Matthäus Schwarz, Renaisance Sartorialist
Manolo says, thanks to the interesting article about the birth of European “fashion” at the History Today, the Manolo has been introduced to the chief accountant to the family Fugger, Matthäus Schwarz, who was apparently the sort of Renaissance Sartorialist. In July 1526 Matthäus Schwarz, a 29-year-old chief accountant for the mighty Fugger family of merchants from Augsburg, commissioned a naked image of himself as fashionably slim and precisely noted his waist measurements. He worried about gaining weight, which to him signalled ageing and diminished attractiveness. Over the course of his life, from his twenties to his old age, Schwarz…