Long before fashion magazines, personal style blogs, or carefully curated social media feeds, a 16th century German accountant named Matthäus Schwarz was documenting his wardrobe in extraordinary detail.
Between 1520 and 1560, Schwarz commissioned artists to create more than 130 precise watercolor portraits of him on parchment, recording the clothing he wore at different stages of his life. The earliest images, painted by Narziss Renner, reconstructed Schwarz’s appearance from infancy through his school years and apprenticeship. Over the next four decades, he continued adding portraits that captured changing fashions, important occasions, and the way he chose to present himself to the world.
The resulting manuscript, known as the Klaidungsbüchlein, or Book of Clothes, has been described as the world’s first fashion book—and, in many ways, the Vogue magazine of its time.
Today, we are joined by Ulinka Rublack and Maria Hayward, co-editors of the first English translation of Schwarz’s remarkable work, to explore what this collection reveals about clothing, identity, status, and self-fashioning in the sixteenth century.
Download a Transcript of Ep 440 here
About Maria Hayward
Maria Hayward is professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton with particular interests in the Tudors and Stuarts. She has focused on court culture and material culture with a particular emphasis on textiles and clothing. Her books include Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (2009) and Stuart Style: Monarchy, Dress and the Scottish Male Elite (2020).
About Ulinka Rublack
Ulinka Rublack is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College. She is the author of Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe, and her work explores how people in the early modern period used clothing and material culture to shape identity, status, and power.
What We Talk About
- How Matthäus Schwarz created more than 130 illustrated records of his clothing, turning his wardrobe into an extraordinary visual autobiography of life in the 16th century.
- What his outfits reveal about fashion, masculinity, social status, self-fashioning, and the growing importance of individual identity in Renaissance Europe.
- Why the Trachtenbuch, or Book of Clothes, is often described as the first book of fashion—and how its portraits preserve details about clothing, body image, aging, emotion, and everyday life that other historical records rarely capture.
- …and more!
Resources Recommended by Our Guests
The Dresden clothing collection
Full-scale portraiture and comparative images from the period
Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe
Maria Hayward’s book on Henry VIII and dress
The First Book of Fashion — their own co-edited English edition of Matthäus Schwarz’s Book of Clothes,
The ending of Taming of the Shrew is something of a Rohrshach for directors in my experience. How was it done or received in the day? What was it’s history?
I don’t know that I have ever seen specific records on precisely how the ending was staged for Shakespeare’s lifetime. That doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, so if you find details, let me know! This is an interesting question.