| dc.description.abstract | In order for people to be able to engage in fashion, to follow the continual changes in clothing and adopt the most recent styles, they need to be informed about what is considered to be fashionable at any one time. This thesis examines how news about men’s fashion spread across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before the Mercure galant began to publish regular reports on the latest fashions from the 1670s. It seeks to determine what methods and media were used to circulate fashion news in the early modern period and which people and places were involved in the exchange of such news. In doing so it offers new insight into the relationship between news and fashion, and nuances our understanding of both the operation of fashion and the dissemination of news in early modern Europe. Many men throughout Europe dressed in a similar manner in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But this thesis shows that they generally did not find out about the latest cross-continental fashions through texts and images. Instead objects themselves acted as a form of fashion media: men could obtain news about an object’s style and making by seeing, embodying or acquiring it. The production and circulation of fashionable objects also created opportunities for people to interact and share news with one another. However the case studies of doublets, gloves and swords reveal the impact an object’s nature had on the ways in which fashion news was transmitted, for news about different types of objects travelled by different routes and means in early modern Europe. | en_US |
