First Book of Fashion

From The Guardian:

Five hundred years ago, two boys grew up in the city of Augsburg in south Germany: Hans Holbein the Younger and his exact contemporary Matthäus Schwarz. Holbein’s father even painted Schwarz in 1508, when he was 11 years old, as part of a family portrait. Here we see him in that same year, playing in the streets after school.

Matthäus started making notes about what he was wearing when he was 17, and also asked older people about the clothes they had worn. For him, changes in fashion registered changes in culture. In 1523, he began commissioning artists to paint watercolours of him and his outfits, a project that became the world’s first continuous record of a lifetime’s worth of clothes. (Read more.)