A dress for the mother in late Medieval and Renaissance Italy

This study examines pregnancy and confinement garments worn in Italy between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, the very period when fashion first began to evolve. Evidence shows that a particular dress for parturient mothers did not exist in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. This was a time of transition, when the comfortable and functional garments of earlier times slowly gave way to much more constraining clothing. The focus of this paper is on the peculiarities of dresses designed in the late medieval period when, for the first time in the history of the Western world, new Italian sartorial strategies developed clothes that were very tight-fitting but at the same time extremely versatile and adaptable to a woman's changing body during her gestation. These garments reflect the environment and culture of the time and shed light on the material culture of the society that created them. At the same time, the garments also indicate contemporary aesthetic ideals, highlighting fashion’s power to initially exalt fertility's primordial importance, only to reject it in later periods.