I have a friend's birthday coming up, and she absolutely adores italian renaissance fashion. I thought I might try to find her a book about it or something akin to that. She loves historic fashion in general, so if I could find anything to do with that, it'd be great! Thank you so much for your help, take care.
Okay, this is German rather than Italian, but it's probably the coolest book concerning Renaissance fashion I can think of: Rublack and Hayward (eds.), The First Book of Fashion: The Book of Clothes of Matthaeus and Veit Konrad Schwarz of Augsburg. And anyway, Renaissance Augsburg wanted very badly to be Italy, sooooo.
It's partially an edition of an original 16C manuscript, but it's so, so much more. And it's the kind of "special" book that seems to me like it would make a great gift.
I don't think I can compete with Renaissance Augsburg (arguably one of the coolest Renaissance cities) but you should also check out The Clothing of the Renaissance World. This particular text is about a Renaissance costume book by Cesare Vecellio published originally in 1590. What makes it so fascinating is that he tried to record costumes from all over the world during the period in which he lived and he even managed to include some New World costumes. His focus is on Venice (where he lived) but he tried to also look at global fashion as well!