Fashion History
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This interdisciplinarity is evident in a number of collaborative works. The previously mentioned encyclopedias are one example. Others include the numerous fashion readers and handbooks that have appeared in recent years: The Fashion Reader (Welters and Lillethun 2007, 2011), The Men’s Fashion Reader (Reilly and Cosbey 2008), The Men’s Fashion History Reader (McNeil and Karaminas 2009), The Fashion History Reader (Riello and McNeil 2010), and The Handbook of Fashion Studies (Black et al. 2013). Also influential has been the Dress, Body, Culture Series edited by Joanne Eicher. The inaugural title was “New Raiments of Self”: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South (Foster 1997), a postmodern history of dress of a marginalized people. In addition to the readers and handbooks focused on fashion history, volumes primarily focused on fashion theory have appeared. Among them are Fashion Foundations (Johnson, Torntore, and Eicher 2003), Fashion Classics (Carter 2003), The Rise of Fashion: A Reader (Purdy 2004), Fashion Theory: A Reader (Barnard 2007), and Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice (Nicklas and Pollen 2015).
For this present work, it is crucially important to distinguish between fashion in cultural studies and fashion in history. While the field of cultural studies appreciates history, it has not drawn attention to the need for a global approach to fashion history. Cultural studies scholars who research contemporary fashion are already global in their perspective. For example, Jennifer Craik in The Face of Fashion (1994) rejected the viewpoint that fashion is unique to capitalistic culture. She argued that fashion systems operate globally and that non-Western dress has been shortchanged by labeling it “traditional” (Craik 1994: 4). She later elaborated on this viewpoint: “Fashion is not a phenomenon that has existed since the fourteenth century. Nor has it been confined to Europe” (Craik 2009: 21). Recall from Chapter 1 that Sandra Niessen had appropriated Wolf’s phrasing to point out that scholars have been thinking of fashion history as “Europe and the People Without Fashion” (2003). Some researchers absorbed this commentary; Susan Kaiser, for example, lists as one of her key assumptions that fashion is now transnational, not just Western or Euro-modern, in Fashion and Cultural Studies (2012). She wrote that at the end of the twentieth century, the accepted narrative of fashion beginning in the West in the fourteenth century did not ring true anymore as cities around the world were vying for attention on the global fashion stage.
We interpret the developments described above to suggest that those in the field seek to better understand its intellectual history, which this book aids in addressing. We also acknowledge that some scholars have already questioned the long-standing theoretical frameworks of the field that have defined fashion as a product of Western capitalism.
A paradigm shift
Given the new intellectual developments from several fronts concerning locating fashion in human experience, we observe a paradigm shift under way. The term paradigm shift, initially conceived by T. S. Kuhn (1962) in regard to scientific inquiry, has many definitions. For our purposes, a paradigm shift is a change in the theory or practice of a particular science or discipline. A change such as the fashion discipline is undergoing, in the altering of its foundational concepts and in research methods, reshapes understanding and knowledge. Fashion scholarship is continuing to expand beyond image descriptions, object analysis, texts from historical records, experiments, and quantitative data to contextualization and multidimensional approaches.
The paradigm shift in fashion history, which has yet to fully occur, places the need for a global fashion history in the foreground. In 2012, we articulated the need for a radical change in how fashion history is conceived. We noted the movement to an inclusive framing of fashion that acknowledges fashion as “global and diverse in its development, occurrences, and dimensions” (Lillethun, Welters, and Eicher 2012: 77–78). This constitutes a change in ontology, in the underlying assumptions about knowledge within the discipline. The paradigm shift in fashion history is reshaping what is known about past fashion systems and processes; previously unexamined questions and groups now receive attention, and prior conclusions and interpretations are reexamined.
We are not alone in our appeal for a global history of fashion. Among the earliest to recognize problems with the former rigid definition of historical fashion have been anthropologists. Jane Schneider observed that the history of dress in courtly societies of non-Western cultures demonstrated the same fundamental elements of a fashion system—changing styles and stylistic influence of elites—as did the court fashions of Europe, although they “stopped short of the perpetual mutation” that took hold in the courts of Italy’s mercantile cities during the Renaissance (Schneider 2006a: 208). Joanne Eicher has been an important proponent of our position. Recognized for her scholarship in dress and fashion, she trained as an anthropologist and conducted fieldwork in Africa. In the introduction to National Geographic’s The Fashion of Dress, she explained that “change happens in every culture because human beings are creative and flexible” and that humans “enjoy change” (Eicher 2001: 17, 19).
In the new millennium, a few established scholars in traditional disciplines have attempted broad histories of dress. Robert Ross, a historian, wrote Clothing: A Global History on sartorial globalization of dress from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. He reviewed an admirable range of literature, but ultimately stuck with existing definitions of dress, clothing, costume, and fashion; he associated fashion with the upper circles of society who used it to exclude those below on the social scale who could not follow sartorial changes fast enough (2008: 6). Robert DuPlessis, also a historian, focused his work on the clothing trade in the Atlantic during the period of colonization. His understanding of fashion incorporated change and novelty, but did not go so far as to limit it to the upper echelons of cultures (DuPlessis 2016: 18, 28). His view that clothing is never static reflects our thinking. The field needs more comprehensive studies like these.
A handful of scholars have gone deep in a single country, observing fashion in what had formerly been considered “traditional” dress systems. Antonia Finnane, in Changing Clothes in China, claims that “the fact remains that little is known in the English-speaking world about changes in material culture in non-Western societies” (Finnane 2008: 8). Toby Slade, writing about Japan, hoped to “demonstrate that there are other modernities, and different fashion histories beyond the canon of European and American dress narratives, which dominate nearly all interpretations of the practices, styles, institutions and hermeneutic structures of clothing in the modern age” (Slade 2009: 1). Penelope Francks noted that fashion operated in elite circles in China, India, and Japan from at least as far back as the eighteenth century. She further argued that fashion cycles occurred not in the cut of Japanese clothing, but in the fabrics (e.g., background colors, type of pattern, and overall design), an observation that we explore further in chapters 6 and 7 (Francks 2015).
These are examples of studies that will move the global history of fashion forward. We have noted that senior scholars who possess broad and deep knowledge have accomplished some of the best studies in the new fashion history. Achieving a global history of fashion will encounter challenges: language barriers restrict access to research studies, reports, and books for many researchers, thus affecting cross-cultural exchange; lack of evidence limits the understanding of the dress of past cultures; the scholarly talents needed are diverse; the idea faces resistance in the teaching profession due to embedded beliefs and classroom time restraints for topics. However, a global fashion history movement will provide richer knowledge of humanity with understandings not yet known. By displacing fashion history of privilege as the dominant format with a multivalent fashion history, the global fashion history will provide for more truthful and integrative teaching and learning about human history. This objective is transformative.
PART TWO
OUTSIDE THE CANON: ALTERNATIVE FASHION HISTORIES
5
FASHION SYSTEMS IN PREHISTORY AND THE AMERICAS
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Fashion, in some sense, has characterized human culture since the first adornments of the Upper Paleolithic. Although the processes of fashion comparison, emulation and differentiation are more noticeably apparent in the rapid changes that characterize systems of industrial production, the same processes are observable or at least inferable in most cultures.
Aubrey Cannon
With these words, Canadian anthropologist Aubrey Cannon introduced the notion that fashion exists in all cultures across time and space (1998: 23). He argued that the universality of fashion is evident in its definition as style change. Cannon understood fashion as a process driven by the human need for self-identity and social comparison, and by the desire to set oneself apart visually. Narrowing the definition of fashion to a continuous process such as that found in Western industrial societies, he claimed, excludes the systematic style changes that occur in all cultures, including indigenous ones. Cannon explained that anthropologists and ethno-historians typically attribute short-term and long-term changes in small-scale nonindustrial societies to external forces rather than internal processes. He pointed out that small-scale societies might have systematic style changes only sporadically in response to a specific set of circumstances; nevertheless, they constitute the same process as fashion in Western cultures.
Cannon noted that style change is rarely documented in indigenous societies, but that accounts of the North American fur trade are an exception to the lack of documentation. Fur traders recorded in detail the changing demand for cloth and items of adornment, especially beads. They regularly updated the types of beads and colored cloth in current demand by Native Americans. Beads became less valuable when markets were saturated. In some instances, tastes changed in as little as a year or two. Cloth color also exhibited style change. Native Americans could even be said to have their own style leaders whom they emulated. For Cannon, the frequent changes in native tastes as well as the existence of style leaders exhibited the criteria for fashion.
Jennifer Craik supports Cannon’s stance, claiming that “fashion is not exclusively the domain of modern culture and its pre-occupations with individualism, class, civilization, and consumerism” (Craik 2009: 19). As explained in Chapter 1, Craik used the phrase “the fashion impulse” to express the universality of the human desire for novelty and change. In this chapter, we take Cannon’s position in arguing that change in dress and appearance is a universal human behavior that is evident in the fashion impulse among prehistoric peoples and indigenous societies in the Western Hemisphere. We begin with the fashion impulse as found in the archaeological record.
Archaeology as a source of evidence
Sources of information on the dress of indigenous cultures in the past are extremely limited until contact with Europeans. This section discusses what can be deciphered through archaeology, the study of human culture through evidence discovered by excavation. Archaeological evidence is partial evidence. Much dress evidence is lost due to decay of the materials used, and what is recovered is usually fragmentary and degraded. The two elements of survival and discovery, each often of tenuous circumstances, must converge for the possibility to document, recover, and study evidence of the past.
Archaeological evidence of dress that can be dated with a degree of confidence captures a moment in time, allowing us to interpret through inference and deduction what was worn, or part of what was worn, at a specific time and place. Synchronic evidence such as a single grave or deposit must be compared to other finds in order to assess change. However, grave goods buried with an individual can indicate status when compared to other individuals from the same stratum of a site.
Knowledge of climate and geographical context is critical in archaeological research since in preindustrial times weather patterns and natural resources determined the availability of materials for creating dress and accessories. Inherent cultural contact that results from trade or exchange patterns may be revealed by the presence of a resource not found locally.
While textiles are sometimes found in archaeological contexts, their prior presence can also be detected. These may occur as an impression in clay, mud, or plaster, and as a pseudomorph, which is “a physical trace remain of a former fiber, thread, or textile.” In the strictest sense a pseudomorph contains only the “chemical breakdown products” of the textile. Variants are a “negative hollow of the fibers in casings of metal salts, much like a fossil cast,” and a combination of the two prior types can also occur (Good 2001: 215). Examples of pseudomorphs that show evidence of textile knowledge have been found in North America as early as 8000 BCE. Cordage and fabric impressions on prehistoric ceramics from eastern North America reveal knowledge of how to spin and ply fiber into yarns and to construct twined fabrics; archaeologists use fiber type, cordage, and twining to infer changes in technology and arrival of new cultural groups in geographical areas (Petersen 1996). Through these types of artifacts, change can be documented, if only intermittently.
The types of sources used and the questions asked by archaeologists are similar to those used by researchers of more recent historical periods. When examining textile evidence, an archaeologist studying textiles and dress seeks answers to questions such as: What fibers were used? Were they locally available or traded? What spinning technology was used to make yarns? Did the culture make objects with netting, twining, matting, or basketry techniques? Did they make felted textiles? Did the culture weave and, if so, using what type of loom? Similar questions would be applied to non-textile materials used for dress and accessories. These include shells, pottery, stones, metals, and animal resources such as hides, sinew, bone, and teeth.
Grave finds in which the body, clothing, and accessories have survived the ravages of time are optimal discoveries, since the placement of the body supplements can be observed. The materials, garment shapes, and techniques may be analyzed. Sometimes dried or mummified skin will disclose body modification such as tattoos. However, usually only partial remains survive. The chemical context of a grave will affect what materials survive. Acidic conditions favor protein materials such as animal fibers and hides, while alkaline contexts favor the survival of cellulosic (plant) materials. Increasingly, the application of analytic technologies is providing new information for consideration of remains, even in reference to artifacts found centuries ago. One example is the extraction analysis of DNA from wool textiles found in Danish Bronze Age bog finds from the nineteenth century (Brandt 2014). A second example is the study of dyes and dyed fibers dating to the first and second millennia CE found in Chile’s Atacama Desert that showed textile dyes were imported from neighboring areas, implying trade (Niemeyer and Agüero 2015).
Evidence applicable to decipherment of the dress of lost cultures extends well beyond garments and accessories found with human remains. Evidence of technologies and materials such as potte ry, metals, and glass plays an important role. Representations in two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms offer much information. Cave and rock art depicting humans may suggest clothing forms, such as the indications of garment silhouettes on human figures in the Sahara at Tassili n’Ajjer (ca. 6,000 BCE). Sculptures of humans may reveal garments as well as technological information; the Stone Age Venus figurine (ca. 23,000 BCE) from the late-Gravettian culture found at Lespugue, France, depicts “the first clear evidence for fiber string” in the figure’s string skirt, according to Elizabeth Barber (1994: 54).
Tools such as stone blades and loom weights and needles of various materials allow insight into crafting and making techniques. Evidence of human work patterns can inform knowledge about dress; for example, the identification of a location as a site where dyeing occurred may provide information about textile processing and the extent of labor devoted to textile coloration, as well as information about dyes used.
Written evidence discovered at an archaeological site, such as laws, taxation records, notations of tribute, and contemporary accounts, may include references to textiles or dress and thus provide valuab
le information. They may attest to value, preferences, exchange, and quantities related to materials used for dress. The glyph texts on the architectural monuments of the Mesoamerican Mayan culture are an example. Glyphs at multiple sites, exemplified by those at Bonampak (580–800 CE) in Chiapas, Mexico, describe tribute as “heaps of textiles or neat packages that contain green feathers” accompanied by chocolate beans and shells (Houston 2000: 173).
All of the types of evidence described above and more are important in the study of dress in archaeological contexts. When scant or no extant garments and accessories, or parts thereof, survive, every type of evidence that bears potential information is utilized. Surviving garments and accessories from as recently as the seventeenth century are rare. In cases of more recent finds, such as accidental discovery of nineteenth-century paupers’ graves—where the cloth has disintegrated, but metal buttons with patent dates remain—written forms of evidence such as patent records may survive in libraries and other places of safekeeping, rather than in archaeological contexts.
Beads and tattoos
Some of the earliest surviving evidence related to dress and adornment is shell beads, that is, shells that humans turned into beads by piercing holes to enable wearing them on a strand or by attaching them to garments or hair. Figure 5.1 shows the skeletons of two females estimated to be between 25 and 35 years of age from the Téviec site in France. Restrung shell bead jewelry—necklaces and bracelets (which are out of the picture frame)—adorned the skeletons that now reside at the Museum of Toulouse. Téviec is a late Mesolithic Era site dating to between 5500 and 5110 BCE based on radiocarbon dating of content in the marine shell midden that also served as the inhabitants’ cemetery. The site, which was first excavated in the late 1920s and 1930s, lies on an island in the Atlantic Ocean off the southwest coast of Brittany. Twenty-three skeletons were found in ten graves at Téviec and Hoëdic (Schulting 1996).