clothing, fashion, dress, and costume in venice 901
the silk threads stood out in lustrous relief above the stiffer linen warp, a
fabric Cesare Vecellio highlights in his description of the “Winter Cloth-
ing of Venetian noblewomen and other Wealthy Women in our time”
(Fig. 24.2):
the clothing shown here displays the greatest extent to which Venetian
women wear ornaments of precious gold, rich in pearls and other jewels,
and how much effort and care they put into their coiffures... every precious
thing dangles from them, from their necks to their breast, complementing
and embellishing the bodice and forming a necklace composed of large
pearls of considerable value... over their camicia they wear a carpetta, most
often of brocatello, and in the winter it is lined with precious furs.38in the second half of the 16th century, pressure- and heat-treating the fab-
ric reproduced on plain velvet the effect of damask without the high cost
in weaving it.39 some fabrics were made with wool thread, often called
rascia (or rash, a twill fabric similar to serge, made in both silk and wool,
named after raska, its city of origin in serbia), or with goat or camel hair
such as ciambelotto (camlet, originally camelhair). mixed fabrics such as
canevaccia (this had a silk warp and a weft of waste silk and flax, some-
times with gold or silver thread) and buratto (this had a silk warp and a
wool weft and could be used, depending on its weight and transparency,
either for veils or for awnings in gondolas) were increasingly popular in
the 16th century.40
retailing, too, moved in a parallel direction to changes in consumer
behavior, as there were many more venues for acquiring goods—the
shop, the street, public markets where itinerant traders, mercers and
merchants displayed and sold their wares, fairs, and lotteries—than ever
before. it is even likely that consumers influenced retailers’ decisions to
integrate new products into their trades, for retailers profited handsomely
from a reduction in prices coupled with increased consumer demand.41 in
addition, global networks involved a wide range and type of commercial
market for individual consumption, from localized shops to international
fairs and auctions and overseas depots. the expansion of europe meant
38 rosenthal and Jones, ed. and trans., cesare Vecellio, Habiti Antichi et Moderni,
pp. 182–83.
39 Belfanti, “the Civilization of Fashion,” p. 273.
40 on silk weaves, see Dorothy K. Burnham, Warp and Weft: A Dictionary of Textile
Terms (new York, 1980), pp. 123–27.
41 richard a. goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300–1600 (Baltimore/
london, 1993); Bruno Blondé, et al., eds., Retailers and consumer changes in Early Modern
Europe: England, France, Italy and the Low countries (tours, 2005), p. 6.