clothing, fashion, dress, and costume in venice 897
traveling gave traditional regional dress, as presented in printed costume
books, a startling novelty rather than inspiring a desire to imitate them.
Vecellio’s ethnographic approach to what people wear emphasizes
how clothing becomes “dress” when it endures as a collection of man-
ners, customs that are informed by prescribed codes of civility and social
dictates, regional specificity, and gender. Dress is also a marker of regional
and social differences. groups of people with shared identities use dress
to forge collective identities even though social, economic, and political
inequalities work to divide them. Dress, or “habits,” therefore, is the oppo-
site of fashion because it affirms the persistence of social patterns and
consolidates cultural ways of life, even though clothing can be transferred
from subject to subject. therefore, Vecellio still orders his prints and com-
mentaries according to a social hierarchy—from the highest social status
to the lowest. in Venice and the mainland state, he begins with the doge,
his officials, and all noblemen and moves down the social scale to porters,
galley slaves and beggars, and, in the case of women, from the doge’s wife
to noblewomen to housemaids and produce sellers in the city’s markets.
the clothing of Venice and the Veneto takes up the first third of Book i,
and he places Venice at the center of the european stage. For Vecellio,
clothing materializes the civic virtue of dress as it had for marin sanudo
(marino sanuto) at the beginning of the century.31 it distinguishes the
noble rank, not the wealth, of the individual. he invokes ancient Venetian
values to remind all Venetians of proper gendered behavior.
Vecellio presents dress also as an indicator of character. a traditional
style of dress reveals a virtuous style of being, especially among noblemen
and noblewomen of the past:
truly worthy of admiration is the great modesty of dress practiced by the
first founding fathers of this famous city, a modesty as great as her splendor.
You see in this drawing that in those early days the noblemen imitated their
prince in their dress and even in their customs, though such noblemen did
not wear the doge’s hat, which was reserved as a lofty symbol for the leader
alone.32he interprets a man’s gown with the wide, full dogalina sleeve as a sign of
dignity and political wisdom, while the dogaressa’s dogalina sleeves are a
31 Patricia h. labalme and laura sanguineti White, eds., Venice cità Excelentissima:
Selections from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo, trans. linda l. Carroll (Baltimore,
2008).
32 rosenthal and Jones, ed. and trans., cesare Vecellio, Habiti Antichi et Moderni, p. 97.