Why a 15th-century gown is so this season

Open a glossy magazine this autumn and you will see an unexpected backdrop to Ferragamo’s autumn/winter campaign. The Italian brand has partnered with the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to use nine Renaissance paintings from the museum in photos promoting its latest collection.

This is part of what Ferragamo has termed its “New Renaissance”, playing on the brand’s Florentine heritage and the fact that it is semaphoring its own rebirth process. The Renaissance is traditionally considered to have been a period of intense revival in the arts and culture throughout Europe, beginning in about 1400, with Florence as an epicentre. Many historians and art historians would now quibble with the idea that the arts had grown stale during the pre-Renaissance era and would argue for a widening of geographic scope and moveable periodisation. However, the former is certainly the interpretation that general culture, and Ferragamo itself, has adopted. Fifteenth-century Florentine artists “dared to break the shackles of medieval norms, sculpting a fresh artistic language and new mythologies, kindling what we now know as the Renaissance”, notes the brand statement about the latest collection.

Ferragamo’s association with Florence began in 1927. That was the year that Salvatore Ferragamo set up shop in the Tuscan city on his return from Hollywood, where he had been designing shoes for the burgeoning film industry. The fashion house is now under the guidance of Maximilian Davis, the 28-year-old British designer who became creative director in 2022. His latest collection features impeccably tailored, quietly luxurious garments in a muted palette with flashes of vibrant reds and metallics. These pair well with the chosen paintings from the Uffizi.

The model Vittoria Ceretti poses in front of Giorgio Vasari’s 1534 portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, wearing a fresh take on the traditional suit. Her enigmatic gaze reflects that of the duke, who would be assassinated three years after the painting was produced. In one hand Ceretti clasps a handbag, mirroring how the duke subtly reaches for his weapon. In another image, Jessica Stam is transposed in front of the rocky outcrop depicted in Giovanni Bellini’s Holy Allegory, which dates from the last decade of the 15th century. Rocky backgrounds were often associated with religious figures such as saints or hermits and Stam’s outfit — a cropped hooded jacket paired with a high-waisted, flared midiskirt — all in stark white, resembles an extremely chic nun’s habit.

Jessica Stam with Giovanni Bellini’s Holy Allegory for Ferragamo

FERRAGAMO

Ferragamo is not alone in taking sartorial inspiration from the Renaissance. In Chloé’s autumn/winter 2023 collection, featuring elaborate sleeves, dropped waists and billowing skirts, the designer Gabriela Hearst is making reference to the 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi’s Esther Before Ahasuerus (although Gentileschi is perhaps more properly a baroque artist). Lanvin’s Bruno Sialelli also cited the Renaissance as one of his touchstones for this season’s designs. Jeanne Lanvin, who started the fashion house of that name in 1893, was herself interested in Renaissance art. It inspired her to create the house’s signature colour, subsequently seen on everything from packaging to sneakers. Sometimes known as Fra Angelico blue, it was based on the delicate shade perfected by that early 15th-century Florentine artist.

But why is the Renaissance such a touchstone for fashion designers? It could be because the period itself was so very fashionable. An unprecedented range of fabrics and textile patterns were newly available to the Renaissance consumer thanks to trade routes and domestic production and clothes were being used as a way of displaying an individual or a family’s social and economic status via the value of the materials and intricacy of the designs chosen (although some scholars have suggested a rather more mundane factor behind the Renaissance interest in fashion — the introduction of larger mirrors made from glass into wealthy European households in the 15th century.)

The Renaissance was also the period when writing about fashion blossomed. This included humanist texts about the theories and proprieties of certain types of dress. The onset of printing brought with it lavishly illustrated books that showed contemporary ideas of different kinds of dress from around the world, from history and for various occasions, such as Cesare Vecellio’s Degli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo from the 15th century. These help us to understand better how people dressed in the Renaissance.

Paintings and drawings, like those that have inspired so many designers, are another way of knowing what Renaissance clothes looked like — although some of these depicted fantasy garments rather than reality. Ghirlandaio’s late 15th-century portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni shows a young woman from Florence’s rich mercantile class at the height of her sartorial power. This is especially poignant as it was possibly a posthumous portrait, following the 19-year-old’s death in childbirth. Her bodice appears to be made from gold brocade, which could cost 40 times as much as a simple linen and eight times as much as woollen fabric. The slashed sleeves of her dress are in an intricately patterned fabric, and she wears a large gold, ruby and pearl pendant as well as two jewelled rings. Such ensembles would have represented a large investment.

The Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni by Ghirlandaio

Written sources, such as letters and inventories, are another good source of information, as is legislation. Sumptuary laws decreed who could — or couldn’t — wear certain materials, embellishments or clothing styles. The gold brocade worn by Giovanna Tornabuoni was technically banned in Florence. These laws also targeted other displays of “excess”, such as the use of a large number of candles. Although the thought of the government controlling your luxury purchases might be horror-provoking, medieval and Renaissance laws of this kind are some of the best evidence we have about what luxury fashions were in vogue at the time. Such legislation was enacted across Europe but was exceedingly common in Italy. An early sumptuary law from Genoa in 1157 banned the use of sable furs over the value of 40 soldi as hem trimmings. Much sumptuary legislation was about controlling access to clothing elements which denoted wealth or status so that they were only available to a certain social group. On a visit to Ghent, Jeanne I, Queen of Navarre and Queen Consort of France at the end of the 13th century, lamented at the sight of a particularly well-dressed crowd: “I believed myself to be the only queen and here I am seen with hundreds.”

One can only speculate what Jeanne would have felt had she been able to attend this month’s fashion shows.