29, Matthäus Schwarz asked his artist Narziss Renner to depict him naked, back and front, only to comment ‘The face is well captured’ and ‘I had grown fat and large’. Schwarz and Renner produced an illuminated manuscript on parchment, but were keenly aware of contemporary print. Cheap broadsheets sometimes depicted differently formed humans, and often from the front and back.

Image of Matthäus Schwarz, The First Book of Fashion, 79-80. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum reposted from here.

This provided a novel way to observe and record bodies in a non-idealised manner. Schwarz startlingly had himself depicted with no hint of muscular strength or any perfection.  Depictions of bodies entering purgatory showed agonised bodies around the age of 29, but not with such systematic, emotionally muted takes of a front and back view against a neutral background.

Morgante was thought of as clever and wonderfully entertaining, certainly not as a despicable freak. The paintings lead us back into the world of the Renaissance, which closely linked the question of who we are to how we look. Classical writers had already proposed that beauty shows health and integrity, so that deformity could easily appear as sign of evil. Christians often feared people who grew little or in unusual shapes as portents. Morgante´s century saw the rise of human anatomy, and it thrived on the new medium of print. Woodcuts medialised a fascination with bodies in their natural state as divine wonders.

Such interests sparked the first writings on cosmetic surgery as a legitimate field of medicine. Case histories expressed compassion for those who had lost noses, ears, or lips, were marked by illness, or seemed ‘ugly’ in other ways. For those who saw happiness linked to health and beauty, medicine had to help to re-establish natural order.

The term kosmein itself meant order. Cosmetic harmony lay in the right proportions of a gracious body, which was neither too large nor too small, neither too fat nor too thin, was used to exercise without becoming grossly muscular, and had all its limbs.

No Paduan medic could make Morgante grow to follow this ideal of proportionate beauty. He would have moved about at Cosimo´s court with his short legs and protruding belly, looking up to everyone. Tailors made him special clothes. Then Morgante had to take them off for Bronzino; now fully an object of curiosity, nothing spared. Stripped down, this Renaissance and its love of images become uncomfortable.

Yet discomfort and puzzlement defines good engagement with history and art. Scholars find it extremely difficult to convincingly explain why Schwarz created these first images of a secular, nude male body after Albrecht Dürer. Yet it seems clear that he grappled with the difference between his perfect shape when dressed, tightly laced into his doublet and hose, and his ordinary, human fleshliness when undressed. Contemporary images of disorderly ‘dwarfs’ continued to fuel such perceptions. The Renaissance cult of idealised proportion for men must have implied that many of them likewise regarded themselves as mis-shaped when they took off their linen-shirts. 

Ulinka Rublack

Can modern men ‘have fashion’?

Last week, Hadley Freeman of The Guardian argued that “men can have style … [but] they can’t have fashion.” This claim, in response to a male reader who questioned why fashion coverage so rarely features men, seems surprising. Is it true that 21st century men have limited fashion options? 

Our investigations of Schwarz and his ‘book of fashion’ have revealed that male sartorial interests shift with age, status, career, emotions, and life-events. In his public portraiture, Schwarz presented himself in sober black - much like many men today dress for work in dark suits - but in courtship, at weddings and celebrations, Schwarz experimented with material, shape and colour. 

Freeman suggests that male 'fashion’ is so limited because men are less interested in shifting styles and are less adventurous than women. The fashion industry responds by producing 'safe’ designs for men and focusing on the female market. The market and the industry have become caught in a 'vicious circle’ of sartorial conservatism.

Aged 32 ½, Schwarz chose to stand out in these bright mismatched hose (yellow on his right leg and blue on the left), which would have been made unique to his shape, colour, and material specifications

Matthäus Schwarz, Book of Clothes, 95 from the 1704 copy in The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek, Hannover, available online

When Schwarz dressed for each event - be it in sober black for his formal portrait, or bright green for courtship - he had to carefully consider each choice in fabric, colour, and shape. Freeman’s male reader relies on 'readymade’ clothing straight from the designer whereas Schwarz would have had ongoing communications with his tailor and vendors of cloth and haberdashery. Schwarz was only limited by his imagination (and purse), whereas today’s male expects to purchase finished garments so is limited by the fashion industry. 

Perhaps Freeman’s reader should not take her advice to buy a colourful jumper, but instead follow Schwarz’s example by seeking colour and individualism in his next clothing choice. By collaborating with textile and haberdashery sellers and tailors, early modern men could fashion their own identity through a collaborative design process. Modern men should subvert the boring fashion industry by following their early modern predecessors and commissioning their own attire.

Sophie Pitman