Forbidden Fashions: Invisible Luxuries in Early Venetian Convents

Form-fitting dresses, silk veils, earrings, furs, high-heeled shoes, make-up, and dyed, flowing hair. It is difficult for a contemporary person to reconcile these elegant clothes and accessories with the image of cloistered nuns. For many of the some thousand nuns in early modern Venice, however, these fashions were the norm. Often locked in convents without any religious calling--simply to save their parents the expense of their dowry--these involuntary nuns relied on the symbolic meaning of secular clothes, fabrics, and colors to rebel against the rules and prescriptions of conventual life and to define roles and social status inside monastic society. Calling upon mountains of archival documents, most of which have never been seen in print, Forbidden Fashions is the first book to focus specifically upon the dress of nuns in Venetian convents and offers new perspective on the intersection of dress and the city's social and economic history.

Author: Isabella Campagnol
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Published: 01/15/2014
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.25h x 6.41w x 0.92d
ISBN: 9780896728295

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2014 pg. 691

About the Author
Isabella Campagnol, a dress, textile, and decorative arts historian, is the co-editor of "Rubelli: A Story of Venetian Silk." She has lectured on the topics of Venice and Venetian textiles in Italy and Europe and the United States. She lives between Murano and Rome.