This captivating book reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history‎.‎ Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance‎,‎ they chronicle how style‎-conscious accountant Matthaus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes‎,‎ and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self‎-image‎.‎ These bourgeois dandies‎'‎ agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the sixteenth century‎:‎ one has to dress to impress‎,‎ and dress to impress they did‎.‎ The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years‎,‎ which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time‎.‎ These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes‎'‎ fashion‎-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions‎,‎ which render the pair the world‎'‎s first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture‎.‎ The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress ‎- seemingly both ephemeral and trivial ‎- is a potent tool in the right hands‎.‎ Beyond this‎,‎ it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and every day culture of the period‎.‎ Historians Ulinka Rublack‎'‎s and Maria Hayward‎'‎s insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of sixteenth‎-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista‎'‎s wardrobe‎.‎ This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award‎-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani‎,‎ from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz‎'‎s most elaborate and politically significant outfits‎.‎