"The number of hours that went into making even a shirt with pre-industrial technology was enormous. Depending on how one calculates—i.e. comparing period prices to period income, or comparing the number of labor hours that went into a garment to the cost of that labor at modern minimum wage—one arrives at a shirt costing somewhere between $300 and $4,000. The inventory of Palazzo Medici valued bolts of lowest-quality home-spun linen, the cheapest fabric you could get (used for shirts, bedsheets, and undergarments), at about 0.14 florins ($140) per yard, but wools were much costlier; remember Isabella d’Este being willing to pay 10 per yard ($10,000) for very fine black fabric. The inventory lists several chests of plain, everyday clothing or bedlinens whose contents were worth several thousands. Even at more modest income levels, when estimating the cost of purchasing what was on someone’s body as they stepped out the front door, don't think of buying an outfit, think of buying a car, and if it was an outfit nice enough for a Florentine from a decent family then think about buying a Ferrari or other luxury car.
...between the trousseau she provided, and the extra clothes, and jewels bought for young Caterina by her groom’ excited family—which included furs and two sixty-florin strings of pearls—the bride would have worn 400 florins’ worth of wealth ($400,000) on her body as she walked across the city to her husband's home. This was not simple conspicuous consumption: all Florence would see the bridal procession and estimate the power of these families by the wealth they saw. By supplementing the trousseau provided by the Strozzi with even more costly robes and pearls, the Parenti family—new to the popolo and excited to secure a bride from one of the ottimati—was making a modest dowry look larger, and once the bride reached her new home, the pearls and other reusable materials would be resold to buy equipment for the newlyweds' silk business.
Returning to our auto industry simile, for this wedding dress think of the kind of Lamborghini that sets the whole town gossiping when someone parks it on the street, except that it can be trivially disassembled and the parts turned back into investment capital. For the pearls, think stock market shares or savings bonds, high-value investments infinitely resalable. Indeed, the choice of pearls as a form of display was itself strategic: costly embroideries and cut gemstones were both unique and recognizable, so if one resold a particular ruby or yard of brocade, others would recognize it and comment, Ah, X-family is poor enough to need to sell! Not so the smooth homogeneity which made pearls as anonymous as coins, and who would notice if a string that had sixty pearls on it yesterday today has fifty-eight?"
Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age
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