I generally dislike theme issues. Reading them, I wonder which articles the editor would have published anyway and which are merely rounding out the set.  So I hesitate to call this a theme issue, even if half the editorial space is allotted to one subject: fashion.

Furthermore, this, um, monothemistic approach was taken quite by accident. Wondering if I might be able to drum up a piece on women’s dress to complement the Chairman’s interview with Michael Anton, author of the Machiavelli-inspired volume The Suit, I started by checking the NEH vault for clothing-related projects we’ve supported.

Thus I encountered Women’s Shoes in America, 1795-1930, the source material for “Teensy-Weensy, Itty-Bitty Shoes” on page 36. I am more the extra-wide, wing-tip type, but I thought I’d give it a read. And after thirty or so pages I felt ready to cobble a pump. It was that good. Excellence in the humanities often requires a passion for the arcane, but it takes good writing to successfully transmit that passion to others.

Then there was an ongoing book project about the color revolution in the clothing industry—by author Regina Lee Blaszczyk—about which I tried to feign indifference lest I appear to be a slave to fashion. But the story had espionage, war, and weird facts like how the color purple used to be worn exclusively by royalty. The necessary dye was rather expensive. It was harvested from the glands of two species of shellfish. But with the chemical manufacture of mauve came the democratization of the color purple and the liberation of the poor abused Murex brandaris and Murex trunculus.

Fortunately, I had commissioned a non-fashion-related essay on the Duke of Lerma, who was sort of the teacher’s pet in the Renaissance School for Courtiers. Best known to posterity for his worst deed, exiling the Arab Moriscos from Spain and Portugal starting in 1609, he was well known in his own time for other accomplishments. He was the first major nonroyal art collector in Europe, and he was the archetype of the King’s Favorite. To see some of his paintings, you should go the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston this spring or the Nasher Gallery at Duke University this fall. To understand what it means to be the king’s favorite, you should read Antonio Feros’s article on page 10.

Lerma learned a great deal from the literature of his time instructing courtiers in how to stay on the king’s good side, a genre related to the “mirrors of princes,” of which Machiavelli’s The Prince is the premier example. Feros even quotes Machiavelli in his article. Which means this issue has three pieces on clothing and two that discuss Machiavelli.

So, if a theme issue this be, I say it’s one with three: how to dress, how to rule, and how to kiss up to those who rule.