The Origins of Dress History and Cesare Vecellio’s ‘pourtraits of attire’

Reading 5A entitled, The Origins of Dress History and Cesare Vecellio’s ‘pourtraits of attire’, follows the creation of Cesare Vecellio’s masterpiece novel “ON ANCIENT and Modern Dress from Divers Parts of the World”.  This book is credited with being one of the first explanations of dress in modern history.

Cesare Vecellio spent the early portions of his life as a warrior for the Kingdom of Venice. After returning from war Vecellio noticed that many other cultures had begun to influence and change the traditional Italian dress, in particular France. Vecellio began to investigate the cause of this change. Vecellio was able to draw a parallel between political instability and the inconsistency of dress in Italy.

These discoveries were of particular interest to Vecellio, due to the fact that the average Venetian male dressed almost entirely in black outerwear. Venice, being a rich and powerful trading port was frequented by a large foreign and transient population. By wearing black the local Venetians were able to easily differentiate themselves from the non-locals with foreign garb. Conversely other cities were seeing a proliferation of foreign clothing into their societies.

Around the late 16^th century, Vecellio ran his own printing-press in Venice and began making his own volumes, print, and woodcuts on various styles that caught his interest. Unlike most of the descriptive books at the time, which only gave a small subtitle about what was being describe, Vecellio was known for going into explicit and exact detail about every part of what he was describing.

Eventually these woodcarvings and small volumes were brought together to be the first edition of his masterpiece work. The book successfully examined costume from Ancient Rome to Modern Italy, as well as some sides on costume in other distant civilizations. This book is today a cherished work for its unparreled insight into the costume of the 16^th Century. 


David Ojserkis