Refashioning the Renaissance: Everyday Dress and the Reconstruction of Early Modern Material Culture, 1550-1650

This talk presents some of the findings of Professor Paula Hohti's recent ERC-funded project Refashioning the Renaissance: Popular Groups and the Material and Cultural Significance of Clothing in Europe, 1550-1650.

During the past five years, Professor Hohti and her team have developed new perspectives on the early modern dress and fashion history by asking two interrelated vital questions: How did fashion beyond groups of wealthy elites create in early modern Europe, and how can one gain access to the culture of lower social groups when so few garments survive, and sources about clothes are fragmentary? Combining archival, material, and pictorial evidence with experimental hands-on work and reconstruction, our project has explored what were the key agents of fashion change at the lower social levels in Early Modern Europe, and how experimental work, reconstruction, and material-based approaches can help us understand and access early modern dress and material culture.

The project website contains a lot of material relating to the research, experiments and outputs.

Every-other Wednesday at CTR, there are administrative meetings running through the semester, followed by a scientific presentation.

All interested parties can join these lectures.

The presentation will start approx. 15:00. Please press the Zoom link to join and you will be let in. We expect everybody to turn on the camera and have their name as the “name tag”.

Please see the programme for detailed information.