A society to
reveal. The underwear consumption in Renaissance Naples
The essay focuses on the underwear consumption of the Aristocracy in
Renaissance Naples. The research is based on unpublished documents collected
from the Filangeri’s Private Archive of Naples: 120 items shared
equally between post mortem inventories and the lists of trousseau. The essay
has been developed in three stages: the first one has compared the luxurious
underwear with the European portraits in order to visualize the garments and,
subsequently, to verify their employ; the second stage of our study has proposed
to recognize the symbolic function of the underwear spotlighting the
gender differences; finally the third one has reconstructed some economic
feature of the underwear consumption focusing on the level of the household
expenditure and the role of the female in the organization and administration
of the family wardrobe.