Dressing Up is a marvelous book—a visually arresting (156 plates!), richly textured, and intellectually compelling history of clothing and its multiple meanings from ca. 1300 and 1600 in Germany and beyond. It showcases the new cultural and visual history of the period at its best. The bulk of Ulinka Rublack's evidence stems from German cities, merchant powerhouses such as Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Leipzig, or cultural centers such as Luther's Wittenberg; it includes some barely known, completely new, and utterly captivating sources. While German materials form the core of this study, Rublack succeeds admirably in situating the German sources in a broader European and even global context. The rise of “fashion,” just like that of modernity for which it serves as a handy marker, was not a uniquely European phenomenon, she highlights, but rather occurred in a multi-centric way in different parts of the early modern world.

In Europe, a push toward fashion first becomes noticeable in the Late Middle Ages, when, sparked by dialogue with the east, interest in clothing styles began to take hold outside the milieu of courts. By the sixteenth century, “fashion” as a term and concept gained currency in many European languages, and clothing took on a whole new import in social and cultural life. The result was a colorful and rapidly changing sartorial world, far from the bleak picture painted by scholars such as Daniel Roche, a world in which sumptuary laws often went unheeded or unenforced and members of all social classes could indulge in flaunting novel fashion items—artificial braids for women, heart-shaped purses for men—thanks to a system of lending and gifting clothes.

Rublack credits two interrelated processes with the emergence of this sartorial regime. On the one hand, global commercial expansion coupled with the Renaissance valorization of material goods led to new forms of production and consumer practices that involved clothes. Simultaneously, the period witnessed the proliferation of new visual and artistic practices that represented clothes, accessories, and, most importantly, people in various types of dress. Taken together, the greater significance of both images of clothing on two-dimensional display and of actual clothes on the three-dimensional figure of the living human body turned dress into a newly potent, culturally active medium. Contemporaries thought, felt, and acted through dress.

In a series of fascinating case stories, Rublack parades the possibilities of this medium before the reader's eyes. Rereading Matthäus Schwartz's book of clothes in which the Fugger bookkeeper is depicted in 135 different types of dress across his lifetime, Rublack shows how clothes could provide a medium for experiencing and navigating the demands of masculine identity and an aging body. Such a reading endows the “Renaissance individual” with welcome complexity. Rublack further nuances our understanding of early modern personhood in a set of chapters on the growing importance of clothes in the emotional and psychic lives of married couples, parents, and their children caught up in consumerism and the evolution of bourgeois notions of taste, notably Nuremberg's Behaim family. Rublack's discussion of Lutheran views on clothing, in turn, reveals the potency of dress in theological and cultural arguments about the proper public order in which, according to the Protestant mainstream, neither popish sumptuousness nor ungodly rags should have a place but a tasteful bourgeois “New Luxury” should rule. This vestiary reform, Rublack convincingly argues, puts the Protestant Reformation in sync with the “material Renaissance.”

Clothes further proved instrumental in formulating larger concepts of national belonging and ethnic identity. In a chapter on “Nationhood,” Rublack traces patriotic campaigns among German humanists who advocated the development of an indigenous (read: not Italian) urban aesthetic of clothing that fit their definition of a civilized, free nation and flourishing Empire. Differentiation from various “others” both inside and outside Europe was crucial to this process. Not surprisingly, the unique genre of costume books soared from the 1560s onward, creating a panorama of clothing customs from all over the world, or what Rublack terms “a global moral geography” in which clothes stood in for levels of civilization. In “Looking at Others,” Rublack probes this visual material for what it reveals about German awareness of and interest in the larger world, which she characterizes as extensive and, at times, even open-minded. One of Rublack's major contributions indeed is her portrayal of Germany as an active and dynamic participant in the transnational exchanges of goods, people, and ideas that accompanied European expansion. It puts Rublack's work in productive dialogue with recent studies such as Christine Johnson's The German Discovery of the World or Alix Cooper's Inventing the Indigenous and offers a much needed corrective to the tenacious conventional image of early modern Germany as an inward-looking, static country forever mired in religio-political conflicts.

It is impossible to do justice to Rublack's multilayered book in a brief review. Let me offer one way of thinking about it by taking seriously her suggestion that clothes are good to think with. Rublack herself borrows a distinction from Lucien Febvre and Claude Levi-Strauss, who, in a playful conversation about the effects of buttons on civilizations, divided cultures into “the draped and the sewn.” Dressing Up as a whole struck me as a draped garment—with flowing, artfully arranged layers upon layers of argumentation rather than clear lines that cut a firm and easily traceable silhouette. Some answers are harder to find within the arguments' many folds. How, for example, does dress change in post-Reformation German Catholic lands? Rublack's individual chapters, though, are clearly and tightly sewn, with a discernible red thread of interpretation running through each. Some virtually burst at the seams, as Rublack packs in much visual and textual evidence; tellingly, in place of a conclusion, there is an epilogue that delivers yet more. The book's hybrid, dazzling construction will perhaps be more aesthetically and intellectually pleasing to some readers than others. It leaves no doubt, however, that Rublack has created a truly original, astonishing assemblage of arguments about clothes and their history that other scholars will want to spin further.