Baselwear

Engravings of Swiss clothing styles from the 1630s

How to admire one another in a good year

Guildmaster and servants

Maidservants: fast mouth-work, slow housework

Schoolmaster, teacher-assistant and student

Noblewomen and their maidservants going to church

The marriage court made up of a board member,
a clergyman and a member of the local council

Local aristocrats

A good woman beats the wine out of her drunken husband's head

Bridegroom and nobleman

Young fellows

A woman mourning her husband

Wine merchant (street crier)

A sexton and a heat controller (or fire stoker) announce a public auction

Peasants heading for the market

[All the images were spliced together from screen shots; the first image was slightly background cleaned; click through on any for an enlarged version]


Hans Heinrich Glaser (1585-1673) was an engraver from Basel in Switzerland who is best known for two volumes of fashion illustrations he produced about a decade apart. The first, from the 1620s, was copied from other illustrators.

Glaser's second book - 'Basler Kleidung', the subject of this post - was published in 1634 and remains a well regarded historical source for Basel's 17th century clothing and culture. The illustrator also exhibits a wry sense of humour at times, obviously.

'Basler Kleidung' (~Basel Fashion) is available online at the e-rara site of Universitätsbibliothek Basel (note the thumbnails link at the top of the page).

There are a couple of biographical sources around, both of which become impenetrably mangled by the online translation: One; Two.

I am grateful to typographer/designer Nina Stössinger for help with the caption translations. And, by some extraordinary coincidence, Nina is working on a project this year that includes images from this book. The odds for this must be just astronomical.

Previously: costumes.

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Tangentially related: Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands at The Morgan Library [VIA].