The First Fashion Magazine of the 16th Century

Long before fashion magazines, personal style blogs, or carefully curated social media feeds, a 16th century German accountant named Matthäus Schwarz was documenting his wardrobe in extraordinary detail.

Between 1520 and 1560, Schwarz commissioned artists to create more than 130 precise watercolor portraits of him on parchment, recording the clothing he wore at different stages of his life. The earliest images, painted by Narziss Renner, reconstructed Schwarz's appearance from infancy through his school years and apprenticeship. Over the next four decades, he continued adding portraits that captured changing fashions, important occasions, and the way he chose to present himself to the world.

The resulting manuscript, known as the Klaidungsbüchlein, or Book of Clothes, has been described as the world's first fashion book—and, in many ways, the Vogue magazine of its time.

Today, we are joined by Ulinka Rublack and Maria Hayward, co-editors of the first English translation of Schwarz's remarkable work, to explore what this collection reveals about clothing, identity, status, and self-fashioning in the sixteenth century.