A fascination with fashion is a marked feature of life across the world. What does the legacy of this historical process mean today?

The pre-industrial period of c.1300-1800 was pivotal for fashion’s global triumph. Fashion emerged as a powerful economic sector, connecting groups of makers, traders, consumers and thinkers who embraced its effects and often ecological devastation. Books about the history of fashion often only start in 1800 or just focus on Europe, many commentators only see courts and elites as drivers of change while others assume that fashion has always existed through practices of adornment. But the story needs to be told from the bottom-up, as consumers drove innovation.

Fashion, moreover, is often defined through European categories, which turn on novelty in tailoring. As a result, Europe is often claimed to have invented fashion. Yet the definition is wrong and change within Europe shared features with and substantially depended on change elsewhere. Nor was the Western world central to trade in clothing well into modernity. To understand these processes means to understand history and how we have come to think about ourselves in time in new ways.

Ulinka Rublack is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John´'s College. Her recent books include Dürer´s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World (Oxford University Press, 2023), The Astronomer & the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight For His Mother (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford University Press, 2010).

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