of all fashion books, each the first of its kind and each the ... these works is the
first printed book of the regional .... officialdom was apathetic to tailoring books;.
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RENAISSANCE COSTUME BOOKS In the past year or so the Museum's Print Room has acquired two of the rarest of all fashion books, each the first of its kind and each the initiator of a branch of the vast literature of costume. The earlier of these works is the first printed book of the regional costumes of the world, issued at Paris in I562. It had immediate imitators and is the remote, forgotten parent of today's magazine articles on "Picturesque Scandinavia," "Bali the Beautiful," and so on. The other book is the first tailors' cutting book, with diagrams showing how to lay out a pattern on a given width of cloth. This was printed in Toledo in 1589 and had almost no imitators for two centuries, until the fashion magazines and dressmakers' pattern books started up in profusion after the French Revolution. Last year Americans bought seventy million dress patterns that look just like those of 1589. A glance at the period which produced these two books is therefore not without its timely interest just now when the Museum is showing fashions of the moment inspired by the Renaissance. The sixteenth century was a disrupted age that had to relinquish many ancient ways of life or reform them to unfamiliar shapes. Mediaeval committee government by town council and guild had had to give way to centralized authority. The western Church had split asunder, and the parts had reshaped themselves into something quite unlike the old unity. The immemorial economy of land, based on patriarchal authority and a scantiness of cash, was beginning to crumble alarmingly under the deluge of gold and silver flowing from the Americas. Dtirer noticed the first exhilaration of the change when he traveled to the Netherlands in I520. Coming from backward Germany, the only European country which had neither helped to discover the New World nor profited directly from its exploitation, Durer was amazed by the beginnings of the great financial boom in Antwerp. People ate and drank so much. They wore such wonderful clothes. Difficulties of exchange bothered Durer when he traveled, but as imported gold and
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silver made banking work more smoothly, travel became easier and more frequent. Not only could people journey to see "cannibals that each other eat and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," but they grew more interested in studying their neighbors and in noting near-by differences in clothes. The Morgan Library has a letter from Henry VII l's sister thanking her aunt, the regent of the Netherlands, for the gift of a Flemish dress pattern (patron des habillements)which she has had made up in England. "I have long desired to know how the attire and the dresses which are worn there (in Flanders) would become me and now that I have tried them on I am delighted with them." The patterns sent with the letter-whatever they werehave disappeared along with practically all the working tools of past dressmakers. To satisfy such curiosities a forwardlooking Paris publisher printed a little book in 1562 called Recueil de la diversite des habits qui sont de present en usaige tant es pays d'Europe, Asie, Affrique et illes sauvages, which ran through a number of editions in the next few years and was soon imitated in Antwerp, Frankfort, and Venice. The Paris book has 121 little woodcuts of the typical dress of Russians, Spaniards, Turks, Portuguese, Indians, Arabs, Persians, and Brazilians. To cover France and Italy the book illustrates the modes of each principal city; for then ladies and gentlemen dressed with as many local differences of style as do the peasants of today, whose costumes derive from vanished court fashions. When a French princess went to Florence in 1589 to marry Ferdinando de' Medici, she traveled in her black French clothes until she came in sight of the towers clustering around Brunelleschi's dome, then retired to a tent and changed to the Florentine fashions she was to wear for the rest of her life. Many of the exotic costumes in the Recueil de la diversite des habits were gathered by a Portuguese traveler, which is not surprising at that time when Spain and Portugal had staked out the first globegirdling empires. The vastness of the Iberian empire may have been one of the factors which produced the first tailors' pattern book, Juan
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de Alcega's Libro de GeometriaPratica. The title is not so ill chosen as might seem at first glance; for most of the book helped the tailor with the problems of geometry and arithmetic that bothered him when cloth came in innumerable widths because each town had its own units of measure. Alcega reckoned in Castilian inches, which are as long as four barley grains strung end to end. But since some barley is longer and some shorter, he established a standard Castilian inch by printing a dash that is about three quarters of our inch. Most of the book consists of some I30 woodcut diagrams which show how Alcega, rule and compass in hand, as he had himself pictured on the title page, laid out the pieces for garments in various ways on various widths of cloth. These elaborate directions were not pointless; for an error was serious in cutting velvet or brocade that cost more than its weight in silver. In our age of power looms it is hard for us to imagine the money lavished on dressing well before 800oor so. In the sixteenth century the stiff richness of stuffs was not confined to one historic splurge like the Field of the Cloth of Gold; for an outburst of purely secular splendor distinguished the whole age. The wherewithal to squander came partly from the liquid cash plundered out of the Americas and the Indies and partly (in England at least) from the loot of abbeys, which Englishmen spent like income instead of conserving like capital. The display of court life becomes vivid in Alcega's diagrams of velvet skirts for fat women, silk mantillas for christenings, white silk cloaks for Knights of Calatrava, black taffeta ones equipped with white cloth "camel skins" for Knights of St. John, embroidered silk caparisons for horses, and so forth. But these elaborate cutting patterns and their measurements were by no means Alcega's only editorial headache. "To get permission to print this book I had troubles and suits with the Royal Council till I was so vexed and badgered that I all but gave up the enterprise." Small wonder officialdomwas apathetic to tailoring books; for in the previous summer Spain's last great offensive had foundered with the Armada. Yet the censors, keeping their
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strangle hold, stated in the imprimatur: "Any new edition must be submitted to the censors along with the original copy which has been passed, with each illustration countersigned." Alcega persisted, however, because he thought his book would contribute mightily to the public good. How did he think to help the commonwealth? What was his great end that was worth so much sacrifice? Did he, who styles himself a descendant of the house of Alcega, wish to make tailoring gentlemanly by giving it the dignity of a book?-a dignity which probably counted for much in a land that was under the influence of Arab thought. Or did he want to standardize the dress of Spanish officialdom the world over? This is quite possible in view of the fact that the Spanish Church shipped plans and specifications overseas from which the Americans were to build their churches. The troubled age hankered for integration in all fields. Its style in art has as little local accent as the abstract painting of the so that the mere look of a woodcut 1920'S, title page of 1550 or so often will not tell whether it was designed in London, Rome, Paris, or Antwerp. Catholicism tried to stamp out local variations in the church service, and France made a desperate stab at unity of faith through the blood purge of St. Bartholomew's Day ten years after publication of the Recueil de la diversite des habits. It is therefore quite possible that, before the Armada, the Spanish Crown may have been interested in publishing patterns that would help Spaniards in all climates to dress alike. Whatever the reasons behind Alcega's book, its patterns for cloaks and doublets and trunk hose must have brought a touch of home to many a lonely empire builder in Santa Fe or Cuzco or Goa, much as the drawings of Burberrys did recently in the Illustrated London News. It is strange that books so different as the Libro de Geometriaand the Recueil de la diversite des habits should reflect an age so completely from their very divergent viewpoints. Yet stranger still is the immense and ever-growing output of books on costume and fashion of which they are the simply equipped Adam and Eve.
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A. HYATT MAYOR.
