The essay investigates the metapoetic significance of the clothing metaphor in the context of the ‘imitatio’-debate in 16th century Italy, thereby retracing the unknown (pre)history of “change of clothes” as a ‘topos’ associated to imitation and translation in the century preceding the rise of ‘travesty’ as a literary genre. The focus lies on Pietro Aretino’s most famous writing on imitation (a letter to Lodovico Dolce, 1537), whose pivotal statement centres on a clothing metaphor. The analysis of Aretino’s text aims on the one side at discovering the metapoetic stances implied in the image of the author’s “change of clothes”, on the other at drawing comparisons with further relevant occurrences of such a literary ‘topos’. The examples are taken from the antiquity (i. e. the passage of Cicero’s ‘De oratore’ linking the clothing metaphor to the notion of ‘aptum’), from the Middle Ages (i. e. Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio about literary imitation, ‘Familiares’), as well as from other crucial texts of the 16th century (i. e. the first treaty in ‘volgare’ on translation, Lodovico Castelvetro’s ‘Del traslatare’).