A path-breaking study that imagines the Renaissance afresh by considering people`s appearances: what they wore, what image they wished to create, and how this made them feel
Draws on an astonishingly wide range of sources to allow us to view the Renaissance from a completely new perspective
Brilliantly illustrated, with over 150 colour illustrations
Integrates its findings into wider arguments about consumption, visual culture, the Reformtion, German history, and the relationship of European and global history
Dressing Up shows why clothes made history and history can be about clothes. It imagines the Renaissance afresh by considering people´s appearances: what they wore, how this made them move, what images they created, and how all this made people feel about themselves.

Using an astonishing array of sources, Ulinka Rublack argues that an appreciation of people´s relationship to appearances and images is essential to an understanding of what it meant to live at this time - and ever since. We read about the head accountant of a sixteenth-century merchant firm who commissioned 136 images of himself elaborately dressed across a lifetime; students arguing with their mother about which clothes they could have; or Nuremberg women wearing false braids dyed red or green. This brilliantly illustrated book draws on a range of insights across the disciplines and allows us to see an entire period in new ways. In integrating its findings into larger arguments about consumption, visual culture, the Reformation, German history, and the relationship of European and global history, it promises to re-shape the field.
Readership: All those interested in the history of clothing and fashion and the cultural history of Renaissance and Early Modern Europe