Fashion History

by Linda Welters,Abby Lillethun

  Trade networks emerged in the Neolithic Era connecting Western Europe with eastern Asia. By the fourth millennium BCE during which urban organization advanced considerably, trade in the raw materials copper and tin intensified and spread. Combining tin and copper creates bronze, a much harder metal suitable for improved tools and weaponry. This discovery ushered in the Bronze Age, the chronology of which varies by region. In Western Europe it began around 3300 BCE.

  Roads to facilitate trade caravans between the Levant and Mesopotamia were established by the second half of the third millennium BCE. Settlements or way stations about every twenty kilometers, or the distance of a day’s journey, offered rest to the merchants who traveled the routes. Prestige materials moved along routes from one commercial center to the next; exchanges occurred at commercial centers such as Byblos and Qatna rather than through direct contact between kingdom emissaries (Al-Maqdissi 2008; Casanova 2008).

  In Egypt and Mesopotamia, beliefs that blue represented prestige and power meant that the hard blue stone lapis lazuli held value. Mined in Afghanistan and the Central Asian Pamir Mountains, evidence of working lapis lazuli has been found in archaeological contexts dated to the fourth millennium BCE in Egypt and the seventh millennium BCE in Mesopotamia and Iran (Casanova 2008). It was used as a pigment in art works, as a precious material for carving and inlay, and for personal adornment.

  Beads of lapis lazuli might be used in necklaces, earrings, or bracelets. A hidden trove of beads, gold items, and cylinder seals associated with the palace in the Mycenaean settlement at Thebes attests to the lapis lazuli trade reaching central Greece in the Bronze Age. The lapis lazuli beads in this treasure may have come to the palace area in the thirteenth century BCE via trade centers in the Syrio-Levant or Cyprus. The blue beads had been combined with locally sourced beads (Aravantinos 2008). Lapis lazuli survives as inlay in gold items: for example, in the funerary treasures found in King Tut’s tomb. In addition to such prestige contexts, at the ancient sites Sarazm (in Tajikistan), Mundigak (in Afghanistan), and Shahr-I Sokhta (in Iran), where the stone was imported, “the craftsmen adapted their work to meet local demand” (Casanova 2008: 60). Thus, the blue stone that moved from Afghan mines to elite contexts apparently was enjoyed more widely in some locations than others. Workshops making products adapted to local demand suggest the presence of the fashion impulse.

  A shipwreck found in 1982 off the southwest coast of Turkey near Uluburun and dated to the late fourteenth century BCE revealed a large cargo of tin and copper ingots. Luxury items present attest to their trade. The precious cargo included thousands of beads and flat decorative items made of glass and faience, such as may be sewn onto textiles. Smaller numbers of beads of amber, agate, faience, and ostrich eggshell were recovered. The disc-shaped eggshell beads had traveled African trade networks starting deep in the continent before reaching the ship, which circulated the eastern Mediterranean before it sank. These smaller groups of beads “may have been for the personal adornment of those aboard the ship” (Pulak 2008: 296).

  Anastasia Dakouri-Hild (2012) studied the production and consumption of the ornament industries for jewelry, furniture, and elaborate weapons in Thebes (Greece) from ca. 2000 to 1050 BCE. The data was drawn from remains of workshops, storage contexts, and mortuary contexts. Changes in details and complexity occurred across the approximately 950 years, particularly toward simpler styles in the later years. The materials used in jewelry included imported lapis lazuli and lazurite, among others. According to Dakouri-Hild, the emphasis in production was on “dress items and furniture, the distant origin of materials . . . [and] manufacture, assemblage, and transformation of parts into composite, elaborate goods” such as a necklace of amethyst, carnelian, faience, and gold (474). The wider society reflected a taste for materially complex personal ornaments and emulated the elites; the differentiation process present in many fashion systems was evident already at this early date. In this process the higher-status group differentiated with a newer fashion when the lower status group copied the higher status group’s older fashion.

  Despite meager fashion evidence in the Bronze Age, other scholars have echoed Dakouri-Hild’s interpretation that a fashion process was present in the wider society. Jack Phillips examined the repair, replacement, recycling, and reshaping of jewelry parts or elements in the Bronze Age Aegean, concluding that fashion played a crucial role in the choices of jewelry owners even as they sought to reuse chipped, marred, or old jewelry elements. Phillips (2012) remarked on this clearly individualized process of reuse claiming that the Aegean jewelry owners “were aware of, and attempted to follow the latest fashion” (490).

  Luxury trade on the Silk Road

  The Silk Road refers to a network of trade routes in Eurasia in use from the second century BCE to the fifteenth century when maritime trade expanded during the onset of the European Age of Exploration. The network linked the far distances of the continent in all directions by land and sea, allowing long-distance trade to occur. The overland rest stops grew as commercial trade increased; the controlling governments levied taxes on sales and tariffs on passage. Of course, conflicts and internal events sometimes temporarily closed trade routes, tribal groups might expect payment for passage, and banditry occurred. Across the vast space of Asia the cultural forms varied from tribal nomadic to pastoral herding, to agricultural settlements, to urban centers often built around an oasis. By the third quarter of the first millennium, the Eastern Hemisphere trade networks were connected; the old routes in Africa linked to those in Eurasia. Important to consideration of fashion, trade goods, as noted above in The Periplus documents, included silk skeins, woven textiles, garments, and precious and semiprecious stones. The cultural contact also brought motifs and metal working techniques to the sphere of exchange.

  Amber (fossilized pine resin) from the Baltic Sea was one of those valued commodities. It had been traded as early as the Neolithic period and was used in antiquity for pendants and perfume containers. From the tenth to the twelfth centuries, large amounts of amber traveled across the Silk Road to China, where it became desirable for personal ornaments and fragrance-related accessories (So 2013).

  We call the network of routes the Silk Road because silk was a key commodity traveling East to West. In China, the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BCE) restricted silk to the court, and successive dynasties attempted to maintain a monopoly on both the raw material and finished goods. However, Chinese silk reached Germany by the mid-sixth century BCE and Greece by the late fifth century BCE (Barber 1991). Greek and Roman women expressed their desire for silk; in the early first century, Seneca the Younger condemned it as too revealing of the body as worn by some Roman women. Silk was clearly fashionable. The distance from eastern China to Damascus and connections farther westward is about 5,000 miles over often harsh trails, and the Han Dynasty pressed for the routes west to be open so that they could acquire horses and glass. Thus, Roman blown glass became a key commodity traveling west to east. The routes between Xi’an and Central Asia diverged into a north and a south trail around the Taklamakan Desert and Tarim Basin. At Xi’an in the east, connections to eastern China, Japan, and Korea, as well as to Southeast Asia, were made. From the western trade hub of Central Asia, connections were made to India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and eastward to the Levant and Mediterranean. The sea routes continuously gave access to goods from far distances: in the ports, cargo was off-loaded and exchanged for new cargo from interior networks.

  During the first third of the fifteenth century, the Ming Imperial Court sent Zheng He (1371–1433 CE), the intrepid Muslim sea captain, on seven voyages southward and westward from Nanjing to gain control of the seas. Zheng He’s armadas included numerous support vessels to accompany “treasure ships” reported to be a colossal 450-feet long. The impressive show of Chinese power throughout the Indian Ocean and beyond was underscored by the approximately 27,000 men on board as crew, soldiers, and specialists. Zheng He’s westernmost reach was Mecca on
the northern Red Sea. In concert with statecraft, Zheng He engaged in commerce. The cargo for sale included “bronze jewelry . . . fans, umbrellas, embroidered velvet and taffeta . . . thread and needles, clothing, dyes, glass beads” (Finlay 2008: 337). Among the tribute goods carried back to China that could be used in fashionable products were “precious stones, ivory, ebony . . . deer hides, coral, kingfisher feathers, tortoise shell . . . rhinoceros horn . . . and safflower (for dyes and drugs), Indian cotton cloth, and ambergris—which the Chinese knew as ‘dragon’s pittle’ and used for making perfume” (337).

  Colorful feathers, noted in Chapter 5 as important among Maya, Chimu, and Andean cultures in Western Hemisphere fashion systems, were a long-lasting fashion in China. The iridescent blue kingfisher or halcyon feathers appear in Chinese imperial court ornaments in the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). Later, Zhou Daguan, a Chinese diplomat for Mongol Emperor Chengzong of Yuan, visited the Khmer kingdom in Cambodia in 1296 and 1297. In about 1312 he wrote the only eyewitness account of the Khmer court titled A Record of Cambodia: The Land and Its People, in which he noted that the kingdom exported kingfisher feathers to China (Kindseth 2009). In the fifteenth century, they continued to be in demand at the Chinese court. Apparently the Cambodian kingfisher feathers were highly prized even though the birds were native in southern areas of China: Admiral Zheng He’s vessels garnered additional Cambodian kingfisher feathers in the early fifteenth century to satiate the demand in China (McCarthy and Chase 2003).

  Feathers of the various kingfishers display a range of brilliant iridescent blues from lapis to turquoise. They were used in a technique called tian-tsui to create art works and personal ornaments at first only for the court and performers, and later for other elites. The feathers were desirable by ladies of the court for “headdresses, hairpins, hair combs, earrings, and other types of personal ornament” (McCarthy and Chase 2003: 15). The taste for kingfisher feather ornaments spread as non-elites emulated the elites and by the “late nineteenth century jewelry decorated with kingfisher feathers was available more widely in China” (McCarthy and Chase 2003: 14). The tian-tsui technique involved adhering tiny sections of feathers to silver metal or silver-colored paper in a manner similar to enamel cloisonné: metal partition walls of silver wire enclosed each space while on paper, string or folded paper did the job (McCarthy and Chase 2003). Design motifs included dragons, phoenixes, butterflies, and flowers embellished with pearls, colored glass beads, and bits of other bird feathers in violet, green, and white (Clark 2013; McCarthy and Chase 2003).

  When the Silk Road trade burgeoned in the first century, settlements also thrived along the routes fringing the edges of the vast Taklamakan Desert in the center of Eurasia. Due to the dry conditions, textile artifacts have survived at various sites there dating from the Bronze Age to 1000, often with mummified human remains. Within Xinjiang, or “New Borders,” lie the archaeological sites at Yingpin, once a town on the southern rim of the Tarim Basin, and its cemetery at Niyä. The sites yielded evidence of both Indian and Chinese influences in contact with those of the Sogdians, dated to ca. 300 to 500. The grave of Yingpin Man (in Tomb No. 15) held a decomposed body, but well-preserved and sumptuous clothing. His ethnicity is officially undetermined, but reports of his facial features and brown hair suggest he was Caucasoid.

  Yingpin Man’s burial is unique among those at Xinjian. He was wrapped in textile strips and held in place by wooden armatures inside a finely made wooden coffin. A silk shroud covered his body. His clothes portray an extremely wealthy man and they also reflect a confluence of cultures. His silk and wool knee-length kaftan opens on the right in the Chinese fashion, but its cut—narrow-sleeved, closely fitted waist flaring to a wide hem—indicates a horseman’s attire, despite the fine textile. The wool brocade of the kaftan has a red ground with rows of yellow pomegranate trees, pairs of naked males fighting with swords and pairs of abutted goats, a design reflective of Graeco-Roman motifs (Sheng 2010). A wide silk sash encloses his waist and a bag for aromatics is attached. His deep maroon-red wide-legged silk trousers are embroidered in wool yarns of blue, green, and yellow in lozenges composed of dots, stars, and floral shapes. Silk boots decorated with gold foil and wool embroideries, made expressly for the burial, shod his feet. Sets of miniature clothing made of spun silk accompanied his body. His grave goods included a glass bowl assumed to be from Syria, part of the late Roman Empire (Jager and Mair 2010; Sheng 2010). All of these attributes led Ulf Jager and Victor Mair to propose that Yingpin Man was a “wealthy traveling trader” and, as a Caucasian, he may have been a Sogdian (2010: 57). Sogdians originated in Central Asia and were Iranian. Without their own kingdom or homeland, they allied with others as skilled traders and expert craftsmen.

  Elizabeth Barber remarked on the “riot of color” in the textile finds at Xinjian, especially mentioning the finely patterned silk brocades created by Chinese weavers (2010: 77). The Sogdians used the samit weave to create “variations of a striking Sassanian design called the pearl roundel . . . in which a ring of pearl-like circles surround a central design” (2010: 78). The pearl roundel became a favored design in the Tang Dynasty in China. In this way textile techniques and patterns traveled the Silk Road and were adapted as new designs, reflecting the fashion impulse.

  Indeed, Central Asian coats with long tight-fitting sleeves and overlapping front closures were excavated at Antinoë, a trading town in Middle Egypt that connected the Nile Valley to the harbors on the Red Sea. Made of sheep’s wool, some had tablet-woven borders, while others had silk appliqués (Evans and Ratliff 2012). They date to the fifth and sixth centuries, roughly the same period as Yingpin Man. This example illustrates the wide circulation of new styles over large geographical areas. As Cäcilia Fluck articulates, trade and cultural exchange brought new fabrics and garment forms to western regions including North Africa, “where they were adopted alongside local traditions, still heir to the Roman styles” (2012: 160).

  Fashion systems in the Byzantine Empire

  Most costume histories include Byzantine dress, but coverage is scant for an empire that lasted over a thousand years. There is much more to the study of Byzantine dress than the mosaics of Justinian and Theodora at the San Vitale Basilica in Ravenna, Italy. Scholars have begun addressing the complexities of Byzantine dress, notably Jennifer Ball (2005) and Timothy Dawson (2006). Further, two New York City institutions recently displayed rare dress artifacts in exhibitions from the early and middle Byzantine periods; both treated dress as a changing form of material culture subject to the vagaries of fashion. A full-color catalog accompanied each exhibition (Evans and Ratliff 2012, Thomas 2016).

  Byzantium came into existence in 324 CE, when Constantine, the emperor of Rome, founded a second capital in the eastern part of the empire, which was not so vulnerable to attacks from the so-called barbarians (people who did not speak Greek or Latin) as Rome was in the west. When Rome finally fell in 476, the new capital, called Constantinople in honor of its founder, grew in importance. The city enjoyed a premium location on the Bosporus Strait, which divided the Eurasian continents into Europe and Asia while at the same time connecting the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Over time the Eastern Roman Empire became known as Byzantium after the small town upon which Constantinople was built. Byzantium embraced Christianity, which perhaps contributes to why its dress is included in Western costume histories while the dress of its Islamic neighbors to the east is not.

  For over a thousand years, Byzantium was the most advanced political, cultural, and scientific civilization in the West, and its style influence was felt as far away as eastern China and northern Europe. Byzantine styles dominated the wardrobes of the elite in Europe. The women of Charlemagne’s court (768–814) wore Byzantine dress as did Otto II in an ivory dated 982, as well as the Norman Roger II when crowned king of Sicily in the twelfth century (Ball 2005). The Byzantines “were extremely interested in creating, borrowing, and wearing fashionable dress” (Ball 2005: 1). Not only the
courts but also ordinary citizens participated in the fashion system. Charioteers, for example, were reputed to have dressed well. While proscriptions for court regalia were recorded for posterity in The Book of Ceremonies, no such restrictions existed for non-court dress.

  Until the seventh century, the empire included four great cities: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria (in modern Egypt), and Antioch (in modern Turkey). Although the spread of Islam reduced the size of the empire in the seventh and eighth centuries, it rebounded to experience a golden age in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Crusades, ostensibly intended to recover the regions that had fallen into Muslim hands, weakened the Byzantine Empire so that by 1204, the empire was little more than the city itself. A reduced Byzantium finally succumbed to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

  Constantinople was the Paris of its era. The city housed the palace, imperial workshops, a magnificent Christian church, and entertainment venues. Over the course of its long history, the Byzantines changed dress styles multiple times, reflecting cultural influences from both inside and outside the empire, as well as from its border areas. Initially, in the fourth century, residents wore the same general styles as the rest of the Roman Empire. This consisted of a tunic—knee length for men and children, and long f or women—and an outer wrap called chlamys. Women also wore shawls and headscarves (Dawson 2006). The many tunics recovered while excavating Christian burials in Egypt reveal that their structure and decoration underwent continual change and innovation (Thomas 2016). The tunic “developed into a vehicle for decorative elements placed at the neck, shoulders, and sleeves, vertically along the torso and following the alignment of the legs (clavi), extending to the ankles, and along the lower edge” (Thomas 2016: 43). These decorative elements, in use since Roman times, were colorful squares (segmentae) or circular designs (roundels) in addition to vertical stripes. Patterning on tunics, along with hairstyles and jewelry, offered plenty of room for individual expression. The basic tunic had close-fitting sleeves. In the tenth century, an over-tunic with wide sleeves came into use; it was termed dalmatic in period sources (Dawson 2006).