Street Style: Art and Dress in the Time of Caravaggio

by Elizabeth Currie

Overview

A revealing portrait of class relations during the Italian Renaissance explored through the artistic representations of clothing.
 
In late sixteenth-century Rome, artists found inspiration in bustling streets and taverns, depicting soldiers, Romani fortune tellers, sex workers, and servants among the city’s poorest inhabitants. Street Style explores these hidden lives, uncovering how the stories of ordinary people are preserved through their clothing and appearances in art. Written records highlight the harsh conditions faced by marginalized groups, while prints and paintings often promoted visual stereotypes. With fresh interpretations of notable works by Caravaggio and his followers, this book reveals the complex social meanings of dress and the ways art captured and shaped the real-life struggles of early modern Italy’s lower classes.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781836390855
Publisher:	Reaktion Books, Limited
Publication date:	10/13/2025
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.61(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Currie teaches at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She has published widely on the history of fashion and textiles, including the edited volume A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Renaissance.
 

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: The Art of Everyday Life
Chapter 1. Rogues and Rascals: Cutting a Dash
Chapter 2. Romani Dress: Assimilation and Segregation
Chapter 3. Sex Workers and the Price of Visibility
Chapter 4. Servants, Servitude and Vicarious Display
Chapter 5. The Poor and the Ends of the Clothing Cycle
Conclusion

References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Street Style presents a vivid array of subjects from the everyday world that fascinated early seventeenth-century painters in Rome - soldiers, gypsies, prostitutes, pilgrims and beggars. It brilliantly unites literary, art and social history, suggesting both the real life of the individuals and their role as stock characters. A deep knowledge of how dress and clothing that's fundamental to the narrative has enabled fascinating new readings of major works by Caravaggio and his circle."

Helen Langdon

"Sporting a rich array of early modern images in paint and print, especially from baroque artists working in Italy, Street Style delivers a lively, cultural history of European clothing with a welcome, fresh focus on types of men and women from marginal social groups. The author smartly shows how genre art is no simple mirror of a past world but a broader cultural representation of ways of wearing and living."

Elizabeth S. Cohen

"Street Style uses the sometimes boldly stylish and sometimes ragged clothing of Baroque Rome’s most marginalized inhabitants to illuminate the astonishingly complex relationship between art and society during the age of Caravaggio. Currie’s expertise in the history of clothing and wide knowledge of new scholarly findings about the texture of daily life in this period enable her to crack the (dress) code. As a result, the intended narratives in genre paintings by these artists gain new clarity, and the struggles of those trying to survive and prosper in this turbulent religious capital gain new resonance."

Paul H. D. Kaplan