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Did the Renaissance Invent Fashion?

Holdfast

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Thanks for the interesting link. To answer the thread title I would say, "Almost certainly not."

I've heard the thesis before, but to my mind it's belied by the vast amount of evidence to suggest that humanity enjoyed keeping up with changing aesthetic tastes in clothes, accessories and homewares for millennia prior to the Renaissance. You simply need to go to any reasonably large/broad museum and observe the changes chronologically for yourself.

What is more accurate is to say would be that over the passing of the centuries, the rate of change accelerates and the degree to which a broader spectrum society are financially able to join in the spectacle increases. Moreover, the concept of fashion as changing only annually as suggested in the article is also outmoded.

In other words, as cultural technological sophistication increases, the desire for novelty/change increases and its dissemination across society amplifies. What might have taken several thousand years to change in the Old Kingdom, now takes several months at most. This is true for all arts/entertainments, and clothes & accessories are not exempt.

There have been many attempts over the millenia to codify standards of dress so as to preserve certain details for the elite; the oldest I'm personally familiar with (and that I can think of off the top of my head) are the regulations regarding toga colour in Classical Rome but I'm certain there must be many preceding examples too. The very fact that sumptuary laws were deemed necessary means that others must have tried copying those details by way of copying the elite. If that's not fashion, I'm not sure what is.

Certainly, the development of court bureaucracies in the Renaissance - and the increasing ease with which the populace could be informed about what those bureaucracies wore - must have accelerated the spread of fashion, but I think it's fairly arbitrary to suggest there was a moment of crystallisation rather than an exponentially (or at least power-function) increasing awareness of fashion (with occasional slips back too, of course). Perhaps the most that could be said is that the Renaissance is a point of maximum curvature in that function. Even then, there are probably arguments to place that point in the Industrial Revolution or post-WWII or even around the turn of the millennium with the spread of the internet.
 
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