Fashion History

by Linda Welters,Abby Lillethun

  Figure 5.2 “Native American Sachem,” ca. 1700. Artist unknown. Oil on canvas. Photography by Erik Gould, courtesy of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Gift of Mr. Robert Winthrop. This sachem (leader) of a southern New England tribe demonstrates the Native American male’s interest in hairdressing and personal adornment. He wears a wampum headband and shell jewelry. His breech clout and mantle, fashioned from imported woolen cloth, contrast with his locally made deerskin leggings.

  Native men painted their faces before entering into battle, but both men and women used face paint as decoration. They had several colors to choose from for cosmetic use: red, yellow, white, and black. They applied animal fat to their bodies to ward off mosquitoes in summer and to add a layer of warmth in the winter, which must have provided a good base for application of powdered pigments. They wore ornaments as pendants around their necks and on their ears in the form of “birds, beasts and fishes, carved out of bones, shell and stone” (Wood [1635], 1977: 85). Tattooing was practised, as noted by Wood, who described portraiture of animals on the cheeks of higher-ranking individuals as well as geometric designs on the arms and breasts.

  A change in materials preferred for ornament occurred during the Contact Period (Marten 1970: 11). The early explorers commented on brass and copper breastplates, necklaces, and bandoliers fashioned and worn by indigenous people along New England’s coast prior to colonization. But after the Pilgrims landed, shell jewelry replaced copper and brass. Dutch traders had introduced shell ornament known as wampum to the indigenous peoples around Plymouth in 1627 as a form of money. It had been in common use further south among the Indians of Long Island and quickly became accepted throughout New England as both currency and ornament. Coastal tribes, especially the Narragansett, became skilled at manufacturing tubular beads from local quahog (clam) shells. Numerous ethno-historical accounts describe the process of drilling the white and purple beads, and then stringing them on Indian hemp for necklaces. To make their bandoliers, belts, and headbands, Indian women strung sinew on small portable looms, then inserted strings of wampum, sometimes in decorative patterns. A belt owned by the Wampanoag chief Metacomet, known as King Philip, was nine inches wide and many feet long and worked in “various figures and flowers, and pictures of many birds and beasts” (Church [1675–76] 1975: 170). King Philip had owned a similarly designed headband. Wampum in the form of headbands was found at Long Pond and as beads in the RI-1000 site, documenting the observation that brass and copper ornament had gone out of style in favor of shell bead ornamentation by the mid-seventeenth century. Figure 5.2 illustrates how wampum and a neck ornament were worn at the end of the seventeenth century.

  Glass beads, of course, were traded from the very beginning. Verrazzano noted in 1524 how much the Narragansetts desired blue crystal beads to wear as jewelry, while ignoring the proffered fabrics of silk and gold, which they considered worthless (Wroth 1970: 138). Beads and other ornaments eventually were strung on hemp strings, or sewn onto skins and cloth.

  By the middle of the seventeenth century the supply of furs and pelts had been depleted because of exports to Europe. Natives began wearing woolen cloth, much of it a thick, fulled woolen cloth called duffles, trading or trucking cloth. Cloth came from English, Dutch, and French traders until England issued the British Navigation Acts in 1651 restricting trade in England’s American colonies to Great Britain. Cloth was sold in 1 ½ to 2 yard lengths and used for mantles, blankets, and breech clouts. The sachem in Figure 5.2 wears a red woolen breech clout and a woolen mantle along with deerskin leggings.

  Wool cloth was not a simple substitution for fur. New England natives liked certain types and colors of woolen cloth; Roger Williams wrote that the Narragansetts with whom he traded preferred “a Mantle of English or Dutch Cloth before their owne wearing of Skins and Furres, because they are warme enough and lighter” ([1643] 1936: 160). Natives throughout North America had definite color preferences that varied regionally (Becker 2005). Traders could not unload colors that were not fashionable. In 1704/5, Thomas Banister, a merchant in Boston, ordered predominantly “blews.” “Next the blews the red sells best and next the Red the purple”; later, Banister wrote: “Leave out the purple. Those no body Chuses to buy” (Montgomery 1984: 159). Suppliers were asked to pay attention to the selvages, about which some Indian consumers were very exacting: they wanted striped selvages (Wilmott 2005). A red woolen cloth dubbed “strouds” (made in Stroudwater, England) found acceptance all over North America (Wilmott 2005).

  The color preferences listed in the ethno-historical accounts are supported by the finds at Long Pond, where red wool fabrics dominated, along with green. At another Rhode Island site, called Burr’s Hill (1650–75), a white Hudson Bay style blanket with striped selvages was recovered (Dillon 1980).

  Ready-made English clothes were gifted or traded to Native Americans early on, even prior to the establishment of Plymouth Colony. In 1602, eight Indians in a small boat visited Bartholomew Gosnold’s ship anchored in a New England harbor: “One of them appareled with a waistcoat and breeches of black serdge, made after our sea fashions, hose and shoes on his feet” (Brereton [1602] 1966: 11). Cloth coats were a regular gift item to sachems. Reactions were varied. Some accepted them with pride and wore them when trading with the English; others passed them on to underlings, not able to tolerate the tight fit of a tailored coat. But at least one tribal leader, Chickatabot, so admired them that he had Governor John Winthrop’s tailor make a suit of clothes for himself (Winthrop 1908). Ready-made English clothes seemed to be popular further west, at William Pynchon’s trading post in Springfield, where Indians stole ready-made coats and petticoats from his storehouse (Thomas 1979). English wool cloaks may have been gifted too. Fragments of a fine wool fabric, possibly camlet, were found in a grave associated with a high-status male at the RI-1000 site. A cloak of similar wool camlet is in the collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society. It belonged to Richard Smith, who operated a trading post near the RI-1000 site.

  By the later seventeenth century, shirts and other European garments and trims had been adopted in combination with native-made articles of dress. These were not always worn or used as intended. A metallic trim from the Burr’s Hill site—a fancy edging called a galloon made of silver wrapped around a silk core—was found in a grave not attached to a textile, but rolled up as it would have been acquired from a European source (Dillon 1980). By the later 1600s, Native American males had readily accepted shirts. These were made of Holland linen, but possibly also cotton. Three fragments of cotton were preserved at the RI-1000 site, which may have been part of a shirt. Cotton was a relatively new commodity in the seventeenth century after being introduced to English markets via the East India trade. An account by Mary Rowlandson, a captive of the Wampanoag prior to King Philip’s War, described how the sagamore Quanopin wore a linen shirt with laces trailing from the shirttails (Rowlandson [1682], 1981: 66). An engraved print from 1710 illustrates how a Mohawk sachem, Etow Oh Koam, wore his shirt (Figure 5.3). He had been brought to London along with two other tribal chiefs. His illustration shows the shirt worn like a tunic along with moccasins, wampum belt, mantle, and ear ornaments. His face was tattooed with bird motifs. This demonstrates acceptance of shirts, but not wholesale adoption of English male dress, which would have been the coats, waistcoats, and breeches fashionable in London at the time.

  Figure 5.3 “Etow Oh Koam, King of the River Nation.” John Simon after John Verelst, 1710. Mezzotint. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. When visiting London in 1710, this Mohawk sachem wore an outfit consisting of shirt, moccasins, wampum belt, sword, mantle, and ear ornaments. His face bears tattoos.

  Further south, in Delaware, a curious fashion for what can be described as parti-colored coats developed. In the 1650s, Swedish settlers traded coats with “one side of the breast and back, red, the other side, blue, likewise on the arms, as the clothes of orphan children in Stockholm are made” (B
ecker 2005: 741–42). High-status sachems liked these coats very much, supporting the concept of fashion leadership in a small-scale society.

  In the post–Contact Period, after King Philip’s War, the Narragansetts who survived were placed on reservations or sold into slavery. The Mashantucket-Pequots had already been relegated to life on a reservation in 1666. So too were the Mashpee Indians, who were of Wampanoag heritage. The English had pushed hard to Christianize the Native Americans, thereby “civilizing” them and getting them out of their scanty attire and into English clothes. These Christianized Native Americans became known as praying Indians. The Indians at Mashpee were early to convert, and Mashpee became known as a praying town. There the Indians lived in English-style houses instead of wigwams. They learned to spin and weave and to cut and sew. The accidental discovery of the two individuals during excavation for house lots revealed Christian burials evidenced by coffin nails and bodies extended rather than flexed as in pre-Christian New England burials. Many fragments of wool cloth survived with these two individuals, revealing remnants of English-style clothes. There were seam allowances, cloth buttons, appliqués, a knee-band from breeches, and fragments of a stocking. Reverend Gideon Hawley, a minister to the Mashpee, wrote in 1802 that the women were good spinners and weavers and clothed themselves and their families in homespun (Hawley [1815] 1968). Interestingly, many woolen fragments were preserved by a metal headband, a holdover from the old way of dressing, revealing that individual choice remained, even in dressing for life after death.

  The dress history of the Native Americans in southern New England demonstrates that fashion systems existed in pre–Contact, Contact, and post–Contact periods despite the relative scarcity of evidence. As the documentary sources and archaeological record suggests, Craik’s fashion impulse was alive and well among indigenous groups in New England.

  Fashion systems in Mesoamerica

  Mesoamerica is an area that includes present-day Mexico and Central America. It is a cultural zone whose pre-Columbian heritage is characterized by a succession of highly sophisticated societies beginning around 1000 BCE. Mesoamerican civilization reached a pinnacle under the Aztecs, who were in power when Hernan Cortés conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521 for Spain (Anawalt 2007).

  The Aztecs and their predecessors had a well-developed dress culture. It has garnered scholarly attention, mostly from anthropologists, who offer interpretations of Mesoamerican dress as an expression of identity, gender, ethnicity, and status. See, for example, a recent edited volume entitled Wearing Culture: Dress and Regalia in Early Mesoamerica and Central America (Orr and Looper 2014). Less frequent are studies that incorporate fashion into the analysis, and these tend to focus on post-Conquest dress (Root 2005; Scheinman 1991). Our purpose here is to take a broad look at Mesoamerican dress in terms of fashion, for if a culture was as sophisticated as that of the Aztecs, it follows that its sartorial expressions would display elements of a fashion system.

  The available evidence limits our knowledge of change in Mesoamerican dress practices in the centuries before Cortés’s arrival. However, the dress worn just prior to, and immediately following, the Spanish Conquest is known because of surviving pictorial books that include many images of gods and people. The Mesoamericans who produced these books, known as codices, used a Mayan system of hieroglyphics to record aspects of religion, economy, agriculture, and everyday life. One researcher estimated the number of surviving codices at 434, although most are fragmentary (Anawalt 1981). The Aztec culture is the best documented. A particularly detailed compilation of Aztec culture was completed under the supervision of a Franciscan friar named Bernardino de Sahagún in the second half of the sixteenth century. It is known as the Florentine Codex (World Digital Library 2016). It found its way to the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, Italy, where it was discovered in the nineteenth century. A page is reproduced in Figure 5.4.

  The pictograms in the codices illustrate basic garment styles as well as fiber- and fabric-processing techniques. Cotton, which is native to Central and South America, was considered a prestige fiber; therefore, it was reserved for use by elites in Mesoamerica’s stratified societies. Common people wore garments made of agave, yucca, or palm fibers. The backstrap loom was used to weave fabrics; it produced cloth of rectangular proportions that had selvedges on all four sides. The Aztecs used the cloth as it came off the loom either in single units or sewn to other units to make larger pieces of cloth. Cloth usage was similar across Mesoamerica: a single rectangle made a man’s loincloth; two or more rectangles joined together made a man’s tie-on cape; two or more joined pieces made a woman’s wrap skirt. Women’s upper body garments consisted of webs of cloth sewn together in such a way as to result in a poncho known as quechquemitl or a blouse known as huipil. Both words come from the indigenous NahuatI language. In some regions, a single length of cloth had multiple uses in the female wardrobe: shawl, baby carrier, or head cloth. Of uncertain origins, it became known as a rebozo after Spanish colonization (Chico 2010: 60–61).

  The upper section of Figure 5.4 shows a seated male wearing a cape. The middle illustration is a trio of huipiles, and the bottom illustration shows six wrap skirts in different patterns. While the skirt designs varied according to age and occasion, the different designs of the huipiles imply at least some individuality. Both sexes wore headdresses and accessories. Mesoamericans showed status in their appearance through beads and other ornaments, cloth made of cotton, cloth with surface decoration, featherwork, and copper and gold jewelry (Orr and Looper 2014: xxviii). Regulations were in place to restrict the wearing of certain styles and materials to the upper classes.

  Figure 5.4 “The Clothes of Noblewomen with Embroidered Huipil Blouses.” Facsimile of the Florentine Codex by Friar Bernardino de Sahagun, Historia general de las cosas de Nuevo España. Nahuatl, mid-sixteenth century, Mexico. Templo Mayor Library, Mexico. Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY. In the upper section, a seated male wears a cape. The middle section shows three huipiles (blouses). The bottom section illustrates six wrap skirts in different patterns.

  Anthropologist Patricia Anawalt completed a detailed study of twenty-eight Mesoamerican codices, categorizing the pre-Hispanic dress depicted therein into six groups based on geographical region (1981). Anawalt’s detailed charts lay out the garment types and where they were worn, but not changes over time. She does discuss inconsistencies in data and offers a “fashion-follows-power” explanation as well as the influence of the missionaries (215). The very existence of sumptuary regulation suggests the desire of non-elites, such as the artisan and merchant classes as well as victorious warriors, to wear prestige styles; emulation of the class above an individual’s station is a basic feature of the trickle-down theory of fashion. Researchers acknowledge the skill and inventiveness of Mayan weavers; it follows that while the garment forms might have remained constant, the patterning and accessories embraced innovation. Further, traveling merchants introduced new materials, which elites must have adapted for their garments and accessories. Indeed, some researchers have stressed that Mesoamerican dress was never static (Schevill 1991: 6).

  After the Spanish Conquest, the indigenous population endured dramatic changes. Not only did their numbers drop precipitously, but the Spaniards attempted to Christianize those who survived by putting rules into place that required them to cover more of their bodies. Men were ordered to wear Spanish peasant attire consisting of white pants and shirt. Native women fared better as their wrap skirts and upper body garments were deemed modest enough. The Spanish also introduced the treadle loom, which produced longer and wider pieces of cloth that needed to be cut before assembly into clothing.

  As the Spanish settled in and intermarried with the indigenous population, a new social order emerged. A caste system developed in the eighteenth century that classified people according to bloodline. Spanish citizens born in Spain were at the top of the social hierarchy, while Spanish born in Mexico were sli
ghtly lower in status. Both of them were termed espanole. Indians, or indios, represented a lower rank followed by negros (Africans). Children born to Spaniards who married Indian women were known as mestizos, while children of Spaniards and people of African descent were mulattos (Earle 2001: 181)

  Casta paintings, a panel of which is illustrated in Figure 5.5, documented the various racial combinations. These paintings also illustrated the rules for how the different ranks were expected to dress (Voss 2008). The Spanish elite wore European styles in luxurious fabrics along with the appropriate accessories. Not-so-wealthy Spaniards and people of mixed heritage also wore European styles, but they were often depicted as plain, even a bit disheveled. Only purebred Indians wore indigenous styles such as huipiles and rebozos. Some of the more prosperous indios used fabrics intended for European styles, but made up in indigenous styles. Figure 5.5 illustrates an Indian woman in a fine gauze huipil worn over a wraparound embroidered skirt; the huipil is so fine that her corseted torso can be seen underneath. She wears a folded rebozo on her head instead of the mantilla accorded to Spanish women. The overall silhouette reflects elite European women’s fashion of the eighteenth century. Her husband, who is Spanish, is dressed in a European coat, waistcoat, and breeches accessorized with a tricorn hat. Their child, of mixed blood, is attired in European dress like his father.

  Figure 5.5 “De Español è Yndia, Mestizo.” Anonymous, eighteenth century. Copperplate painting (48 x 36 cm). Museo de América-Coleccion, Madrid, Spain. Album / Art Resource, NY. This casta (caste) painting illustrates how people of different racial combinations were expected to dress in Spanish Mexico. The Indian mother wears a huipil blouse and a rebozo on her head. Her Spanish husband and mixed-race son dress in European styles.