If the fourteenth-century fashionable could have seen themselves! If they had, perhaps the first age of fashion would have sputtered out rather than caught fire. As chance had it, mirrors adequate for head-to-toe scrutiny came into use only toward the middle of the next century, so the constructive exercise of self-scrutiny was close to impossible. Consider what those pioneers of fashion might have seen upon inspection of their decked-out selves: robes hiked up to the calf, then the thigh, right up to the brink of indecency; padded shoulders, tight fit, parti-colored tunics and hose; tasseled hoods, floppy hats, slashed and...

Highly desirable luxury wares had always augmented the medieval trade in staples, and long-distance merchants, even peddlers, regularly carried ready-made luxury goods in their bales and packs. By the fourteenth century city shops had begun to pay close attention to the drawing power of well-displayed luxury wares and built up trade on the premise that fine objects themselves aroused interest, even strong desires to possess. Luxury wares, and their display and presentation, pose questions requiring careful study since the newer mode of presentation to customers in city shops has not received all the attention in scholarly literature that it deserves.¹...

Men in cities enjoyed being seen in their costly wardrobes, and it was their good fortune that they could indulge their preference for fine dress. In achieving man’s estate a fourteenth-century citizen of an Italian town governed by sumptuary ordinances moved beyond the reach of those laws with rare exception. This chapter examines the implications for urban men who remained largely unrestrained in consumption, dress, and display while others—boys and girls, women, and, in synodal law, clergy—came under the surveillance of sumptuary laws.

In 1333 Duccio Puccii, factor of the great merchant banking house of Acciaiuoli of Florence,...

Women in Italian cities did not take well to the restrictions imposed on them in sumptuary laws. They flaunted prohibited fashions in the streets and went over the heads of local officials to gain exemptions from the law. They paid a gabelle in order to wear a forbidden ornament and did their best to interfere with the enforcement of the law. Franco Sacchetti reached new heights of satire when he addressed women’s audacity in flaunting the laws.

Florence in its wisdom established a special office to oversee women’s dress, the much deridedUfficiale delle donne. In 1384, a Messer Amerigo...

The turn to fashion in the fourteenth century began in what would be the last decades of a three-century-long era of expansion in the medieval economy. As such, Fashion’s influence on demand may be treated as a late-added feature of the emergence of the European market economy.¹ In 1955, Frederic C. Lane suggested that “a consumers’ theory of economic growth would ask whether part of the amount previously spent on goods no longer in demand now went into capital accumulation or some form of ‘consumption’ which might be so reclassified.”² Reclassifying did occur in the fourteenth century: staple textiles were...

In a fourteenth-centurybottegathe retail business of the front room gained some leverage over the demands of the back room with its focus on production.¹ The old understanding ofapotheca, warehouse, or magazine (in sua apotheca vel domoin the statutes of the secondhand clothes dealers of Florence) was largely supplanted by a new apprehension ofapothecaas an apothecary shop open for browsing to customers.² For thirteenth-century Venice it has been argued that patrician merchants and shopkeepers alike served as mere brokers of services to the city’s inhabitants.³ By the fourteenth century, stiff competition for advantageous stalls in...

Italian banking and long-distance trade had developed hand in glove in Europe, so a prominent role for banks and currency handlers in marketing luxury goods in Italian towns was an extension of earlier joint enterprises conducted farther afield. Notwithstanding, the banker’s bench or the money changer’s stall as a spot for selling silver, gold, and jeweled wares has earned little comment until recently in the scholarly literature. This small bypath on the road to building complex financial networks warrants some attention, however, since it reveals a different facet of retailing, one that helps explain how precious metals and jewels came...

Although there was little that was genuinely new in the fourteenth century when fashion began to affect consumer preferences and influence demand, fashion was a new economic phenomenon and thus uncharted territory, and there was no template for retailers, merchant bankers, luxury tradesmen, or for that matter urban customers to use for predicting how fashion would affect markets and influence daily life. John Day has noted that “by mid-fourteenth century, merchant capitalism had already perfected the instruments of economic power and business organization that were to serve it for the next four hundred years: foreign exchange, deposit banking, risk insurance,...