Turnau Irena History of Dress in Central and Eastern Europe from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century

Warszawa: Institute of the History of Material Culture, Polish Academy of Sciences, 1991. — 168 s.Published in a limited academic edition of 500 copies. Distinct national dress existed in each country of Central and Eastern Europe in the period discussed in this book. To some extent it was dependent on models from the Near East and on changing fashions coming from Western and Southern Europe. National and regional native traditions were very important as well. In spite of that we lack synthetic studies about the national dress of the upper classes, while the studies about the folk dress are usually based or materials from the last two centuries. No scholar has yet tried to show the variety of national costumes in the Eastern part of Europe. The development and inventiveness of the most important fashion centres, as well as their crossing influences on smaller countries which did not constitute separate states, have not been pointed out. None of the histories of dress published so far includes countries farther east than Germany. The individual character of dress in many of the countries to be discussed here was noticed by travellers as early as the 16th century. Hans Weigel (with illustrator Jost Amman) made this observation in their book published in 1577. It was also emphasized by Cesare Vecellio in his great compendium of world costumes published in 1590...