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Figure 5.—Leaf from a book of court costumes showing back and front view of a gentleman’s dress. German, second half of the 16th century. (Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.)

The history of fashion plates, therefore, is to be followed in less specialized works. In the 16th century, with the improvement of communications and the continuation of voyages of discovery, great interest developed in the costume and way of life of other nations. It is in this connection that the word “fashion” was first used in its modern sense. In an address to King Henry VIII, a petitioner in 1529, deploring the sinfulness of the people of England, wrote:12

The pryncypall cause [of sin] is their costly apparell and specially their manyfolde and divers changes of fasshyons which the men and specially the women must weare uppon both hedde and bodye: sometyme cappe, sometyme hoode, now the French fasshyon now the Spanyshe fasshyon and then the Italyan fasshyon and the Myllen [Milan] fasshyon, so that there is noo ende of consuminge of substance . . . .

Foreign fashions were being imitated by English ladies. Inventories13 in the Public Record Office in London show that the English queens had robes cut in

Spanish, Milanese, or French styles. As for men, it was said that they could not make up their minds what to wear, and a popular caricature shows an Englishman standing naked with a roll of cloth under his arm and a pair of tailor’s shears in his hand, saying:14

London, however, was not a fashion center, and the first book on the fashions of nations was printed in

Paris in 1562.15 In his introduction to the book François Deserpz moralized:16*

. . . noz vieux predecesseurs . . . ont esté plus curieux de sumptueuse vesture que de rare vertu . . . car tout ainsi qu’on cognoist le Moyne au froc, le Fol au chaperon, & le Soldat aux armes, ainsi se cognoist l’homme sage à l’habit non excessif.

Acknowledgments were made to the late Captain Roberval and to an unnamed Portuguese, but it is not known which of them contributed the portrait of the

English lady (fig. 6). Although she is said to be distinguishable by her square bonnet, it is hard to find the style paralleled in any other picture. The huge slashes on the bodice of her gown surely are exaggerated, as is the smallness of the muff which hangs by a cord from her waist. On the other hand, Joris Hoefnagel copied and used the portrait as one of a group of citizens standing in the foreground of Hogenberg’s 1574 plan of London,17 so the figure must

have been regarded as approximately accurate.

Much more convincing as evidence of fashions are the etchings by Aeneas Vico that appear in Bertelli’s book on the costumes of the peoples, published in Venice in 1563.18 The French woman shown in figure 7 clearly illustrates a fashion which is familiar enough in portraits. Of particular interest is the back view (fig. 8) showing her petticoat. This type of petticoat was popular in Spain in the late 15th

century,19 but was not adopted in France, Italy, and England until the second half of the 16th century.

The next development in the history of the fashion plate is found in the costume books by Cesare Vecellio, published in Venice in 1590 and 1598.20 Vecellio, a

member of the same family as Titian, showed the costume of the different ranks of society in the various Italian cities and states, in the other countries of Europe, and indeed in the known world; he also depicted a number of antique and old-fashioned dresses. Unfortunately, the illustrations (fig. 9) by Christoph Krieger, whose name was Italianized as Guerra, are not as good as Vico’s, and Krieger died before the series was complete. But Vecellio took great pains to secure accurate and up-to-date information about fashions, and he received letters and drawings from his friends in various cities of Italy. Master Erasmo Falte of Parma sent him particulars of the