A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age

A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion #2

by Sarah-Grace Heller (Editor)

During the medieval period, people invested heavily in looking good. The finest fashions demanded careful chemistry and compounds imported from great distances and at considerable risk to merchants; the Church became a major consumer of both the richest and humblest varieties of cloth, shoes, and adornment; and vernacular poets began to embroider their stories with hundreds of verses describing a plethora of dress styles, fabrics, and shopping experiences.

Drawing on a wealth of pictorial, textual and object sources, the volume examines how dress cultures developed - often to a degree of dazzling sophistication - between the years 800 to 1450.

Beautifully illustrated with 100 images, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, visual representations, and literary representations.

Genres: Fashion

256 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2018

Reviews

[Sarah Holz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is well-written and informative, but any book about dress and fashion is seriously hobbled when the publisher is too cheap to spring for *any* color illustrations.

[lucy snow · Rating 3 out of 5]

really interesting overview of medieval fashion. i could have done with slightly more factual details about the items of clothing before we started delving into thematic analysis but i think this book expects more knowledge going into the book than i actually had (so i blame myself lol).

really loved the chapters on gender and sexuality, and status. really interesting how much clothing shifted throughout the period (it is hundreds of years to be fair - when you think about how much changed during the victorian era it is not surprising!).

i wish there was more evidence the remained of medieval fashion. i really wish i had a tardis to go and see what the average person looked like on a day to day basis.