ABSTRACT
At first it might seem odd to link the words fashion, city, and national identity in the context of a distant past such as the Renaissance when nations as political entities did not even exist. Nevertheless, even if nation states as we know them today had not yet been formed, it was in this crucial period of European history in the midst of geographical exploration and proto-colonialism that the idea of nations first came to the fore. This process, as this chapter argues, intersected with the creation of a “national” fashion. The language of fashion as documented in print culture was constructed as both local—linked to the formation of vernaculars—and global—as testified by the genre of European and Italian costume books. It was through print that the world was translated into images of different “nations” made recognizable through men’s and women’s clothing, and thus the faraway and the unknown were brought closer to Europeans, and therefore closer to knowledge of the other, via linguistic and visual representation. In particular, I will focus on some examples taken from Giacomo Franco’s costume plates, which are the focus of this article and illustrate how Venice becomes the symbol of Italy itself.
