Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting

Chicago, April 3-5, 2008

The Communication of Appearances:
Dress and Identity in the Early Modern World

Relying on a broad definition of fashion, this CFP aims to attract several
panels focusing on one or more of the following issues: the material
realities in which fashion is engendered; the diffusion of particular
sartorial styles; and the complex ways in which clothes reveal the wearer's
gender, social status, and hers or his intellectual, political, religious
and cultural values.
The direct symbolic relation of clothes with identity, clarifies well the
polyvalent language of attire, thus inviting an interdisciplinary approach,
which will bring together specialists in communication studies, art
history/visual studies, literature, anthropology, political sociology, and
more.

Possible suggested topics:
1. Various expositions of how early modern geographical discoveries,
technological innovations, and the related expansion of urban centers,
markets, and products affected the daily lives and appearances of
contemporaries.
2. National styles and their influence throughout Europe and the New World,
with particular reference to Italian fashion during the Renaissance, Spanish
fashion during the Catholic Reformation, and French fashion from the times
of Louis XIV onwards. Of course, subtle analysis of sartorial evolution
should transcend all-encompassing discourses of zeitgeist, cutting across
social and regional divides. Changes in design, reflecting contemporary
ideas of proper appearance and taste, should be confronted with specific
cases of personal and group agency across social, regional, and gender
divides.
3. The ways in which women and men used apparel and cosmetics for body
improvement or concealment.
4. Sumptuary Laws: including the various strategies applied by governments
and city councils to restrain expenditures on attire, as well as the
physical marking of socially undesirable groups such as Jews and
prostitutes.
5. Clothes as disguises: for example, Carnivalesque costumes showing the
ritualized opportunities used to symbolically subvert and transgress
sartorial conventions.
6. The functions of supposedly unchangeable forms of clothing
(anti-fashions) used in public ceremonies by monarchs/princes/rulers, civic
officers, and clerics.

No geographic limitations apply, and papers dealing with any related topic
are welcome.

Proposals should include the following items:
1. Preliminary abstract, 150-300 words.
2. CV with e-mail address, phone and fax numbers.
Please send them by April 30, 2007 via e-mail attachments to: Gabriel
Guarino:
guarinoggmail.com; or guarinoresearch.haifa.ac.il

--
Gabriel Guarino, Ph.D.
Department of General History
University of Haifa
Tel. (Home): +972-4-9593337
Cellular: 0525-662275