ABSTRACT
It is wintry weather in Nuremberg, "groaningly" wintry, Magdalena writes in December 1591 to her husband in Lucca. Magdalena here affirms the aesthetics of fashion in remarkable terms: It could make the world new by extending what one thought possible and lending it beauty. Fashion regenerated one's energy, which early modern people could see as interrelated with material innovation. In this way, fashion could not just be seen in negative moral terms as an example of fanciful change. This was also a moment of triumph of the tasteful fashion of the urban elites in light colors and just a trim of gold against the small-spiritedness of the lower classes' clothing or any brash aristocratic expenditure. Silks and fine woolens were the materialized idiom of decorous civility, in which Italy met the northern Renaissance in the Nuremberg urban milieu. Even medieval commentators had thought of beautiful, ingenious clothing as a source of joy, and Nuremberg Lutherans affirmed these assumptions.
