Early Modern Pattern Books and the Expansion of Luxury Through Design

Economic historians increasingly stress that Europe’s early modern economic growth cannot be explained by changes in production alone. Demand-based accounts, notably Jan de Vries’ “Industrious Revolution,” describe a shift toward a “New Luxury” of inventiveness and style, set against older views of consumption driven by emulation. This article argues that such dichotomies obscure the coexistence of Old Luxury (rank and emulation) and New Luxury (innovation and novelty). Their interplay, rather than their succession, expanded consumption by allowing rank to be reaffirmed through innovation. Textile pattern books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exemplify this process. Produced by commercially driven publishers and marketed to women, they diffused design trends while accommodating a hierarchy-oriented moral order. The analysis of prefaces and dedications reveals that a prestige of industriousness was central; yet this did not replace the prestige of noble birth, but rather made it possible to shift distinctions by redefining rank through labor. In this sense, social hierarchy did not stand in the way of innovation through producer–consumer interaction but was, in fact, constitutive of it. However, as the analysis shows, this expansion required design as a luxury based on the virtues of knowledge and labor.