This article analyses Giulia Calvi’s Vestire il mondo as a major contribution to the visual history of early modern globalisation. Focusing on costume books from sixteenth–century Europe to Edo–period Japan, it explores how clothing functioned as a key medium for representing human difference and organising hierarchies of gender, religion, and civilisation. By tracing the transnational circulation of images, the essay highlights costume books as instruments of visual knowledge operating between art, ethnography, and power.
The Fabric of the World: Clothing, Vision, and the Making of Global Difference (On "Vestire il mondo. Una storia globale di abiti, corpi, immaginari", by Giulia Calvi, Bologna: il Mulino, 2025) / Giovanni Tarantino. - In: CROMOHS. - ISSN 1123-7023. - ELETTRONICO. - 28:(2025), pp. 1-11.
The Fabric of the World: Clothing, Vision, and the Making of Global Difference (On "Vestire il mondo. Una storia globale di abiti, corpi, immaginari", by Giulia Calvi, Bologna: il Mulino, 2025)
Giovanni Tarantino
2025
Abstract
This article analyses Giulia Calvi’s Vestire il mondo as a major contribution to the visual history of early modern globalisation. Focusing on costume books from sixteenth–century Europe to Edo–period Japan, it explores how clothing functioned as a key medium for representing human difference and organising hierarchies of gender, religion, and civilisation. By tracing the transnational circulation of images, the essay highlights costume books as instruments of visual knowledge operating between art, ethnography, and power.
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