There has always been fashion.

At least that's what Georg Simmel claimed in 1905 in his classic text on the "Philosophy of Fashion".

It condenses the fundamental tension between people's "equalization and [...] individualization drive", the need for social support versus individual differentiation.

Simmel's idea of ​​social “class fashions” says that the lower classes can imitate the higher classes, especially in the area of ​​clothing, by “merely investing money” and cheaper imitations.

This results in a dynamic of rapid change, of outdoing oneself and setting oneself apart: "The living conditions of fashion as a continuous phenomenon in the history of our genre are paraphrased here."

Of course, if fashion has always existed, how can we speak of the “birth of fashion”?

This is the title of a comprehensive, richly illustrated “Cultural History of the Renaissance” by Ulinka Rublack, which was published in English in 2010.

In the original, the book is called much more cautiously “Dressing Up.

Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe”.

In fact, Rublack's theses range between the two title versions: fashion is examined as a social "symbolic practice".

The modern interest in the self

It is about clothing as a form of appropriation, expression and safeguarding of a certain idea of ​​self in society.

It's about marking or claiming "cultural identity", but also about a need for the "material expression of new emotional worlds" and about a new desire to consume.

This "symbolic practice" experienced a decisive intensification and acceleration during the Renaissance.

For example, a dress code issued in Leipzig in 1596 frustratedly refrained from detailed regulations, since there was “almost nothing certain to order and to write down, all the while the costumes and the stuff in the German nation change almost every year and therefore from one to the other”.

Overall, Rublack focuses on the situation in “early modern Germany”.

This opens up a new perspective

have at least Germany's reformed areas in the sixteenth.

Century have not been considered fashion hotspots so far.

Thus, Rublack's book does not provide a history of the development of clothing styles in the period from 1300 to 1600. It does not systematically examine the social, economic, manufacturing, or aesthetic transformations and reasons why new, elaborate, rapidly changing clothing became so important in early modern German lands.

And it doesn't compare more closely to other European fashion scenes in Italy, France, Spain, Burgundy or the Netherlands.

The book concentrates on a series of exceptional pictorial and textual testimonies on the phenomenon of fashion that were created between Strasbourg, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Leipzig and Frankfurt/Oder.

One could say it is about the new para-texts and para-images of fashion in the sixteenth century.

A respectful look at the other 500 years ago

The well-known, spectacular picture book that the Augsburg bourgeois son and bookkeeper of the Fuggers, Matthäus Schwarz (1496-1574) began to put together at the age of twenty-three in 1520 makes the start, parallel to an autobiography "Der welt Lauf" that is now lost.

In the manuscript (today in Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum) Schwarz had himself depicted until his death with the clothes he had bought for important occasions, sometimes only a month apart.

The precisely dated 137 snapshots of this vestimental curriculum vitae are inevitably reminiscent of today's selfies on a time-line.

However, the full-length portraits made by professional painters required considerable organizational and financial effort.

In addition, Schwartz had his childhood and youth presented in retrospect.

And in contrast to today's social media, one can only speculate as to which audience the "klaydungsbuechlin" was actually intended for.

The fact that his son Veit then continued the fashion project with his own illustrated autobiography proves the importance within the family.