Overview
Italy invented Renaissance fashion and then lost the lead. Divided and largely under foreign rule, it took its silhouettes first from Spain and then from France for some three centuries — while remaining, throughout, one of Europe’s great makers of the cloth those silhouettes were cut from.
Key garments and style
Spanish Habsburg rule over Milan and Naples brought the Spanish manner: dark, stiffened, formal dress, the ruff at the neck, the conical bodice and the farthingale beneath the skirt, all of it built on rigid understructure. The eighteenth century swapped that for French Rococo — lighter silks, pastels, the sack-back gown — and the fashionable Italian looked much like the fashionable Parisian.
Venice is the exception that proves the pattern. It remained a producer of the first rank, in silk and in the needle lace of Burano, and it developed dress of its own that answered to no court: the bauta mask worn with the black tabarro cloak and tricorne, permitted in the long carnival season and used by all ranks precisely because it erased rank. Venetian sumptuary magistrates spent the period trying, with little success, to limit what citizens wore.
Transition
Nineteenth-century unification gave Italian dress a political vocabulary it had lacked, and the industrial base that survived these centuries is what postwar Italy built its fashion industry on.