Dressing For The King
Madeleine Schwartz writes: ‘Like a teenager admiring his reflection before a big night out, the Renaissance accountant Matthäus Schwarz often took note of the outfits in which he looked particularly fine. As a child, he had been fascinated by fashion and would ask old people about what they had worn thirty or forty or fifty years earlier. In 1520, at age twenty-three, he hired an artist to draw his most notable getups and collected these in a book that he continued to fill throughout the rest of his life.
Schwarz’s outfits, and those of his son Veit Konrad Schwarz (who derided his father’s “fanciful†sensibility before undertaking almost the same project), are reproduced in “The First Book of Fashion,” edited by Ulinka Rublack and Maria Hayward. The first thing one notices are the fabrics: white fustian, a heavy cotton and linen cloth, covered with strips of bright yellow and pale grey silk; scarlet hose slashed to reveal green taffeta. Augsburg, where the Schwarzes lived, derived much of its wealth from cloth production, and the fabrics are drawn with particular care, highlighting the softness of fur or the shine of silk.
