Forbidden Fashions - (Costume Society of America) by Isabella Campagnol (Hardcover)

About the Book

A study in contradictions, revealing that in Venice anything was possible

Book Synopsis

Form-fitting dresses, silk veils, earrings, furs, high-heeled shoes, make-up, and dyed, flowing hair. It is difficult for a contemporary person to reconcile these elegant clothes and accessories with the image of cloistered nuns. For many of the some thousand nuns in early modern Venice, however, these fashions were the norm. Often locked in convents without any religious calling--simply to save their parents the expense of their dowry--these involuntary nuns relied on the symbolic meaning of secular clothes, fabrics, and colors to rebel against the rules and prescriptions of conventual life and to define roles and social status inside monastic society. Calling upon mountains of archival documents, most of which have never been seen in print, Forbidden Fashions is the first book to focus specifically upon the dress of nuns in Venetian convents and offers new perspective on the intersection of dress and the city's social and economic history.

Review Quotes

Out of the foggy depths of Venetian convents, Isabella Campagnol delightfully brings to light the diverse fashions cloistered nuns wore and the lifestyles they followed. Skillfully drawing on period archival documents, engravings, literature and paintings, Campagnol draws a vivid portrait of how these "involuntary" nuns lived their lives in luxury and luxurious clothing through copious textual examples and illustration.
?Maureen Daly Goggin, professor of rhetoric, Arizona State University

Designed to be both academic and entertaining, Forbidden Fashions draws on hundreds of dusty volumes documenting convent inspections that were kept in state and church archives.
?The New York Times

About the Author

Isabella Campagnol, a dress, textile, and decorative arts historian, is the co-editor of Rubelli: A Story of Venetian Silk. She has lectured on the topics of Venice and Venetian textiles in Italy and Europe and the United States. She lives between Murano and Rome.