Notes on contributors

Paula Hohti is a professor and a fashion and material culture historian at Aalto University (Finland). Her research focuses on the Italian Renaissance, with a special focus on dress and decorative arts. Hohti has been a principal investigator within the international The Material Renaissance and Fashioning the Early Modern projects, and a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Centre for Textile Research in Copenhagen. In 2016, she received a €2 million ERC consolidator grant to develop material hands-on experimentation and historical reconstruction as a methodology in dress and fashion history.

John Styles is Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Hertfordshire (UK). Before taking up his professorship at Hertfordshire, he was Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where he remains Honorary Senior Research Fellow. He specialises in the history of early modern Britain and its empire, especially the study of textiles, material life, manufacturing and design. His books include Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (co-edited with Amanda Vickery, Yale University Press, 2006), The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale University Press, 2007), and Threads of Feeling: The London Foundling Hospital’s Textile Tokens, 1740–1770 (Foundling Museum, 2010). He curated the exhibition ‘Threads of Feeling’ at the London Foundling Museum in 2010–11 and at the de Witt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, USA in 2013–14. He is currently writing a book on fashion, textiles and the origins of the Industrial Revolution.

Andrea Caracausi is Professor of Economic History at the University of Padua (Italy). He specialises in the social and economic history of Italy and the Mediterranean world, with particular focus on textile manufacturing, guilds, women’s work and child labour. He received a BA in History (University of Padua) and a PhD in Economic and Social History (Bocconi University, Milan). Recent publications include ‘Fashion, capitalism and ribbon-making in early modern Europe’, in Thomas Max Safley (ed.), Labor before the Industrial Revolution: Work, Technology and Their Ecologies in an Age of Early Capitalism (Routledge, 2019).

Sophie Pitman is the Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and Research Director of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection at the University of Wisconsin Madison (USA). A cultural historian specialising in the early modern period, she is particularly interested in clothing, textiles, material culture and reconstruction methodology. Formerly she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (UCL) and held postdoctoral positions on the Making and Knowing Project (Columbia University) and the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ project (Aalto University), where she led the experimental strand of research including the reconstruction of a mockado doublet. Pitman holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on clothing and textiles, including investigations into sumptuary law, luxury and identity, and early modern materials and craft practice. Her current research explores clothing, weather and the environment. She recently curated the exhibition Remaking the Renaissance (February-May 2024, Lynn Mecklenburg Textile Gallery) which featured many of the Refashioning experimental reconstructions.

Michele Nicole Robinson prepared her chapter for this book as a postdoctoral researcher on the project ‘Refashioning the Renaissance, Popular Groups and the Material and Cultural Significance of Clothing in Europe 1550–1650’, which was funded by the European Research Council. Her work explored the role of print culture in the dissemination of ideas about fashion in early modern Italy.

Natasha Awais-Dean is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of History, King’s College London (UK). She holds degrees from the University of Cambridge, the Royal College of Art and a doctorate from Queen Mary, University of London. Natasha has curatorial experience from working at three national museums – the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, London – where she developed a love for working with objects. Her research interests include the material culture of early modern Europe, with specialism in jewellery and metalwork. Her publication Bejewelled: Men and Jewellery in Tudor and Jacobean England (British Museum Press, 2017, rev. edn 2022) reinterprets collections within the British Museum, revealing that jewellery was owned, worn and valued by a range of men in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English society. Natasha is a Trustee of the Society of Jewellery Historians, where she has previously held editorial roles (Features Editor of Jewellery History Today and Co-editor of Jewellery Studies).

Victoria Bartels is a cultural historian of early modern Italy. She holds a PhD in Early Modern European History from the University of Cambridge, where her doctoral research examined the cultural role of arms and armour in Renaissance Florence. She worked as a Research Fellow on the project ‘Refashioning the Renaissance: Popular Groups and the Material and Cultural Significance of Clothing in Europe 1550–1650’, funded by the European Research Council. She also previously held a Kress Fellowship at the Medici Archive Project in Florence. She currently works as a post-doctoral researcher at Aalto University and a Lecturer at Syracuse University in Florence.

Stefania Montemezzo is an Ahmanson Fellow at I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, in Florence, Italy. She specialises in Renaissance Italy and the Mediterranean, focusing on late medieval trade and Venetian mercantile practices. Her other main area of interest is the material culture of popular groups in Renaissance Italy. She has held fellowships from the Universities of Bologna and Padua Aalto University and Villa I Tatti-Harvard and is co-author of the database ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’, which collects thousands of fashion items from Italian inventories. She was a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, St Andrews University and Gustave Eiffel University (Paris). In 2017 she received the ‘Ugo Tucci’ award from the Istituto Veneto di Lettere Scienze e Arti (Venice) for her doctoral dissertation.

Astrid Wendel-Hansen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena (Germany). She is interested in early modern northern Europe, particularly Sweden and its relationship with its Baltic territories. Her research focuses on relations of inequality, material culture and consumption as well as the daily economic and provisioning activities of middling and poor people. Her current research focuses on thefts and the economy of early modern Sweden. She defended her PhD in 2020 at the University of Uppsala with a dissertation titled Dress Matters. Clothes and Social Order in Tallinn, 1600–1700. Her other publications include ‘The fabric of a corporate society: Sumptuary laws, social order and propriety in early modern Tallinn’, in Johanna Ilmakunnas and Jon Stobart (eds), A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) and an edited volume To Take Us Lands Away: Essays in Honour of Margaret R. Hunt (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2022).

Elizabeth Currie is a lecturer and author specialising in the history of fashion and textiles. She has published articles in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Fashion Theory, Renaissance Studies and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on tailoring, clothing retail and production, health, gender and the body. Her books include Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) and the edited volume A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion: The Renaissance (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). She is currently researching the clothing of non-elite groups in Italian Baroque art.

Jordan Mitchell-King is a PhD researcher at De Montfort University (UK). Her research is centred on the relationship between the materiality of textiles and the cultures surrounding their use. Her current work focuses on eighteenth-century women’s undress clothing in Britain, exploring the complex ways in which elite women experienced and understood informal forms of dress in the period. Jordan is also a maker and often experiments with research through the making and wearing of reproduced historical clothing. She studied at the University of York for her undergraduate degree in History and at the Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum for her MA in History of Design.

Anne-Kristine Sindvald Larsen is a cultural historian from Denmark. She received her master’s degree in history from the University of Copenhagen in 2016. She was a PhD candidate in the ERC-funded ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ project and the Department of Art and Media at Aalto University, Finland. In her PhD dissertation she focused on the culture and meanings of clothing of Danish artisans and their wives living in the town of Elsinore from 1550 to 1650.

Piia Lempiäinen holds a MA in Finnish and Nordic History from the University of Helsinki. Her own research focused on medieval and early modern clothing terminology and class, and over the years she has deepened her knowledge on various historical textile crafts. She worked in the ERC funded ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ project for four years as a project co-ordinator, where among other responsibilities she was part of developing the project’s participatory research framework through co-ordinating the citizen science project on early modern stockings.

Valerio Zanetti is the Sir John Elliott Junior Research Fellow in History at Oriel College, University of Oxford. He completed a History PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2020 and has since held fellowships with the Society for Renaissance Studies, the Warburg Institute, I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Herzog August Bibliothek and the British School at Rome. His research and publications focus on the history of the body across early modern Europe, exploring topics ranging from women’s athletic culture to horse-riding and hunting, embodied nationality and educational games, dress and fashion.

Maarit Kalmakurki is a scenographer, researcher and educator. She is a lecturer at the Department of Culture at Xamk – South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, where she also leads the digital design part in a Creative Europe funded project Time for (S)heroes (2024–28). Maarit’s doctoral thesis (Aalto University, 2021) investigated digital character costume design in computer-animated feature films. This pioneering work has been recognised by the industry and media, such as The Walt Disney Animation and The New York Times. She has conducted practice-led research by digitally reconstructing historical clothing in Refashioning the Renaissance and in an international, multidisciplinary research project Visualising Lost Theatres. Maarit has received the Herbert D. Greggs Honor Award from the USITT editorial staff and the TD&T Publications Committee for her article studying performance costumes in Stockholm during the Gustavian era.

Elena Kanagy-Loux descends from the Amish and grew up between the USA and Japan, immersed in both traditional Mennonite craft and the DIY fashion scene in Tokyo. After earning her BFA in Textile Design from FIT, she won a grant to study lace-making across a dozen European countries for four months in 2015. Upon returning to NYC, she co-founded Brooklyn Lace Guild and began teaching bobbin-lace classes. In 2018 she completed her MA in Costume Studies at New York University and now works as the Collections Specialist at the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.