The suspicion of shopping was part of a larger fight against luxury and all the evils that came in its train. The argument reached back to Plato, who had reasoned that the material world was a mere shadow of reality. While his ideas had never been entirely lost in the Middle Ages, they gained new prominence in the Renaissance through the Platonic Academy at Florence, where Marsilio Ficino translated his complete works into Latin. In his Republic, Plato followed the decline of a virtuous, frugal city as it was corrupted by the lust for luxurious living. When citizens kept to the basic needs set by nature, the city was in ‘sound health’. Once people started to follow the desire of their flesh, however, they set in motion an insatiable drive for more that ended in war and corruption. First, they wanted to ‘lie on couches and dine from tables, and have relishes and desserts’, but, rather than being satisfied with that, this only whetted their appetite for ‘painting and embroidery . . . and gold and ivory’.40 The quest for luxury was insatiable and forced the city to expand and go further and further afield in search of resources, leading to war and conquest. Aggression abroad was worsened by decay at home, as luxury emasculated formerly virile citizens. The loss of self-control turned vigorous citizens into weak brutes, incapable of defending themselves. Inevitably, the corruption of the flesh led to the corruption of a republic. This link between a frugal lifestyle and republican greatness on the one hand, and private excess and public corruption on the other, was a central theme for Cicero, who would become the Renaissance’s favourite Latin author.
Christianity gave these classical ideas a fresh thrust and urgency. Just as Plato had argued that bodily pleasures interfered with the soul and the pursuit of true knowledge, so the Church warned that the desire for earthly possessions distracted Christians from the life of the spirit. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus had said: ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’41 By tracing the lack of self-control all the way back to original sin and Adam’s eviction from paradise, Christian teaching also sexualized luxury. The desire for goods, money and carnal lust all sprang from the same source.
That luxury easily led to lechery was common knowledge in the Renaissance and contributed to the moral disquiet about shopping and excess. A mercer in late-sixteenth-century Venice, for example, was accused of living ‘luxuriously’ because he was suspected of having extramarital affairs.42 Only in the hands of the Church, where it was used appropriately to proclaim the glory of God through splendid buildings and paintings, was luxury safe. On the eve of a daughter’s wedding, a Venetian patrician might proudly show off trousseaus full of clothes richly embroidered in silk or gold, but conspicuous consumption was tempered by no less powerful displays of frugality, such as choosing to be buried in the coarse brown habit of a Capuchin monk. The path to heaven started with simple living. According to a popular Venetian proverb, he who ‘disregards the world and its things within it, is given wings to go to the summit of heavens’.43
Suspicion of luxury was the kindling with which the Dominican friar and fanatical preacher Girolamo Savanarola started the ‘bonfire of vanities’ in the middle of Florence’s Piazza della Signoria in 1497. On the bottom step of the pyrotechnic pyramid lay precious foreign tapestries; higher up were images, board games, musical instruments and books by Boccaccio.44 It is important to remember that many Florentines not only owned paintings, lutes and domestic furnishings but many also happily piled them up 20 metres high and danced around the flames as they burnt.
Opulence and excess did not only trouble fanatics like Savanarola. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Venice senate passed more than a dozen laws and regulations against such a ‘sumptuous’ lifestyle. Lavish weddings and expensive fur-lined coats made visible inequalities in wealth and status that threatened the republic’s ideal of equality and restraint. They also triggered a competitive spending spree which pushed some citizens into debt. For a republic frequently at war, this was a serious concern, for money that had been spent on ermine or gilded furniture could not be collected as a special war tax. A first law in 1299, by the then Great Council, tried to curb spending on weddings, and applied to everyone except the doge and his family. Another in 1334 complained about the ‘inordinate and especially superfluous expenses by both men and women’ and justified restrictions because cupidity, ‘the root of all evil’, was all too easily creeping up on its citizens. In the fifteenth century, the senate’s principal concern shifted to dress. The wide sleeves of mantles (socha) were prohibited in 1400. Deprived of that distinction, wealthy Venetians started to line theirs with precious furs. The senate responded with a new law in 1403 that outlawed the use of ermine and marten. A string of restrictions followed, from the allowed size of the trousseau to the use of gold and silver in gowns and coats. In 1512, the senate stipulated that no more than six forks and six spoons were to be given as wedding gifts and banned a whole range of luxurious home furnishings, including gilded chests and mirrors and highly decorated bed linens. Two years later, a special magistracy was set up, with three noblemen empowered to check, regulate and punish extravagant behaviour. Some offenders, they reported, threw bread and oranges at them. ‘The fickleness of unbridled appetites of men as well as women,’ the senate concluded, ‘continues to grow so much that few care about spending.’ Still, it would not give in without a fight. In 1562, the senate launched its most comprehensive attack, outlawing tapestries that were 1.5 metres high, prohibiting gilded fireplace furnishings, and stipulating in fine detail what was permissible at banquets, all the way to specifying that desserts were to consist only of small pieces of ‘ordinary pastry’ and fruit in season.45
While precocious, then, consumption in Renaissance Italy also remained precarious, kept in check by a series of material and moral constraints. Excess and opulence retained a stigma of sin and corruption. Splendid possessions could not simply satisfy individual desire but needed civic legitimation. Tableware and furnishings were becoming more numerous and sophisticated, but, overall, they were part of a culture of refinement rather than of novelty and its twin, disposal. Quality, storing wealth and reuse retained the upper hand, for patricians as well as artisans. While the number of stools and chests was on the rise in the homes of craftsmen, the choice of words used by many inventories is telling: they are described, simply, as vecchio or vechissimo (old or very old).46 We are not dealing with a consumer culture of high throughput; it was geared towards luxury rather than the mass market. The tone of consumption thus reflected and reinforced the extraordinary accomplishment of the highly skilled artists and artisans in these urban luxury industries. At the same time, this left these societies highly vulnerable, heavily dependent on the fortunes of small luxury markets and sensitive to shifts in international trade and politics beyond their control. The Portuguese discovery of a new sea route to the East in 1497 sidestepped Venice. Competing traders from Northern Europe arrived in the Levant in the wake the Holy League’s defeat of the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, off western Greece. The rise of Atlantic trade in the next two centuries pulled the centre of commercial life north to Amsterdam and London, further marginalizing Venice and Florence. Plagues in 1575–7 and 1630 decimated their populations, and the Thirty Years War (1618–48) cut them off from the German fairs and cities, one of their remaining markets. The Mediterranean chapter of magnificent luxury consumption had come to a close.
The clash between commerce and custom, between desire and restraint, was a European-wide phenomenon in the late Middle Ages and early modern period. Venice and Florence may have been at the forefront, but markets extended their reach in this period, from respectable cities like Nuremberg to small towns in the Black Forest. And as they did they brought with them more goods and tastes that posed a challenge
to the social order. In addition to financing trade and buying and selling in bulk, merchants were themselves ambassadors of new fashions. Hans Fugger, for example, the head of the powerful creditor-merchant family firm in sixteenth-century Augsburg, southern Germany, was a discerning lover of shoes made in the Spanish fashion. He ordered his from Spanish shoemakers in Antwerp with detailed instructions, down to their small, ornamental perforations.47 Such new fashions and imported goods were vehicles of distinction and emulation that could unsettle existing hierarchies and codes of behaviour. What if a style-conscious apprentice were to copy Fugger’s shoes? And what of the local shoemakers who might lose their livelihood to foreign competitors? Things did not have to come from very far to be threatening. In 1453, for example, Nuremberg passed a sumptuary law outlawing long peaks on shoes, a fashion blamed on nearby Swabia.48
Between 1300 and 1600, a great wave of sumptuary laws swept across Europe. In parts of central Europe, such legislation retained its force into the nineteenth century. At first, regulations banned extravagant meals and gifts at weddings and funerals. In the fifteenth century, the focus shifted to clothes.49 In German-speaking central Europe, over 1,350 ordinances were passed regulating clothing alone between 1244 and 1816.50 These laws reveal a world in flux and give us an opportunity to explore a little further how early modern societies responded to the challenge posed by the advance of goods. The laws’ fixation on clothing is simple to explain. These were the most visible markers of one’s place in the social order, denoting status, rank, age and gender. Unlike in Venice, where many restrictions had an egalitarian motif and hit all patricians and citizens alike (except the doge), most European sumptuary laws were instruments of inequality, seeking to preserve a finely graded hierarchy. Thus, Nuremberg fairly typically reserved silk, furs and pearls for aristocrats, princes of the church and respected professions; only knights and doctors of law were also allowed to wear gold threads.
Societies reacted in three ways to transgressions. One extreme was a sweeping ban. In Strasbourg, an ordinance of 1660 fined anyone who dared to imitate ‘new’ clothes from foreign nations, ‘regardless of whether it looks good or bad’. The other was to give in. Under Henry VIII, in 1532–3, the English Parliament had passed an act ‘for Reformacyon of Excesse in Apparayle’ which, among other things, limited the wearing of purple silk and cloth of gold tissue to the royal family (dukes and marquesses were allowed to wear it in their doublets). It forbade anyone not in receipt of at least £100 a year to ‘weare any satene damaske silke chamlett [a mixed fabric of silk and wool] or taffata in his gowne cote with sleeves or other uttermost apparell [sic]’ nor any foreign fur.51 In London in 1574, a member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company was sent to prison for wearing a ‘pair of hose lined with taffety, and a shirt edged wieth silver contrary to the ordinances’, and a few years later, the Lord Mayor ordered that apprentices were allowed to wear only hand-me-downs from their masters.52 But, overall, English justices of the peace showed little enthusiasm for enforcing the restrictions. Elizabeth I issued several clothing proclamations, but by the end of her reign such bills routinely died in the House of Commons. The Tudors’ sumptuary legislation lapsed in 1604. The Netherlands had not even bothered to introduce any. Significantly, these two were the most advanced societies not only commercially but, as we shall see, also in learning to live with change and trusting people to monitor and fashion themselves. Still, in the seventeenth century, they were the exceptions, not the norm.
Most societies steered a third, middle path, making some allowance for new tastes by creating ever more finely detailed codes of dress. In a new regulation in 1693, the patricians of Nuremberg tolerated the fashionable short jacket that replaced the customary long coat, but when it came to caps and accessories imposed an elaborate set of gradations. Ladies of old noble families were allowed to wear a silken velvet cap with a sable or marten border that, during public festivities, could be adorned with buckles of gold and pearls, though not diamonds. Wives and daughters of ‘respectable merchants’ could also wear a velvet cap, but the cost was not to exceed twenty-four gulden and they were prohibited from attaching gold buckles or gold lace. Matrons and maidens of regular trading families and other members of the third rank were allowed a cap of velvet with dyed marten, to cost no more than ten gulden, without any gold whatsoever. Shopkeepers – the fourth rank – were limited to tripp-velvet with rims of simple fur (not marten) and neither silver nor gold. Similar rules reached into other spheres of life. Their visibility made coaches, for example, potent carriers of status. Only the first class was permitted to ride in a dream of silk. Coaches for the second class had to be upholstered in cloth, but red and blue were prohibited. Third-class people had to pay fifty thalers for the privilege of renting a coach and then had to make do with plain grey cloth, horses without shiny harnesses and coachmen without livery.53
Enforcement varied. While many communities relied on their citizens to restrain themselves, others were more punitive. In eighteenth-century Basel, thousands of women were fined for dress abuses. Few went as far as Mustafa III, the sultan of the Ottoman empire, who in 1758 went out in disguise into the Aya Kapisi quarter in Istanbul to check whether non-Muslims were respecting his clothing laws. When he stumbled across a Christian and a Jew wearing yellow leather boots reserved for Muslims, he had them promptly hanged.54 In general, enforcement depended on local allies in guilds, churches and community courts with an interest in disciplining offenders and defending the social order. On their own, states and central governments were able to do very little. That was one major difference between England on the one hand and central Europe, France and Scandinavia, on the other, where local authorities actively fined and admonished transgressors in their midst.
Such laws expressed a view of the world as one of fixed horizons. A society had limited resources and needed order and self-restraint to survive. For early moderns, to consume literally meant to use something up or to exhaust it. This latter sense – for example, burning wood or wearing a coat until it is entirely worn through – was still alive as late as 1900.55
In societies with limited technological innovation and no sustained growth, the flight of money and resources was a natural cause of concern. A burgher’s wife in Nuremberg who wanted a silk dress from Lombardy threatened to put local artisans out of business. Money was scarce and once spent on luxuries escaped the reach of the tax officer. That spent on foreign luxuries left the local economy altogether. This was the background for many sumptuary laws which tried to stop wealth from going to waste through luxurious living. Moreover, if one group in the community started to consume more, it diminished what was left over for everyone else. How people dressed, what they ate and how they spent their money was therefore treated as a communal matter, not an exercise of private choice. Consumption had to be subordinated to production. Dress marked one’s guild and profession. Social stability required people to know their place and consume within their limits. New fashions, especially when coming from outside, were an assault on this conservative order. Those who lusted after new styles, the Strasbourg law of 1660 explained, were losing ‘the commendable steadfastness for which our old German forefathers had a singular reputation in other things as well as in clothing’.56 Fears of extravagance were directed at conspicuous patricians as much as at uppity plebeians. The limits placed on wedding feasts, jewels and expensive caps and gold buckles all targeted status competition at the top. If wedding costs were allowed to spiral out of control, the children of burghers would marry later or never, sending a community on the road to extinction.
These were the fears. What about the reality? How much difference did these restrictions make? Clearly, they were unable to arrest the march of time and completely freeze societies in a static mould. Artisans would innovate with new styles and materials to stay ahead of the rule book. In many parts of Europe, living conditions picked up again after the ravages of the Thirty Years War. In the early seventeenth century, for example, m
en and women in Bondorf and Gebersheim, two villages in Württemberg, Germany, owned 3 and 12 articles of clothing respectively. A century later, the number had shot up to 16 and 27 pieces. By 1800, it had doubled again.57 Not far from there, in the town of Laichingen in 1796, the wardrobe of the merchant Georg Christoph Nestel included 17 short fashionable vests cut with a high waist, in colourful patterns as well as in black and white, and including ones made of cotton and silk. Eighty years earlier, the merchants and members of the local town council had accorded themselves the privilege of wearing cotton as well as gold and silver. But the lower orders continued to have to wear local dress made of a mix of linen and cotton. By the mid-eighteenth century, half the clothes of married women were inventoried as ‘old’ or ‘semi-old’. The authorities forced artisans and the poor to appear in black dress in church and at town gatherings. Consequently, the town was a sea of plain, black dress. Light cottons and bright colours – the twin marks of the fashion revolution, to which we shall return – started to make their slow appearance only in the 1790s, a full century after they had reached the Netherlands and England.58
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