Man met baard (land onbekend) before 1558

Enea Vico made this engraving of a bearded man in the mid-16th century. The man’s distinctive dress, from his pointy shoes to his tall hat, suggests he is a foreigner, but someone familiar to Vico’s audience. Fashion prints like this one were popular in Europe at the time, showing the dress of different social classes and nationalities. They were a way of defining a sense of local identity through contrast. The image of foreign dress codes worked to establish difference and to locate the identity of the domestic population, who bought the prints and looked at them. As a historian, I am interested in what these images tell us about the way people saw themselves and others. Fashion prints are one resource, but so are travelers’ accounts, maps, and literature. All these sources help us understand how identity is formed in relation to the societies around us. We can see that identity as something actively shaped, and something subject to change.