Accountant Matteus Schwarz describes four decades of his clothes in Klaidungsbüchlin

The German accountant Matthäus Schwarz decided to gather in a single book every outfit he had ever worn, annotate them at length and explain the circumstances that had prompted him to choose those very costumes. The fascinating life of a humble bookkeeper, from his childhood, when at the age of seven he was a court jester, behaved badly, ran away from home and by nine had become a wandering singer and a shepherd boy, is told in 137 portraits with extended commentaries. The Klaidungsbüchlin can, perhaps, be called the first such deliberate and sustained fashion diary, spanning four decades of a life, and created 500 years before the arrival of Instagram. The years of youthful infatuation, chance liaisons, friendship, street hooliganism, the building of a business, the years in the service of the richest men of the age: all of this is reflected in the witty and compact descriptions of each look, be it a luxurious fur coat for riding or a satin doublet with slashed breeches. In short, an exhaustive encyclopaedia of sixteenth-century men's fashion.