Dressing a Renaissance city: Society, economics, and gender in the clothing of fifteenth-century Florence

Clothes signified social worth in fifteenth-century Florence, and a highly-professional guild community developed to provide the necessary fashion statements for families of note, even in the face of repeated sumptuary restrictions from the Commune itself. Luxury cloth-makers and finishers, clothing-providers, and accessories craftspeople organized the marketplace of Florence, which satisfied the sometimes flamboyant tastes of foreign courts, as well as its own refined citizenry. Outside of the guild structure, craftswomen sewed personal linens, hosiery, and bags from their homes and from within the convents; some worked the streets as peripatetic venders or used-clothes dealers.;This study investigates the clothing of fifteenth-century Florence; its designing, fashioning, decorating, and accessorizing. I use archival documents to get at first, the entire process of getting a garment made, from the purchase of cloth and sewing notions, to the creation of clothes, accessories, and jewelry, and secondly, to piece together a demographic profile of the lives of the craftspeople involved, especially the tailors of Florence.;I have found that men and women had about the same size wardrobes of equal value, and that their clothing constituted up to forty percent of a family's total worth. Also, I have found that clothiers, and especially tailors, could make a good living serving the wealthy, but were never allowed real political voice.;Lastly, I have concluded that the received notion of the way in which Renaissance Florentines dressed is skewed by the artwork which has generally survived, for the written records do not mirror the visual images. The lavishly-adorned women and soberly-dignified men were part of a visual presentation painted to create an image of Medicean Florence as an honorable egalitarian republic. Members of the rich merchant oligarchy paid tailors to fashion the appropriate gender-specific clothes for their families, and then hired painters to represent them as icons of the ideal Florentine state.