Introduction

In 1594, a precious cargo was transported from Florence to Transylvania. In a letter, dated 6 April, Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinando I de’ Medici described the contents to Prince Sigismund Báthory as ‘some sables and lynxes, not those real ones that come from other parts, but those that art imitates from my lands’. Ferdinando emphasised that it was not the economic value of these furs that was notable but rather the ‘novelty of their artifice’.¹ This brief missive reveals much about the availability, interest in and production of imitation materials used in early modern fashionable dress. We discover that furs imitating sable (a small marten with fine dark-brown or black fur, trapped in Siberia) and lynx (a wild cat with a silky white belly and black-patterned coat found in Scandinavia and eastern Europe) were being made in Italy. Unlike imported ‘real’ furs, esteemed for their rarity and cost, these fakes were prized for the skilled craftsmanship they manifested.

This chapter explores these ingenious so-called ‘artificial novelties’ in order to discover how and what we can learn about imitation materials in early modern fashion, particularly when so few examples survive.² It uses hands-on experimental reconstructions, made and tested following early modern sources, to suggest how fakes might have operated aesthetically and culturally, and explores how mimetic materials enabled individuals who were economically or legally unable to wear the finest furs, fabrics, metals and jewels to dress fashionably. Using the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database of 448 inventories that record the belongings of members of the artisan classes in Siena, Florence and Venice between 1550 and 1650, as well as sources from other European cities, it locates some of these materials among the possessions of artisans. It also challenges the assumption that imitations were simply inferior copies for the non-elite. In doing so, it reveals that the often overlooked category of imitations disrupted a culture of clothing that had relied on a hierarchy of materials to display social status and led to creative ways of making and dressing.

Imitation furs and the rarity of materials

We do not know how Ferdinando’s fakes were made, but fine furs could be imitated by treating lesser skins. Common mustelids, such as pine martens and stone martens (from northern Europe), calabers (a kind of squirrel), other squirrels and even domestic cats were dyed black to appear like fine sable. In cities such as Rouen and London, skinners were forbidden from selling dyed furs, but, in 1533, records show that ‘cats painted’ were sold in England.³ Jewish dealers were accused of selling ‘fake’ furs on the streets of Istanbul.⁴ The 1563 Italian edition of Girolamo Ruscelli’s De secreti – perhaps the most popular, copied and translated book of secrets – includes a recipe that promises to transform a cheap white fur into ‘the colour of a leopard or panther’.⁵ It explains how to make a mixture of lead and quicklime that will permanently tint readily available furs (such as rabbit) with black spots that simulate the patterning on wild cats’ pelts. As the technique chemically weakens the skins, and survival bias privileges the finest materials, it is unsurprising that no existing examples of this fake leopard fur are known. But by reconstructing the process we can learn how it worked. An experiment on imitation fur suggested that visually a fake fur could be rather convincing, but the texture is much coarser than authentic leopard fur (Experiment in focus I and Figure i.3).⁶ Those who bought fake furs might have been willing to compromise on quality or durability in return for affordability or availability. Ferdinando de’ Medici himself experimented with counterfeit jewels in his alchemical laboratory at the ducal palace, and so the idea that exotic furs could be created in workshops as well as hunted in distant lands may well have appealed to his sense of wonder. The art historian Marlise Rijks suggests that educated consumers might have valued counterfeits more than the real thing due to what she terms ‘process appreciation’ – that is, valuing the skill of the artisan in making one material appear like another.⁷ Such ‘material mimesis’ could be appreciated as a manifestation of the scientific and artistic fascination of early modern experimenters in pushing the limits of material properties.⁸ Moreover, high-quality pelts took significant time and effort to source, as we see in letters from the merchant Hans Fugger detailing his attempts to acquire enough lynx for a Hungarian-style coat.⁹ Fake furs provided an alternative option in the streets and princely courts of early modern Europe.

The fashion for furs, hitherto associated with elite luxury, widened in the sixteenth century as urban middling and labouring people aspired to fur clothing for aesthetics and utility.¹⁰ We find more than six hundred fur items in the inventories of Italian artisans, mostly from Siena and Venice. A variety of pelts including otter, fox, squirrel, marten, rabbit, cat, wolf are described for trimmings, linings, muffs and occasionally outer garments. For example, a Venetian baker owned two old muffs made of rabbit, and a hemp-spinner possessed an old neck ornament (cravatta) made of purple-dyed fur lined with fox.¹¹ The majority of recorded furs – especially the finest sable and lynx – comprised the stock of furriers and clothing dealers, giving us a broader glimpse of what was available on the market, rather than representing the typical artisan wardrobe. Only two pieces of leopard fur are found among the inventories, both belonging to the Venetian furrier Baldissara Da Pozzo.¹² Given such rarity, it is perhaps unsurprising that people might have wished to imitate leopard fur using Ruscelli’s Secreti or purchase Ferdinando de’ Medici’s artificial sable and lynx novelties.

Beaver fur was another relative rarity. With the creatures driven to extinction in most of Europe, pelts had to be imported from Russia, Scandinavia and through French-controlled Canada.¹³ Its comparative strength and weatherproof qualities reduced the need for the adhesives and varnishes required to produce sturdy headgear from other kinds of animal hair. High felted beaver hats were among the most expensive accessories on the market, but we find thirteen of them among the belongings of Sienese, Florentine and Venetian artisans. Nine of these were owned by the Sienese shopkeeper Adriano Guagni and were described as ‘half beaver’ (mezzo castor).¹⁴ The appearance of pure beaver could be imitated by blending it with rabbit fur or sheep’s wool to produce ‘demicastor hats’, or even by felted wool alone.¹⁵ The process of reconstructing a felted beaver-style hat using pure Merino wool glazed with rabbit-skin glue and napped with a brush reveals how effective this substitute material could be (Figures 3.1a, b).¹⁶ Many surviving early modern felted hats are assumed to be beaver, but without fibre analysis it is hard to tell whether they are made from wool, a blend of furs or pure beaver.¹⁷ Mixed materials and skilful finishing can conceal their status as imitation fashions.

Most furs belonging to the artisans studied by the ‘Refashioning’ project were used in linings, borders and trim, suggesting that fur was both a practical material for keeping warm and a luxurious decorative flourish. The magnificent effect of fine furs could also be achieved by the careful placement of small pieces. Garments could be ‘purfled’ – lined at the neck and sleeve openings – with costly furs, with the remainder made of a cheaper fur.¹⁸ A Venetian rag-dealer’s inventory from 1555 records a heavy duliman gown lined with ‘red skins’ and edged with stone marten.¹⁹ Here, the imitation operated through the implication that an object included more than the bare minimum of fine materials.

Figure 3.1a Hat, 1590–1670. Victoria and Albert Museum, T.22–1938 T.

Figure 3.1b Brushing a reconstructed felted hat to create a smooth shiny surface, Sophie Pitman at the School of Historical Dress, London, 2014.

Imitation silks and the price of finery

Silk fabrics were coveted for their smoothness, lustre, drape and softness. The highest-quality and most expensive silk velvets and damasks were instant markers of luxury.²⁰ In the hierarchies of materials created by sumptuary laws, such silks were often the preserve of the elite, and yet silk was also enjoyed by those lower down the social spectrum through a lively second-hand market, and the careful use of small pieces in clothes and affordable accessories like ribbons and masks.²¹ Spun silks, produced from the waste after the finest silk threads had been reeled from the cocoons, were another lower-cost alternative. A Florentine clog-maker, for example, owned a black filaticcio (spun silk waste) cloak trimmed with sarcenet, and a mask of black velvet.²²

Silks were also imitated by lesser fibres, or blends which combined silk with wool, linen, hemp or cotton. One of the key transformations in the era, as John Styles in Chapter 1 above shows, was a shift towards lighter mixed-fibre fabrics, which were less expensive and less durable than pure wools and silks.²³ In the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database there are more than 1,700 items made of these mixed materials, such as brocatello, buratto, ciambellotto, mezzalana, mocaiardo, mussolo and panno misto. While previous narratives about Renaissance textiles typically separate wools, silks and linens, the widespread use of these mixed blended fabrics, particularly among the middling classes, suggests that a more nuanced approach to textiles in the era is needed.²⁴ By examining one of these materials, mocaiardo – a ‘mock’ velvet known as ‘mockado’ in English – we can observe the widespread purchase, use and economic and legal impact of one of these novel blends.²⁵

Mockado was a mixed-fibre textile with the structure of velvet, known for its hairy or fluffy pile created from looped supplemental warps that could be cut or left uncut. It was woven from some combination of wool, hemp, linen, camel or goat hair or spun silk, making it a far more affordable option than pure silk velvet.²⁶ The word is possibly derived from the Arabic mukhayyar, meaning ‘select, choice’, and possibly was etymologically confused with mocajar, a mid-quality camlet, and mohair. Mockado, and its many variant spellings and translations, were often elided with Naples fustian, tripp and later moquette.²⁷ Produced in the Levant, in Lille and across the Low Countries, and by immigrant weavers in Norwich, it was one of the most popular fabrics among artisans.²⁸ It appears 294 times in the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database, from across the period – 238 of these were in Venetian inventories, only one from Siena and 55 from Florence. Mockado was used in large items of apparel such as cloaks, gowns, petticoats, hose and doublets and smaller pieces including sleeves and other accessories.²⁹ Mockado was worn by men, women and children alike, and dyed into a kaleidoscope of colours: most commonly black, but also brown, blue, green, red, white, pink, purple and yellow. Mockado items were often intended to be decorative and showy: among the most fashionable garments owned by the Florentine wine-seller Evandio Honesti, for example, were a tawny mockado doublet, a red mockado gown with yellow cords, a black mockado petticoat and another petticoat the colour of ‘dried rose’, decorated with yellow and black cords.³⁰

Sumptuary laws suggest that mockado was regarded as a substitute for silk velvet, suitable for those lower down the social scale. A 1551 law in Mantua forbade artisans and their wives – as well as Jews and soldiers – from wearing clothes, caps and shoes with silk or velvet decorations ‘of any sort, except ones made of moccaiato or bavella [cloth made from spun silk]’.³¹ In Pistoia in 1562, regulations offered mocaiardo as an alternative option for those forbidden from wearing ‘silk of any sort’. Women from artisan families were permitted mocaiardo, camlet, catarzo (a coarse wool), samite and other fabrics not included in the category of drappo.³² A 1563 Pisan law stipulated that artisan wives were permitted a single gown of silk mockado or say. Their male relatives, and male peasants and porters, were forbidden from using mockado, silk, russet or grain-dyed wool or camlet in their dress altogether.³³

Sumptuary laws drove a market in substitutes. When silk passementerie was banned in Spain in 1551, for example, artisans adopted wool trimmings.³⁴ Despite the cultural historian Daniel Roche’s claim that sumptuary laws represented a ‘sartorial ancien régime’ marked by ‘inertia and immobility’, they in fact prompted imaginative creativity among craftspeople and nimble purchasing by consumers.³⁵ Imitation goods could provide individuals with products that achieved the effects they desired without breaking the law.

The weaving of mixed-fibre fabrics was also a response to vigilant guild control. In 1576, a London ordinance explained that because blended novel fabrics such as ‘tufted mockado’ were ‘not called by any of the same names that the cloths of woollen or linen of the former ancient time were (although they consist of the same substance)’, the makers and merchants were selling them without paying duties or following guild and city customs, a practice deemed ‘naughty and deceitful’.³⁶ The ordinance stated that that mixed wool and linen fabrics had to be inspected, checked and charged duty. Violations were subject to hefty fines; that for tufted mockado was 20d (about one day of wages for a skilled tradesperson).³⁷ The association between mockado and deceit was reflected linguistically in the way that the term was often used to refer to fakery.³⁸ In 1577, for example, the English Puritan William Fulke denounced Catholic texts as being full of false claims, including ‘mockadoe miracles, narrations, and relations’.³⁹ While the novel and often changing names of new fabrics mean that it can be hard for historians to decipher what each one was (weave structure, weight, size, composition, finish etc.), the 1576 ordinance makes clear that the proliferation of names was not just a marketing tactic but also could help immigrants and others excluded from markets by the guilds to skirt controls.⁴⁰

Mockado was not only consumed by those forbidden from wearing silk. On 6 July 1574, the servant John Knyveton wrote from London to the Earl of Shrewsbury to tell him that ‘all kyndes of tufted mockadoes be so deare because of the [15 June] proclamation for apparel, that now paye xd in every yarde more than before and therefore I staye to bye any till the price be better’.⁴¹ While the proclamation permitted earls to wear silk velvet, Shrewsbury’s request suggests that mockado was desirable in its own right. Surviving velvets made with wool, hemp or linen are often remarkably effective simulants (Figure 3.2a). Their dense plush and sheen can be so similar to pure silk velvet that it is hard to identify their fibre composition without close analysis or scientific testing.

Figure 3.2a Stamped wool velvet, sixteenth-seventeenth century, Italian? Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 07.62.5.

Imitative decoration and the development of techniques

Many woollen velvets are stamped in a manner that reproduces the decorative effect of a more complex weave structure: that is to say, they were woven without pattern, and after the fabric was taken off the loom, a pattern was impressed into the surface with a metal stamp or roller press (Figure 3.2b).⁴² Six mockados in the database are described as stamped, including a sea-green mockado petticoat owned by the Florentine delicatessen worker Angelo Fantacci in 1635.⁴³ Other stamped fabrics recorded in artisan inventories include velvet, mixed fabrics and light silks such as camlet, grosgrain, sarcenet. Hands-on experiments, such as the reconstruction of the stamped mockado doublet belonging to a Florentine waterseller (Experiment in focus III) demonstrate that stamping is an easy and relatively quick process, whereas weaving patterned mockado is a highly skilled and time-consuming task.⁴⁴ Imitation fabrics might cut costs through the use of inferior materials or quicker processing, but the successful end result required ingenuity on the part of the maker.

Imitative decorative techniques could also mimic the shimmering designs of the finest woven silks. A velvet damask woven with crimson silk and gold thread in a pomegranate pattern represents perhaps the most iconic and costly fabric available in Renaissance Europe (Figure 3.3a). The high value of such a textile could be justified both on the grounds of its expensive raw materials (silk, gold, crimson dye) and the slow and highly skilled labour of the weaver. But the colours, patterns and visual effects could be replicated quickly by block printing on to linen, as a fragment in the Victoria and Albert Museum shows.⁴⁵ In this example, crushed mica (shiny silicate scales) was added to pigment to give it a glimmer that recalls fine silk velvet, especially in candlelight (Figure 3.3b). A recipe for an imitation damask, found in a French manuscript from the 1580s, suggests that the effect might otherwise be mimicked through a form of resist-dyeing.⁴⁶ Linen could be glazed using a smoother, starches and heat, which polished the surface into a silky sheen, as one fine surviving doublet demonstrates.⁴⁷ A gown of green satin camuffada striped with gold is mentioned in one artisan inventory.⁴⁸ The word camuffada could mean ‘fake’ (as in ‘camouflage’), suggesting that the satin was woven with materials other than silk. But John Florio defined camuffare in his sixteenth-century English–Italian dictionary as ‘to filch or steale craftily … Also to smooth between stones, to polish’, so perhaps the gown was made of polished satin.⁴⁹ Such linguistic elision demonstrates how such finishes might be associated with fakery.

Figure 3.2b Stamping mockado using a heated four-petalled flower stamp by Jordan Colls and Jenny Tiramani.

Buttons cast from gold or silver or made of precious metal and silk threads wrapped around a wooden bead became increasingly fashionable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A single outfit might require hundreds of buttons, so it makes sense that such a lucrative and highly visible element of dress would spur innovation.⁵⁰ While some artisans owned buttons of ‘real’ gold, silver and silk, many made use of imitations. A grosgrain gown and petticoat, owned by the linen merchant Filippo di Sforzo Guerrieri, had 244 buttons, made of both real and imitation materials. The finest buttons were carefully deployed in the most visible places: 1.5 oz of real gold were used for the buttons on the cloak, while those in the petticoat were made of false gold.⁵¹

Figure 3.3a Damask of silk and metal thread, sixteenth century, Italy. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2002.494.127.

Figure 3.3b Block printed linen with crushed mica, c. 1550–99, French? Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1546–1899.

We also find iron, copper and brass buttons in artisan inventories. Cast-metal buttons might have been polished to look like real gold or silver, but others were shaped to imitate the three-dimensional designs of silk-wrapped buttons (Figures 3.4a and 3.4.b). Patterns and techniques were translated across materials as artisans were inspired to imitate desirable products.⁵² Imitative designs responded to consumer tastes which associated fashion not just with materials but with shape, colour, sheen and design.

Figure 3.4a Detail of silk and metal thread wound buttons on doublet, c. 1645. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1982.183.2a-c.

Figure 3.4b Pewter buttons, cast with pattern that imitates wrapped thread patterns, on jerkin, c. 1555–65. Museum of London, 36.237.

Imitation metals and the anxiety of fraud

Cheaper metals treated to look like gold or silver were used in all kinds of dress, wrapped around threads, and woven into cloth, or hammered and cast into accessories. To take just three cases from over thirty examples in the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database: the aforementioned mockado-wearing Evandio Honesti owned a doublet striped with red silk and fake silver; a Sienese linen weaver had a doublet of fake cloth of gold; while a Florentine carpenter possessed two copper chains, one of which was gilded.⁵³ Gold or silver-gilt lace was an incredibly fashionable and expensive trimming, made of thin wire wound around a silk core. It could be imitated by using copper instead of gold wire (Figure 3.5).

Copper substitute was so widely used in theatrical costume that it was associated with acting and pretence. In the satirical comedy Poetaster, first staged in 1601, actors are described as ‘copper-lac’t scoundrels’.⁵⁴ Another satire, the advice manual The Gul’s Horne-booke (1609), even suggests that stylish men sit on the stage where they can ‘examine the play-suits’ lace, and perhaps win wagers upon laying ’tis copper’.⁵⁵ While audiences expect theatrical devices, fictive materials were more threatening offstage. Contemporaries worried about duplicitous vendors who might fool buyers into confusing fake with ‘real’. The process of covering a silver or copper core with a thin layer of gold was described in detail in 1540 by the metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio, who deemed it a ‘fraud’.⁵⁶ Imitations of all kinds were discussed with unease, but valuable gems and gold were particularly concerning. For the German writer Sebastian Franck, writing in 1541, false religion could be best explained through the simile of fake gold: ‘a thing is all the more wicked and dangerous the more closely it approximates a real thing and yet is not that thing, as “conterfei” [an alloy] and brass approximate silver and gold’.⁵⁷ Consumers were warned to beware fakes: two Dutch travellers cautioned that on a visit to a Parisian second-hand market:

Figure 3.5 Copper lace border, c. 1700. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T.24–1980.

Already in the twelfth century many guilds forbade their members from working with inferior and fake materials; but, as global trade increased, the provenance of materials became even harder to judge.⁵⁹ In order to reassure buyers, guilds marked goods with signs of quality and authenticity such as distinctive selvedges and lead seals.⁶⁰ They also carried out workshop searches and punished dishonest workers. In October 1559, for example, the London dyers’ guild reported to the City authorities that it had levied fines on ‘false coloured cloths being a browne blewe, condemned by Judgement’.⁶¹ In Milan, two men convicted of falsifying gems were shaved and branded in public in 1469, and three years later a Jew in Mantua was arrested and nearly executed for attempting to sell fake gems to local jewellers.⁶²

Vendors were also held accountable. When the City of London’s Court of Common Council passed an act in 1611 against dyeing black silk in a way that increased its weight and therefore price, the court stated that it would hold not just the dyers responsible but also the silkmen who wove and sold ribbons and lace made with ‘silks so deceiptfullie dyed, [which] is so rotted corrupted and spoiled that it is not fit to be worne or used & yet is falslie made faire to the eye to deceave or abuse the buyer & wearer’.⁶³ But there must have been an economic incentive to make and sell fake goods. In Bruges, for example, buttons, buckles, clothing hooks and rings made of gilded pewter, brass, copper, iron and tin have all been excavated, despite a 1497 law forbidding the gilding of any metals other than silver.⁶⁴

Imitation gems and pearls and the fascination with fakery

Historians of science have argued that early modern experimenters gained knowledge about nature when they artificially imitated metals, stones and other matter. Surviving objects and texts express how their findings shaped their understanding of nature, an ‘artisanal epistemology’, as Pamela Smith has called it, gained through the manipulation of matter.⁶⁵ Two recipes for making amber from the 1595 English translation of Ruscelli’s Secreti, for example, suggest the process was about more than merely simulating appearance (Experiment in focus VI). One recipe instructs the reader to mix turpentine with cotton; by following the recipe, we see that the cotton gives the turpentine structural integrity and mimics the natural striations found in true amber. Another recommends making a paste of egg yolks, gum arabic and cherry-tree gum, which ‘will become hard, and shine like glasse, and when you rub them, they will take up a straw unto them, as other amber stones doe’.⁶⁶ Ruscelli pointed out that the stones possessed all the properties of naturally occurring amber – even its triboelectric effect – implying that he regarded them as ‘true’ synthetic amber and not just visually convincing substitutes.⁶⁷ He also did not term these stones ‘fakes’ but entitled the recipes ‘To make cleere stones of Amber’. This perspective may have been widely shared. False amber was presumably not considered negatively by Bernardino Ciampi, a cutlery-maker from Siena whose devotions were assisted with a fake amber rosary.⁶⁸

Many men and women were keen to buy imitations advertised as such, and the fake diamonds, emeralds, rubies, turquoises, pearls and coral we find in the inventories of Italian artisans could be highly prized. For those legally prevented from wearing the real thing, a convincing imitation could enable them to participate in fashions. ‘Because they are forbidden to wear pearls,’ the artist and writer Cesare Vecellio explained in 1590, immigrant women in Venice ‘wear what they call tondini [little round balls] of silver or gold, and other jewellery that imitates pearls’.⁶⁹ In Venice, fake pearls were so successful that they led to the founding of a new corporation of supialume-makers who controlled the manufacture of blown-glass imitation pearls from 1672. In Tallinn, an unusual 1706 regulation listed the sumptuary taxes that allowed people to wear certain materials if they were happy to pay for the privilege. Those who wished to wear real diamonds in a brooch or earrings had to pay 100 daler silvermynt annually, while fake ones were taxed at the lower rate of 50 d sm.⁷⁰

Even those legally and financially able to wear the real thing might find benefits in choosing imitations. In one recipe, Isabella Cortese suggests that a fake pearl might surpass a real one in shape and sheen: ‘when you compare it with a real pearl, it will always seem more beautiful to the eye for being more lustrous and more round’.⁷¹ When King James I was crowned at Westminster in 1603, he wore a mix of real and fake gems, including ‘Stones lyke topasses … lyke saphyres … lyke emaraldes … and other made stones’ along with their genuine counterparts.⁷² Such material substitutions were probably a logistical necessity as much as an economic one when rare gems of high quality and appropriate size and shape were costly and challenging to source, especially in large quantities. As Timothy McCall has argued, courtly splendour required such an extravagant display of magnificence that members of the elite regularly relied upon ‘material fictions’ such as oricalco (a brass substitute for gold) or paste gems backed with coloured foils in order to create the required overwhelming effect of shimmering brilliance.⁷³ Imitation gems could cost almost as much as real ones because they required so much time, effort and expertise to manufacture.⁷⁴

The social expectation of material magnificence was felt even among the middling or artisanal levels of society. Locating low-cost luxuries in non-elite Italian Renaissance homes, Paula Hohti discovered that most imitative products related to the social act of dining, such as jugs and glass goblets painted like gold, brass or bronze.⁷⁵ Clothing and accessories were an even more public expression of material abundance and discernment than tableware, and we find over four hundred examples of imitation and low-cost substitute materials in the wardrobes and jewellery boxes of Italian artisans in the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database (excluding the aforementioned 1,700 mixed material fabrics).⁷⁶

The motivation for imitation

Law-makers struggled with the economic, legal and social implications of imitation materials. The 1551 Spanish law specifically noted that hats could not be adorned with false gold or silver decorations.⁷⁷ In Bologna, laws in 1568 banned both real and imitation gold and silver on clothing or accessories (‘neither good nor false’); and both high- and low-quality real pearls, along with counterfeit ones, were also expressly forbidden (‘neither good nor bad nor false’).⁷⁸ Such cases suggest that law-makers were often less concerned with material distinctions than with regulating appearances.

Some legislators saw benefits in allowing imitation materials. In October 1634, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal refused a London Goldsmiths’ Company’s petition to prohibit counterfeit pearls, stones and gilt or enamelled metals. He believed not only that imitations did not devalue real gems but that fakes also benefited the economy, providing taxes and enabling individuals to fulfil their desire to appear bedizened in ‘rich jewels’ without bankrupting themselves or the country. ⁷⁹ Nevertheless, Charles I issued a proclamation in 1636 prohibiting the ‘wearing, buying, or selling of Counterfeit Iewels’: fake fashions ‘exhausted’ his subjects’ wealth and ‘exported’ money out of the country in return for things that were materially worthless, ‘carrying onely a shew and semblance of Precious stones, Pearles and Jewels’.⁸⁰ In this legal controversy, we can see how imitative goods challenged economic policy, social distinction and the culture of appearances.

A culture of imitation

At once desirable and inferior, ingenious and deceptive, frugal and superfluous, imitative goods occupied an uneasy position in the cultural consciousness of early modern Europe. The economic historian Guido Guerzoni has noted the diverse Italian lexicon of imitation, finding the terms imitante (‘imitating’), falso (‘false, fake’), finto (‘sham’), apparente (‘illusory’), contrafacto (‘counterfeit’) and camuffo (‘camouflage’) in commercial, statutory and juridical sources.⁸¹ The historian Corine Maitte turned to French dictionaries to establish the precise meanings of imitation, copie, faux and contrefaçon, but found slippery and indistinct terminology, with words being used synonymously and evoking both positive and negative traits.⁸² We must resist the temptation to interpret this language of imitation through twenty-first-century associations with scams, acknowledging instead the central role of imitation in early modern culture generally, and in craft practice in particular.

Apprentices of all crafts gained skills through copying, and imitation was one of the primary means of developing expertise.⁸³ Giorgio Vasari encouraged artists to imitate nature in their paintings and sculpture, while Leon Battista Alberti stated that the painter who could imitate gold with his pigments merited greater praise than one who used gold leaf.⁸⁴ Crafts were improved, revitalised and diversified through the imitation of techniques. The success of the Florentine wool industry, for example, was probably based on the adoption of imported techniques.⁸⁵ Economic historians have written about the way that ‘import substitution’ and imitative processes led to product innovation.⁸⁶ The skills developed by Muranese glass-makers in their quest to imitate luxury materials resulted in new ‘populuxe’ products valued by an emerging urban middle class.⁸⁷

Invention and imitation, therefore, were not diametrically opposed; they were part of the same craft practice. As global markets expanded and travel increased, craftspeople were exposed to novel fabrics, colours, cuts and silhouettes which inspired them to imitate fashions from other cities and countries. While some of the clothes listed in the inventories of the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database are described as imported from elsewhere (such as ‘from Holland’, or d’Olanda), hundreds of items are referred to as being ‘in the style of’ foreign fashions. These are recorded by appraisers as generally ‘foreign’ as well as more specifically in the English, French, Genoese, German, Greek, Lucchese, Moorish, Moroccan, Neapolitan, Persian, Roman, Syrian or Turkish style (see Chapter 7 below). ⁸⁸ Where the buratto gown cut ‘in the French style’ owned by the Venetian dyer Marin Marini in 1632 was actually made is unknown – but it was associated with French fashion.⁸⁹ Other entries explicitly suggest that artisans were imitating foreign products. Thirty-one pairs of leather shoes made ‘in the fashionable French style’ were found in Santi Biancardi’s Sienese shop when he died in 1646.⁹⁰

The imitation and adoption of foreign goods has been understood not only as an act of ‘material appreciation’ but also as a means of competition and even ‘material conquest’ of other nations.⁹¹ Among contemporaries there was some anxiety about dressing in foreign styles. The clergyman William Harrison, for example, lamented that in late sixteenth-century England ‘we do seem to imitate all nations round about us, wherein we be like to the polypus [octopus] or chameleon; and thereunto bestow most cost upon our arses’.⁹² Imitations fuelled the fashion industry, and shaped narratives about identity, materiality and corporeality.

Conclusion

Acknowledging the widespread use of imitation materials has implications for the ways we understand surviving archival, visual and material sources as well as our understanding of the culture of appearances. This is important because many scholars rely on images to learn about what was in the wardrobes and on the backs of early modern people, believing that ‘the literal truth in dress is what we do see’.⁹³ But weavers, dyers, cloth finishers, goldsmiths and other craftspeople were adept at making one material imitate the optical effects of another. We cannot be certain that a portrait sitter is really wearing a silk velvet rather than a wool imitation, or that their pearls were sourced from the sea rather than moulded in a workshop.

Archival sources revealing the scale of production and interest in fake materials and reconstructions demonstrating how simulant materials imitated fashionable effects should make us question what we are really seeing in Renaissance portraiture. We also need to interrogate surviving objects, for some early modern imitation materials are so successful that they hide in plain sight, misidentified in museum catalogues. While the use of fake materials at court, on stage and in the streets of Renaissance Europe was an open secret, we must also keep in mind that imitations and fakes might have fooled contemporaries too, further complicating the already challenging task of interpreting the descriptions of items in archival texts such as inventories and letters.⁹⁴ More than four hundred items in the ‘Refashioning the Renaissance’ database are explicitly described as being fake, but many more might have been missed by those who drew up the records. For instance, the appraiser of the Sienese bookseller Nicolò Ormandini’s belongings in 1591 noted that ‘a plain necklace was said to be fake’, suggesting that he had not made the assessment himself but was perhaps informed by a witness.⁹⁵

Early modern fakes made fashions available to a wider range of men and women than ever before – and the material traces and reconstructed examples of these imitations testify to the ingenuity of craftspeople in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Imitation materials used in dress and accessories span a wide range of objects. At one end of the spectrum are poor-quality silk blends dyed with fugitive colours and deceptively sold to ordinary town- and countryfolk; at the other are fake diamonds and lynx furs which impressed early modern princes. By focusing on imitation as a category – or subculture – of early modern fashion, this chapter has brought together sources for the making, wearing and meaning of simulated materials with wider discussions of artifice, craft skill and innovation, and the power of appearance in early modern Europe. In doing so, it represents a first examination of early modern fake fashions as a discrete category, arguing that imitations should be recognised as a key feature of clothing in the period.