̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - fashion

Samuel Pepys’ fashion prints reveal his love of fancy French clothes

ta385 — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 05:00:00 +0000

A collection of French fashion engravings offers precious new insights into the life of Samuel Pepys years after his premature final diary entry. ̽��ֱ��prints show the tailor’s son remained fascinated by the power of fashion long after he had secured wealth and status. But they also expose Pepys’ internal conflict over French style.

Fashion for pointy shoes unleashed a plague of bunions in medieval Britain

fpjl2 — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 08:12:51 +0000

Researchers analysing skeletal remains in Cambridge find a dramatic increase in ‘hallux valgus’ around the time that pointed shoes became de rigueur in the 1300s.

̽��ֱ��conservationist, the herders and the fashionistas

cg605 — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 16:56:00 +0000

Respect for the Mongolian landscape is engrained within her, says Onon Bayasgalan. Her work is helping herders in her home country to preserve livelihoods and lands that are under threat from the luxury fashion industry.

What next for Japan's women?

ta385 — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 05:00:00 +0000

Japan's women are experimenting with new femininities in challenging times, a new book reveals

When real men wore feathers

ta385 — Thu, 14 Feb 2019 10:45:00 +0000

Ostrich feathers are often associated with glamorous women but this wasn’t always the case. In the sixteenth century, it was Europe’s men who spearheaded this trend. Now experts in Cambridge and London have brought this forgotten moment in fashion history back to life by recreating a lavish headdress.

A feather in your cap: inside the symbolic universe of Renaissance Europe

tdk25 — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 08:50:40 +0000

Later, an eyewitness recalled that officials thought the Duchess had fainted at the sight of blood trickling from her husband’s mouth. Only the Archduke himself seemed to realise that she, too, had been hit. “Sophie dear! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!” Franz Ferdinand pleaded. Then, “he seemed to sag down himself,” the witness remembered. “His plumed general’s hat… fell off; many of its green feathers were found all over the car floor.”

̽��ֱ��assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, had such seismic repercussions in precipitating the First World War that it is easy to disregard the curious little detail of feathers on the floor. In such context, they seem trivial. Rewind a few moments more, to the famous final photograph of the couple leaving Sarajevo town hall, and the plumage sprouting from the Archduke’s hat looks positively absurd; as if amid all the other mortal perils of that day – the bomb that narrowly missed his car, the bullets from a semi-automatic – he somehow also sustained a direct hit from a large bird.

Today, we generally associate feathers with women’s fashion, and a peculiarly ostentatious brand at that, reserved for Royal Ascot, high-society weddings and hen parties. Among men, wearing feathers is typically seen as provocatively effete – the domain of drag queens, or ageing, eyelinered devotees of the Manic Street Preachers.

Yet a cursory glance at military history shows that Franz Ferdinand was far from alone in his penchant for plumage. ̽��ֱ��Bersaglieri of the Italian Army, for example, still wear capercaillie feathers in their hats, while British fusiliers have a clipped plume called a hackle. Cavaliers in the English Civil War adorned their hats with ostrich feathers.

“Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men,” observes Cambridge historian Professor Ulinka Rublack. “Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.”

Rublack is beginning to study the use of featherwork in early modern fashion as part of a project called ‘Materialized Identities’, a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge, Basel and Bern, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

To the outsider, its preoccupations (her co-researchers are studying gold, glass and veils) might seem surprising. Yet such materials are not just mute artefacts; they sustained significant economies, craft expertise and, she says, “entered into rich dialogue with the humans who processed and used them”. Critically, they elicited emotions, moods and attitudes for both the wearer and the viewer. In this sense, they belonged to the ‘symbolic universe’ of communities long since dead. If we can understand such resonances, we come closer to knowing more about how it felt to be a part of that world.

Rublack has spotted that something unusual started to happen with feathers during the 16th century. In 1500, they were barely worn at all; 100 years later they had become an indispensable accessory for the Renaissance hipster set on achieving a ‘gallant’ look.

In prosperous trading centres, the locals started sporting hats bedecked with feathers from parrots, cranes and swallows. Headgear was manufactured so that feathers could be inserted more easily. By 1573, Plantin’s Flemish–French dictionary was even obliged to offer words to describe people who chose not to wear them, recommending such verbiage as: ‘the featherless’ and ‘unfeathered’.

Featherworking became big business. From Prague and Nuremberg to Paris and Madrid, people started to make a living from decorating feathers for clothing. Impressive efforts went into dyeing them. A 1548 recipe recommends using ashes, lead monoxide and river water to create a ‘very beautiful’ black, for example.

Why this happened will become clearer as the project develops. One crucial driver, however, was exploration – the discovery of new lands, especially in South America. Compared with many of the other species that early European colonists encountered, exotic birds could be captured, transported and kept with relative ease. Europe experienced a sudden ‘bird-craze’, as birds such as parrots became a relatively common sight on the continent’s largest markets.

Given the link with new territories and conquest, ruling elites wore feathers partly to express their power and reach. But there were also more complex reasons. In 1599, for example, Duke Frederick of Württemberg held a display at his court at which he personally appeared as ‘Lady America’, wearing a costume covered in exotic feathers. This was not just a symbol of power, but of cultural connectedness, Rublack suggests: “ ̽��ֱ��message seems to be that he was embracing the global in a duchy that was quite insular and territorial.”

Nor were feathers worn by the powerful alone. In 1530, a legislative assembly at Augsburg imposed restrictions on peasants and burghers adopting what it clearly felt should be an elite fashion. ̽��ֱ��measure did not last, perhaps because health manuals of the era recommended feathers as protecting the wearer from ‘bad’ air – cold, miasma, damp or excessive heat – all of which were regarded as hazardous. During the 1550s, Eleanor of Toledo had hats made from peacock feathers to protect her from the rain.

Gradually, feathers came to indicate that the wearer was healthy, civilised and cultured. Artists and musicians took to wearing them as a mark of subtlety and style. “They have a certain tactility that was seen to signal an artistic nature,” Rublack says.

Like most fads, this enthusiasm eventually wore off. By the mid-17th century, feathers were out of style, with one striking exception. Within the armies of Europe what was now becoming a ‘feminine’ fashion choice elsewhere remained an essential part of military costume.

Rublack thinks that there may have been several reasons for this strange contradiction. “It’s associated with the notion of graceful warfaring,” she says. “This was a period when there were no standing armies and it was hard to draft soldiers. One solution was to aestheticise the military, to make it seem graceful and powerful, rather than simply about killing.” Feathers became associated with the idea of an art of warfare.

They were also already a part of military garb among both native American peoples and those living in lands ruled by the Ottomans. Rublack believes that just as some of these cultures treated birds as gods, and therefore saw feathers as having a protective quality, European soldiers saw them as imparting noble passions, bravery and valiance.

In time, her research may therefore reveal a tension about the ongoing use of feathers in this unlikely context. “It has to do with a notion of masculinity achieved both through brutal killing, and the proper conduct of war as art,” she says. But, as she also notes, she is perhaps the first historian to have spotted the curious emotional resonance of feathers in military fashion at all. All this shows a sea-change in methodologies: historians now chart the ways in which our identities are shaped through deep connections with ‘stuff’. Further work is needed to understand how far these notions persisted by 1914 when, in his final moments, Franz Ferdinand left feathers scattered across the car floor.

Inset image: Hendrick Goltzius, soldier, c. 1580; credit: ̽��ֱ��Rijsmuseum, Amsterdam.

Today, feathers are an extravagant accessory in fashion; 500 years ago, however, they were used to constitute culture, artistry, good health and even courage in battle. This unlikely material is now part of a project that promises to tell us more not only about what happened in the past, but also about how it felt to be there.

Historically, feathers were an incredibly expressive accessory for men. Nobody has really looked at why this was the case. That’s a story that I want to tell.

Ulinka Rublack

Achille Beltrame

Assassination of the feather-hatted Archduke Franz Ferdinand

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Men in stripes: spot the difference in early modern woodcuts

amb206 — Thu, 16 Jul 2015 08:16:05 +0000

Historians need to pursue parallel lines of enquiry to add an extra dimension to their research. Tillmann Taape, a PhD candidate in History and Philosophy of Science, is much more interested in early printed books than in clothes. He never thought he’d be immersing himself in the fine details of 15th century men’s fashion as means of understanding the makings of early modern science.

Taape is studying medical manuals compiled by a surgeon-apothecary around the turn of the 16th century. Hieronymus Brunschwig’s works were published by Johann Grüninger who commissioned a highly skilled artist (name unknown) to produce dozens of detailed woodcuts to illustrate some of the earliest books printed in Germany. Brunschwig’s were the first books on surgery and medical distillation to be published in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire.

̽��ֱ��focus of Taape’s research is Brunschwig’s surgery manual, plague treatise and two books on distillation, all published in Brunschwig’s home town, Strasbourg. His scholarship will add to an understanding of medicine in the context of a world in which printing was just beginning to revolutionise the transmission of practical knowledge and thus to raise questions about who should have access to what kind of knowledge.

A big question for historians working on early medical books is: who did the author and publisher think would be likely to read and benefit from items that would have been costly to produce and correspondingly expensive to purchase? In the case of Bruschwig’s collections, the clues to unravelling this puzzle lie not just in the text – which he often addresses to the ‘common man’ – but also in the illustrations used to give the reader a quick idea of the topics covered in the book.

As Taape shifted his gaze from the books’ written content to the woodcuts, a succession of smaller but equally compelling questions crept into his mind: why are so many of the men depicted in the images wearing bold and vertical stripes, and what was the artist’s intention in dressing some men in stripes and others in plain garments?

At a time when people’s outer appearance was thought to reflect their inner character in a much more direct way than today, artists could use clothing as a visual ‘label’ for the different kinds of people they wanted to depict. Anyone with the proverbial feather in their cap, for example, would have been recognised as well-to-do, masculine and energetic.

̽��ֱ��striped garments in the woodcuts used in Grüninger’s books are a striking label, calculated to stand out. While the background and other sartorial details are captured in fine lines and delicate hatching, the stripes appear as unbroken, solid black or white shapes. ̽��ֱ��difference in clothes is underlined by an apparent division of labour in the images: striped people are often shown doing manual work, such as stitching up wounds, while figures in monochrome fur-trimmed robes stand well back.

Stripes clearly marked out a particular kind of person, so the next step was to find out what it meant to be stripy in the early modern period. “ ̽��ֱ��whole topic of stripes, and the messages they convey, set me off on a tangent that took me into the realms of art, fashion and social satire. To embrace stripes as a complex narrative of symbols, you have to look at cultural and political history, the ways in which social structures were perceived and conveyed in forms of dress as well as figures of speech,” says Taape.

A book called ̽��ֱ��Devil’s Cloth discusses stripes in Biblical references and medieval fiction right through to stripes in prison uniform, pyjamas and toothpaste. Its author, Michel Pastoureau, argues that stripes stood out because they were inherently offensive to the medieval eye which was used to decoding images layer by layer. “Pastoureau suggests that stripes defied this hierarchical gaze because they resist being distinguished into background and foreground. Instead, their contrasting colours appear in the same visual plane,” says Taape.

“Stripy clothes, moreover, were often literally cobbled together from different pieces of material, which could make them somewhat second-rate not only with respect to visual sensibilities, but also because they could be seen to go against the Bible. Stripes were in stark contrast with Jesus’s garment, woven in one piece, and laughed in the face of the decrees against wearing garments made from different materials, found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.”

But visual symbolism is rarely one-sided and, by the early modern period, stripes had acquired another set of connotations. Precisely because of their conspicuous or even unsavoury nature, striped clothes became a sign of courtly extravaganza, giving rise to a new fashion of elaborately tailored striped or slashed doublets and hose – perhaps rather in the way that more than four centuries later, punk, with its rebellious rips and subversive safety pins, was reimagined by couture.

Historians think that the 16th century fashion for stripes first appeared at the North Italian courts, and was brought to the streets of prosperous Germany by the Emperor's new infantry, the so-called lansquenets, who combined short doublets, often striped, with tight-fitting striped or mi-parti hose.

“Stripy clothes became particularly popular among the middling sort of citizens of free imperial towns, artisans and even wealthy farmers and landowners,” says Taape. “These people constituted a growing and increasingly self-aware middle layer of society, sandwiched between poorer day-labourers, who did not own any property, and the wealthy urban patriciate or landed gentry.”

Like checks and other bold geometric patterns, stripes are attention-seeking: “look at me!” In the setting of burgeoning European towns and cities, where artisans and merchants often formed part of the governing council, the new middle class of ‘stripy people’ represented a force to be reckoned with. As arrivistes they were, inevitably, satirised for their uppity, in-your-face presumption in treading on the toes of those higher up the social scale.

“ ̽��ֱ��literature of the late 15th century, notably social satire in the tradition of Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, associates this newly significant social group with striped clothes. In a sermon inspired by Brant’s satirical work, the Strasbourg preacher Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg coined a new term for this kind of person – ‘striped laymen’ or gestreyflet leygen in the original German,” says Taape.

“ ̽��ֱ��phrase stuck, and so the 'striped layman' became a rhetorical statement as well as a visual one. His striped clothing identified him as being ‘half and half’, or in between, not just in terms of wealth and status but also in terms of education.”

Taape continues: “ ̽��ֱ��striped layman is literate in his local language but not in Latin – and, as he becomes more powerful, he emerges as a central figure in the visual rhetoric of Protestant pamphlets during the Reformation. Martin Luther wrote for an audience of precisely this kind of person. Although not a Latinate scholar of theology, the striped layman sought salvation in his own reading of Scripture in the vernacular without learned clergy as an intermediate.”

Brunschwig was more concerned with the common man’s health than the salvation of his soul. Each of his books contains a number of different woodcuts – but one particular illustration appears in all of them. It shows a teacher addressing a group of students who stand in front of him. ̽��ֱ��teacher, who is seated at a lectern, wears a fur-lined scholar’s robe. He is lecturing from a book positioned so that only he can see its contents, thus demonstrating his exclusive access to the text.

“Among his students, we see a young man dressed in stripes. While his fellow student listens demurely, cap in hand, this striped chap gesticulates as if he’s arguing a point with the teacher. What’s more, he’s holding a roll of paper, which could be a sheet of notes or a medical recipe. ̽��ֱ��picture suggests that this striped layman is literate and familiar with some of medicine’s written forms,” says Taape.

It was a nifty sales ploy on the part of Brunschwig and his publisher to put the striped layman centre stage. ̽��ֱ��customer, perhaps not yet always right, was often striped. “In the chapter of my PhD thesis that explores the dress depicted in the woodcuts, I argue that the middling man – the striped man – neatly symbolises the intended reader of Brunschwig’s works, although Brunschwig himself never explicitly comments on the depicted figures and their stripes,” says Taape.

“Just a few years later, however, the physician Lorenz Fries from Colmar, not far from Strasbourg, dedicated his Mirror of Medicine specifically to gestreiffelten leyen, ‘striped laypeople,’ who want to learn about medicine. Styling himself as something of a Luther of medicine, Fries makes explicit a trend which we already see developing in Brunschwig: the middling, half-educated layman as a reader of medical books which can help him to treat himself and his household.”

As a digression from his meticulous analysis of Brunschwig’s texts, Taape’s foray into the world of stripes was undoubtedly a lot of fun. But it also showed him that the visual culture of early modern print can still tell us new things if we can figure out how to decode images and read them alongside contemporary texts.

This article is based on a blog that appeared on the Recipes Project website http://recipes.hypotheses.org/5551

Inset images: Master (surgeon?) lecturing from a chair to four standing students, from Die hantwirkung der wund Artzeny by Hieronymus Brunschwig (Wellcome Library, London); A man sits in a chair apparently with his abdomen opened surgically. Kneeling before him is the surgeon with a bowl collecting the abdominal contents, watching are three figures, one with spectacles. Could show an early surgical procedure or portray treatment of a severe abdominal injury, from Das Buch der Cirurgia des Hieronymus Brunschwig by Hieronymus Brunschwig (Wellcome Library, London).

Sixteenth-century woodcuts often depict young men wearing striped doublets or striped hose. When historian of science Tillmann Taape embarked on a journey into the meaning of stripes, he discovered that artists used them to mark out people who were neither rich and educated nor poor and illiterate – but something in between.

̽��ֱ��whole topic of stripes, and the messages they convey, set me off on a tangent that took me into the realms of art, fashion and social satire

Tillmann Taape

Wellcome Library, London

Distillation in the 15th century, from Liber de Arte Distillandi de Compositis by Hieronymus Brunschwig

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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What goes up must come down: a brief history of the codpiece

amb206 — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 10:00:01 +0000

In the Elizabethan play Wily Beguiled, a character named Will Cricket boasts that women find him attractive because he possesses “a sweet face, a fine beard, comely corpse, and a carousing codpiece”. Wonderful things have been said about the codpiece, not least in response to the television dramatisation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Explaining the deliberate downsizing of Thomas Cromwell’s codpiece, actor Mark Rylance opined that modern audiences, especially in America, “may not know exactly what’s going on down there”.

An item of male dress that was briefly de rigeur some five centuries ago, the codpiece both covered, and drew attention to, a part of the anatomy that couldn’t even be mentioned in polite society. Writing in the 1580s, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (translated by Donald Frame) summed up the curious case of the codpiece as “an empty and useless model of a member that we cannot even decently mention by name, which however we show off and parade in public”.

At a conference later today (30 April 2015), Victoria Bartels, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, will offer new insights into the popularity of a must-have item for the man about town, with a special focus on references to the codpiece in European literature as well as representations in early modern portraiture and prints.

Bartels' dissertation investigates the militaristic influences found in civilian male dress in 16^th century Italy and Germany, and the codpiece is a prevalent component of her research. At a conference on history and gender, she will propose a novel explanation for its seemingly rapid demise in the last quarter of the 16th century when it shrank to a shadow of its former self, before disappearing completely by 1600.

Fashions can be charted in terms of upward and downward movements as well as shifts in emphasis from one part of the body to another. ̽��ֱ��historical consensus on the origin of the codpiece is that it was devised to fill a gap and, initially at least, preserved men’s modesty. From these practical beginnings, the codpiece (‘cod’ was slang for scrotum) became a fashion item in its own right.

In the 15th century men’s dress comprised doublet or tunic (worn on the top half of the body), hose (bottom half) with a mantle or cloak (worn over the outfit). Hose were two separate wool or linen leggings that fastened into the doublet, rather in the style of fisherman’s waders. As doublets became shorter, and the length of mantles also decreased, the tell-tale bulge (or more) of gentlemen’s privy parts became evident beneath their under-shirts.

“It’s hardly surprising that this revealing style was not to everyone’s taste – and that moralists were quick to condemn it,” says Bartels. In a sermon of 1429 (translated by Michael J Rocke), San Bernardino of Siena admonished parents who kitted their sons out in “a doublet that reaches only to the navel [and] stockings with a little piece in front and one in back, so that they show a lot of flesh for the sodomites”. In 1463 in England, Edward IV’s parliament made it compulsory for a man to cover “his privy Members and Buttokes”.

Pictorial and textual evidence suggests that the early codpiece was constructed from a triangular shaped piece of cloth called a ‘braye’. ̽��ֱ��bottom tip of the triangle was stitched to the hose and the remaining corners fastened to the doublet to form a kind of gusset. This soft triangular flap was superseded by a stuffed and padded shape designed to hold what Montaigne coyly called “our secret parts” and John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary lists as “pillcocke or pricke”.

Masculinity was big in 16^th century Europe – along with notions of chivalry, honour and romance. Codpieces were speedily hijacked for the purpose of proving masculinity in the most blatant of manners. ̽��ֱ��most elaborate versions were singularly showy and portraits show that in the mid-16^th century the codpiece reached epic (if not priapic) proportions. No expense was spared: codpieces were made in luxury silk velvet, bejewelled or embroidered. Even young boys were obliged to wear them.

Bartels says: “Ideas about masculinity were closely linked to notions of martial strength. ̽��ֱ��defensive codpiece was an integral part of the costume worn by German and Swiss mercenaries. On the battlefield, the armour codpiece was both protective and assertive.” In a satirical text by French author Francois Rabelais, a character asserts that men’s genitals require great protection in battle just as nature has equipped nuts and seeds with “belles et fortes braguettes naturelles”.

There are few extant codpieces. Rare survivors include the metal versions made to wear with suits of armour (Henry VIII’s armour codpiece is on display at the Tower of London) and the prettified wool and velvet codpieces adorning the ‘plunderhosen’ of Svante Stensson Sture and his two sons in Sweden’s Uppsala Cathedral.

Costume historians have long argued that the codpiece fell from favour as the result of the vogue for femininity that swept through the French and English courts. Elaborate ruffs and ballooning breeches heralded a shift in focus to the face and hips. “It’s evident in the late-16th and early 17th-century portrait miniatures of decorous young men by Nicholas Hilliard and similar painters that the style of men’s fashion was taking a new direction,” says Bartels.

However, fashion is more subtle than we think. Drawing on detailed investigation of contemporary sources, Bartels argues that codpiece entered a third – and hitherto overlooked – phase in its evolution. During the last quarter of the 16th century, she suggests that the codpiece was squeezed downwards and diminished in size, and then finally supplanted, by the emergence of another trend known as the ‘peascod’ belly.

“ ̽��ֱ��peascod was a style of doublet constructed by skilful use of padding and stuffing to achieve a rounded and tapering look akin to the fecund shape of a peapod ripe for picking,” she says.

“Both fashions protruded and competed for the same bodily real estate – the codpiece was reduced to accommodate the peascod. ̽��ֱ��markedly subtler version of the codpiece possessed a smaller silhouette and was often hidden by the billowing breeches on either side. Even in the northern countries, where it was not uncommon to see bows ornamenting the codpiece, this later version remains relatively concealed.”

Bartels' research suggests that the peascod was as imbued with notions of virility as the codpiece. ̽��ֱ��two are often mentioned together, and compared, in early modern texts. “ ̽��ֱ��peapod was a potent sexual symbol, likened to male genitalia. Moreover, the pea field was a convenient spot for canoodling and the phrase ‘shelling peas’ was employed as a euphemism for sexual intercourse. In Thomas Ingelend’s 1570 play ̽��ֱ��Disobedient Child, a character after mishearing his colleague confusedly asks ‘…with my madame laye in the peeas?’,” she says.

“An exploration of handkerchief designs in ̽��ֱ��Fair Maid (1607) by the historian Juana Green shows that the peapod motif was not just a virility symbol but could also represent betrothal, marriage and fertility. I think it’s fascinating that both styles possessed strong sexual connotations. However, I’m also interested in exploring their subtle differences – and how these two distinct fashions were read by contemporaries.”

Exaggerated peascod doublets became, like codpieces, the object of mockery. In a poem from 1580 the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey derides the use of “largebellid kodspeasid dubletts, unkodpeasid halfhose”. Also in the 1580s, the moralist George Stubbes declared: “Now what handsomenesse can be in these Doublets, which stand of their bellies as big or much bigger than a mans codpiece.”

Some 30 years later Robert Hayman wrote in his poem Two Filthy Fashions:

Of all fond fashion, that were worne by Men.
These two (I hope) will ne’r be worne againe:
Great Codpist Doublets, and great Codpist britch,
At seuerall times worne both by meane and rich:
These two had beene, had they beene worn together,
Like two Fooles, pointing, mocking each the other.

There’s ample historical evidence that men have always agonised about their masculinity – and especially the question of size. A late 15^th century manuscript entitled Detti Piacevoli recounts the following joke (translated by Barbara Bowen): “A woman was asked what kind of penises women preferred, big or small or medium-sized. She answered: ‘Medium ones are the best.’ When asked the reason, she replied: ‘Because there aren’t any big ones’.”

Fashion is all about communication. “We use dress to construct an outward image of our perceived inner selves. ̽��ֱ��items we choose to adorn ourselves with are loaded with complex cultural messages.” says Bartels. “For me, the interesting thing about 16^th century male fashion is the way in which it reveals what was important to men at this time – their preoccupation with masculinity, military prowess and virility.”

Inset images – Portrait of a Young Man, credit Wikimedia Commons; Portrait of Antonio Navagero, credit Wikimedia Commons.

Only briefly in vogue, the codpiece has left a rich legacy in art, literature and – most recently – in televised costume drama. In focusing her attention on this ostentatious male accessory, PhD candidate Victoria Bartels has developed some new ideas about its evolution (and demise) as a symbol of virility.

We use dress to construct an outward image of our perceived inner selves. ̽��ֱ��items we choose to adorn ourselves with are loaded with complex cultural messages.

Victoria Bartels

Left - Wikimedia Commons; centre - ̽��ֱ��Master and Fellows of Trinity College; right - Museo del Prado, Madrid

Left - portrait of Charles V; centre - portrait of Henry VIII; right - portrait of Pedro Maria Rossi

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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