A Climate of Restriction.

Renaissance society depended upon the production of cloth and clothing as one of its key industries. As a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, the production of textiles kept as much as a third of urban populations employed, often in servile and brutal conditions. Despite the immense amount of energy that went into the production of clothes, there was a prevalent mistrust of clothing as "fashion" at the dawn of the Renaissance; the majority of the population still adhered to the medieval belief that such displays contributed to the sin of vanity. This attitude lost some ground during the fourteenth century, however, as court and urban fashions in Europe became more changeable and daring. The tension between moralists who denounced changing fashions as sinful and the upper-class obsession with clothes became a hallmark of this period. Renaissance moralists particularly zeroed in on...