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Power Dressing in Seventeenth-Century Europe and Beyond - HOA00089I

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  • Department: History of Art
  • Credit value: 20 credits
  • Credit level: I
  • Academic year of delivery: 2023-24
    • See module specification for other years: 2024-25

Module summary

This module will understand Europe as a self-reflexive, cross-cultural sphere whose clothing communities were in dialogue and exchange with other global fashion centres. This module invites you to immerse yourself in these clothing communities from the past and to learn how to research and interpret them.

Module will run

Occurrence Teaching period
A Semester 1 2023-24

Module aims

Fashion became more widely accessible to people in seventeenth-century Europe. Even young pupils could memorise from John Clarke’s 1639 collection of proverbs for school children: ‘Better be out of the world than out of fashion.’ The world of 17-C fashion - with its velocity of man-made fashion cycles; life-style magazines, global trade - and with Paris as the emerging capital of European fashion – these are all familiar to us now. Fashion was as much imaginative play as it was a highly effective, yet unstable political tool through which power relations between subjects and sovereign, men and women, western and non-western societies could be re-thought, manipulated and subverted. For example, some 17th-C women wore adapted versions of male clothing to achieve their own stake in the world of learning and politics; something rather similar to the 1970s term ‘power dressing’ for women in our modern world of business. However, the world of the 1700s can also be utterly remote, bewildering and mesmerising in its strangeness. This module invites you to immerse yourself in these clothing communities from the past and to learn how to research and interpret them. This module will understand Europe as a self-reflexive, cross-cultural sphere whose clothing communities were in dialogue and exchange with other global fashion centres. You will therefore not only hear the voices of princes and burghers, but also those in the marginal or remote communities connected to 17thC Europe.

You will learn skills to study 17th-C fashion through a wide variety of source material ranging from actual sartorial artefacts and their wearers to images and texts. You will not simply understand 17C fashion in its affinity to our contemporary world of fashion, but you will be able to carefully historicise it. You will also learn how to approach your object-focus study in a methodological conscious way by formulating appropriate theoretical and conceptual frameworks. You will be able to challenge essentialist terminologies like ‘the Orient’ by understanding non-Western clothing communities with greater nuance and complexity.

Module learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

  • an understanding of the interdisciplinary exchange between the history of art, the history of dress/textiles and other relevant fields of study and their methodologies

  • familiarity with the cultural practices relating to the making, marketing, wearing and representation of 17-C clothing.

  • an ability to analyse and interpret the medium-specific issues of visual and textual source material.

Indicative assessment

Task % of module mark
Essay/coursework 100

Special assessment rules

None

Indicative reassessment

Task % of module mark
Essay/coursework 100

Module feedback

You will receive feedback on assessed work within the timeframes set out by the University - please check the Guide to Assessment, Standards, Marking and Feedback for more information.

The purpose of feedback is to help you to improve your future work. If you do not understand your feedback or want to talk about your ideas further, you are warmly encouraged to meet your Supervisor during their Office Hours.

Indicative reading

  • Anishanslin, Zara. Portrait of a Woman in Silk. Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World. Cumberland: Yale University Press, 2016.

  • Paulmann, Johannes, et al. Dress and Cultural Difference in Early Modern Europe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.

  • Ribeiro, Aileen. Clothing Art: the Visual Culture of Fashion, 1600-1914. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

  • Riello, Giorgio. Back in Fashion: Western Fashion from the Middle Ages to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.

  • Rublack, Ulinka, and Giorgio Riello. The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, C.1200-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

  • Sarah Fee, ed. Cloth that Changed the World. The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.

  • Terry Satsuki Milhaupt. Kimono. A Modern History. London: Reaktion Books, 2014.

  • Trentmann, Frank. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First. London: Penguin Books, 2017.

  • Vincent, Susan J. The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today. Oxford: Berg, 2009.

  • Welters, Linda and Abby Lillethun. Fashion History. A Global View. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2020.


The information on this page is indicative of the module that is currently on offer. The University constantly explores ways to enhance and improve its degree programmes and therefore reserves the right to make variations to the content and method of delivery of modules, and to discontinue modules, if such action is reasonably considered to be necessary. In some instances it may be appropriate for the University to notify and consult with affected students about module changes in accordance with the University's policy on the Approval of Modifications to Existing Taught Programmes of Study.