THEA 312
Dressed for Diplomacy: Global Fashion in Early Modern Europe Spring 2025
Division I

In this course we will examine the context and cultural messaging contained in portraits of people from around the globe visiting (or brought without consent to) western Europe in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, including visitors from the Arctic, North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Though these images are often read as “authentic” depictions of regional dress, the clothes worn by the people in these images represent a complex spectrum of hybridities of foreign and European garments as recorded by European hands. In what ways are the people in these images performing diplomacy? Who decided what the people wore in these pictures and how does it reflect the goals of the portrait? Is it possible to “read” the clothing in these portraits as “speaking” for the person pictured? For the painter? For a political objective? What kinds of agency and self-representation were the portrait subjects able to express through the medium of dress? What role do clothes play in diplomacy and how were the global visitors expressing their diplomatic intentions through dress? What did it mean for a foreign visitor to wear their home clothing while abroad or to take on the dress of their host country? How are international and inter-personal relations expressed and effected by clothing, gesture, comportment, and self-fashioning? Coursework will include participation class discussions, investigations of visual primary sources, one presentation on readings, and a final 8 page research paper on the subject.