2025/01/28 by Astrid Wendel-Hansen · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Fashion and Cultural Textiles
paper · doi:10.7765/9781526164674.00025
openalex publication_date 2025/01/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Previously, the early modern period has been characterised as a period of inertia, persistent social inequality and deep-rooted ideas about the appropriate relationship between a person’s social standing and their appearance. More recently, however, historians have also shown it to be a period of significant material change with an intensified consumer demand and interest in fashion. This chapter will re-examine the relationship between clothes and social order as expressed primarily through the dress of urban artisans in seventeenth-century Tallinn. While early modern sumptuary laws undoubtedly influenced sartorial expression, the clothing culture of the middling ranks of people was much more complex than examination of the laws might suggest, and evidence from inventories concretely demonstrates just how varied the clothing resources of this seemingly uniform middling group were. As the boundaries between categories of people, based on ownership of clothes, rarely followed the same lines that were prescribed by the sumptuary norms, household inventories of early modern artisans are excellent for highlighting the grey areas in early modern hierarchical thinking, for allowing us to shift focus away from the role of clothes as social signifiers and for showing the importance of individual strategies, tastes and available means.