While fashion magazines and social media strongly influence how people dress today, there were literally fashion police in most early modern European cities, according to art history scholar Ana Cristina Howie, with local laws dictating – down to the gold button and the color of silk – what people of various groups could and could not wear.

Credit: Galleria Nazionale della Liguria a Palazzo Spinola, Genoa.

“You can wear silk, but only in a certain number of colors – black, white, yellow, green, dark blue, red, purple, or tawny brown,” Howie said of “sumptuary laws” local to 16th century Genoa. “You can wear wool in any of the colors silk comes in, plus fawn, white, rose, and porcelain. You can wear velvet, but not if it has any kind of pattern. It’s hard to wrap your head around what’s forbidden because it’s so detailed.”

In new research, Howie, assistant professor of history of art and visual studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, points out how sumptuary laws in early modern Genoa – designed to “control luxury clothing consumption and the social ills it could encourage” – constrained women more than they did men, even while fashion was an important means of self-expression for women, who were seen as “the silent sex,” Howie wrote.

Her research, “Sumptuary Laws, Gender, and Public Dressing in Early Modern Genoa” was published in The Historical Journal in September.

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.