Likewise, costume history textbooks did not specifically state when fashion began until the late twentieth century. Blanche Payne’s widely used textbook History of Costume (1965) did not mark a beginning of fashion although the author started using the term “fashion” after the chapter on fourteenth-century dress. When Geitel Winakor and Jane Farrell-Beck revised Payne’s textbook in 1992, they stated that “the middle fourteenth century marked a major turning point in costume history” in that novelty and competition between classes spurred faster change. “This was an atmosphere in which fashion could flourish” (Payne, Winakor, and Farrell-Beck 1992: 187). Phyllis Tortora and Sara Marcketti stated that “some historians and social scientists believe that the phenomenon of fashion in dress in western society began in, or at least accelerated during, the Middle Ages” (Tortora and Marcketti 2015: 103).
In trying to determine how the “birth of fashion” claim got started, we zero in on the later 1960s, when two well-respected dress historians—François Boucher and James Laver—began linking dress in the 1300s with the word “fashion.” Boucher and Laver published books at about the same time, which helped to establish the claim. Boucher stated in the introduction to 20,000 Years of Fashion that “it was in the fourteenth century that clothing acquired personal and national characteristics; it began to undergo frequent variation in which we must recognize the appearance of fashion in the modern sense of the term” (Boucher 1966: 13). Then in the chapter on dress in Europe from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, the subheading “The Birth of Fashion” appeared; under that subheading Boucher wrote: “The development of fashion is a capital change, and of far greater significance than a mere passing change of style” (Boucher 1966: 192). He gave the example of the short tunic as the first manifestation of fashion and noted its spread across Europe in national variations. He emphasized the influences that each nation’s courts and growing towns had on the development of fashion. Sarah-Grace Heller pointed out that Boucher and others relied on Paul Post, whose 1910 dissertation proposed that modern male dress first appeared in France around 1350 (Heller 2007: 48–49). But Boucher’s costume history book was the one that changed the discourse by announcing the birth of fashion in the fourteenth century.
British fashion historian James Laver, in his 1969 book A Concise History of Fashion, made the specific statement that “it was in the second half of the fourteenth century that clothes for men and for women took on new forms, and something emerges which we can already call ‘fashion’” (Laver 1969b: 26).
Figure 8.1 illustrates what these authors are referring to. This miniature by Jacques de Longuyon is dated 1345–50, and it was produced in French Belgium. It shows four young men in short tunics. Recall that Boucher identified the tunic as the clothing item that started fashion. On their heads are hoods, which display dagging (i.e., edges cut in decorative strips). The seated woman wears a surcote with deep open armholes over her fitted gown. The standing woman on the right, who is receiving romantic advances from the man behind her, has long tippets hanging from her sleeves. All three women have their hair arranged over their ears. Both men’s and women’s garments are fitted, a feature that both Boucher and Laver link to the beginning of fashion.
Figure 8.1 Les voeux du paon, fol. 25v. Jacques, de Longuyan. Belgium, probably Tournai, ca. 1350. The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MS G.24. Gift of the Trustees of the William S. Glazier Collection, 1984. This miniature shows young men wearing the latest fashion—short tunics and hoods with dagged edges—about the time some dress scholars claim that fashion started in Europe.
Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism, 15 th –18 th Century also influenced scholarship on the birth of fashion. Published in French, then translated to English in 1981, this work reached a wide academic audience interested in the emerging field of cultural studies. It connected cultural studies to the history discipline. He devoted twenty-three pages to “costume and fashion,” a subject that had previously been ignored by historians in academia. He distinguished between “costume” and “fashion” based on the pace of change in dress. He stated that this change occurred around 1350 when men’s tunics suddenly became shorter. He went on: “One could say that fashion began here. For after this, ways of dressing became subject to change in Europe” (Braudel 1981: 317). Interestingly, Braudel appears to have obtained his information from Boucher, as he quoted Boucher in the section where he identified 1350 as the starting date for fashion.
Braudel made the clear claim that fashion began in Europe as a way for the elite to distinguish themselves from those lower on the social scale. His argument centered on tailoring, or “fashioning” clothes to the body, which ignored body modifications and hairstyling, as well as changing tastes in textiles. In Braudel’s eyes, fashion applied only to Europe’s elite, not to the clothing of Europe’s peasants. He described costume as a manifestation of stable societies. Yet, in apparent contradiction, he stated that costume the world over was “subject to incessant change” (Braudel 1981: 311).
British scholar Stella Mary Newton made a deep impression on the field with the publication of her study on fashion during the age of Edward, the Black Prince (1330–76). She examined surviving evidence for the years 1340 –1365, specifically British royal wardrobe accounts; chronicles and poetry; and representations in painting, sculpture, and illuminated manuscripts. She published her findings in 1980 as Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: A Study of the Years 1340–1365, in which she traced the increasing rapidity of change in clothing that began around 1340. She cited sumptuary laws, women’s hairdos, dagging on the edges of clothing, and the appearance of set-in sleeves as examples of changing fashions. Newton’s scholarship was impeccable, and it influenced subsequent authors. She did not say that fashion began during that period, but other authors used her work to support their own explorations. For instance, in their oft-cited study Dress in the Middle Ages, Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane noted that many costume historians consider the middle of the fourteenth century to be the beginning of fashion (1997: 65). They expanded this observation with the explanation that the details of dress were in a constant state of change and that the silhouette was modified every fifty years. They include Newton as well as Braudel in their bibliography.
Paula Mae Carns chose 1340 as the benchmark year for a study of costume depictions on French Gothic ivories (Carns 2009). She stated that until the 1340s, men and women wore the same basic outfit consisting of undertunics, overtunics, and a head covering, but that “in the late 1330s, a fashion revolution swept France as well as other parts of Europe” (56). By way of explanation, she said that clothes started to be cut to fit with set-in sleeves, often with extensions hanging from the elbows. She cited Stella Mary Newton as the reason why she used 1340 as her start date.
In 2011, the Morgan Library in New York City displayed over fifty illuminated manuscripts and early books in an exhibition on the theme of fashion. The exhibition and accompanying catalog were entitled “Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands, 1325–1575.” Both exhibition and catalog were divided into four parts, beginning with the “fashion revolution” that swept northern Europe around 1330. The image in Figure 8.1 was included in that exhibition as exemplifying the beginning of fashion. The text pointed to the set-in sleeve, again, as evidence for this fashion revolution. The catalog’s author, art historian Anne van Buren, modulated the “fashion revolution” claim by stating that “fashion—a style subject to imitation and change—had existed in every society since the Romans and before, but it had been slow-moving and restricted to a small and mostly invisible segment of society” (van Buren 2011: 3). She interpreted fashion as a style subject to imitation and change, thus an important signifier in an increasingly stratified society. Van Buren had studied the dress illustrated in illuminated manuscripts for thirty years, beginning her work in the early 1980s, when the Newton and Braudel publications were new, and when scholars embraced semio
tics to interpret fashion. Her bibliography includes both Roland Barthes and Boucher.
Yet even in comparatively recent scholarship, the “birth of fashion” concept is accepted. Laurel Ann Wilson completed a PhD in history at Fordham University with a dissertation titled “‘De Novo Modo’: The Birth of Fashion in the Middle Ages” (2011). Focusing on menswear, her main goal was “an attempt to establish and historicize the birth of fashion at a specific time in the history of the West” (Wilson 2011: 1). She defined fashion as the commodification of change and display of gender difference, linking it to the expansion of the woolen trade in northern Europe (90).
Thus, we have seen how the conclusions of a few authors were repeated and quoted by subsequent scholars. The assertion that fashion emerged in Western Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century is alive and well in books, textbooks, journals, exhibitions, museum catalogs, and PhD dissertations. Even the authors of this book were guilty of unquestioningly repeating the claim in the first edition of The Fashion Reader (2007). The student of fashion has been ind octrinated to believe that fashion did not truly exist before the fourteenth century.
Note that the scholars cited above do not identify the same feature of dress and appearance as the one that sparked the birth of fashion. Some say it was fitted clothing in general; others say it was the practice of tailoring specifically exemplified by the set-in sleeve; still others point to extremisms in dress; while most claim it was the increasingly rapid pace of change. To boot, authors do not even settle on the same time period. The late Anne Hollander, an art historian, identified the thirteenth century as the period when the modern notion of fashion appeared in Western Europe. Her argument is familiar, except that her date is 100 years earlier than Boucher’s mid-fourteenth-century date: “Sometime during the thirteenth century, the aesthetic impulse toward significant distortion and creative tailoring (as opposed to creative draping and trimming) arose in European dress and established what has become the modern notion of fashion” (Hollander 1978: 17). Thus, we urge readers not to pinpoint a specific start date for fashion, for the reasons given in the next section.
Excluding pre-1340 from the fashion discourse
Excluding the centuries preceding the 1340s misses what can be considered fashionable behavior in earlier cultures in Europe. We argue our point by drawing on examples from two broad time periods: the early medieval period in Western Europe and the ancient world.
Fashion in early medieval sources
Two authors—Christine Waugh and Sarah-Grace Heller—have pushed back the date of fashion’s arrival in Europe after studying contemporary written sources. Previous scholarship relied on visual evidence, which is mainly limited to church sculptures and miniatures. Christine Waugh, citing monastic writers (e.g., monks and abbots) and the emerging genre of French romance literature, noted a new ideal of beauty that appeared around 1100. Young noblemen began manipulating their appearance after inheritance laws changed, which forced them to rely on fashion and unusual behavior to gain attention and secure a good match. They grew their hair long and started wearing tight-fitting tunics and pointed shoes. Their long trailing sleeves provoked commentary, as did their mannerisms. At Canterbury, Eadmer wrote in 1094 that “almost all the youth of the court let their hair grow long . . . and, with their hair combed, it was usual for them to walk around glancing about them and nodding in ungodly fashion, with delicate steps and a mincing gait” (quoted in Waugh 1999: 6). Orderic Vitalis, writing here about the late eleventh century in Normandy, criticized the young men who “delighted in wearing long and excessively tight undershirts and tunics” as well as attaching things at their toes that resembled “serpent’s tails . . . which appear just like scorpion’s tails before their eyes” (quoted in Waugh 1999: 16). Vitalis even complained that “these days old ways are almost all changed for new.” This sounds as much like fashionable behavior as the short tunics of the fourteenth century cited by Boucher, except centuries earlier.
Women were not to be left out, as evidenced by the romance literature of the Middle Ages. These were tales of courtly love and adventure with moral overtones. They taught the aristocracy how to behave. The stories relay scenes where young women wear dresses “well-cut through the body.” Again and again the sources mention well-cut clothing that fits snugly. The use of curved seams, tight lacing at the side seams, and inset gores helped to achieve the close fit. Sometimes the fine linen inner chemise peaked through at the lacings, or in warm weather, the skin itself was revealed as indicated in these lines:
Because of the great heat, she had taken
Her cloak from her shoulders,
And her body was revealed, long and beautiful;
The white skin of her sides and of her arms
Appeared between the laces.
(quoted in Waugh 1999: 7)
These dresses were seductive and sent noblemen into fits of desire. In another romance, a fair lady was wearing a bliaut (fitted tunic) of figured silk, “tightened with laces over her torso, which is well-shaped.” When Guillaume, a young nobleman, sees her, “his whole body trembles” (quoted in Waugh 1999: 7).
Sarah-Grace Heller also used French romance literature to study fashion in medieval France. She concluded that fashionable behavior was occurring in France as early as the twelfth century, as evidenced by detailed descriptions in Old French literature. She cited the emphasis on individuality and the demonstration of taste and refinement in this literature as evidence. Yet she rejected the temptation to say that fashion was born in France during the twelfth century because “fashion seems to stage its own birth again and again.” She continued: “A fundamental characteristic of fashion is declaring the past invalid in favor of a new, improved present” (Heller 2007: 59). In fact, after reciting the litany of authors who have announced the birth of fashion at different times and places, she suggested that “fashion is born whenever you study it” (Heller 2007: 47). Heller, however, proposed that there was a period in the early Middle Ages when a fashion system did not exist in France.
Sumptuary laws are another indicator of authorities attempting to control what they perceived to be extremes in dress. These began to appear in the eleventh century to curb vanity and sartorial excess among the clergy in Italy. Soon they extended to the laity, particularly women. A 1279 edict from Cardinal Latino Malabranca harped on women who did not wear veils, who had garments that trailed on the ground, and who wore clothes “sewn together artificially from [different] types of cloth” (Izbiki 2009: 46). This was the fashion for parti-colored garments reportedly brought back from the Crusades.
Fashion in the ancient world
Garments of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds that were draped from lengths of woven textiles have been widely regarded as unchanging and therefore not as fashion. However, the evidence now shows that there was fashion in antiquity; change was present and may be documented in draped garments and other aspects of Greek and Roman dress. This discussion focuses on Hellenistic Greece (323 BCE–31 BCE), the era before the Roman Empire was established, and on imperial Rome (27 BCE–396 CE) to portray fashion’s diverse occurrences and dimensions.
The problems in establishing the existence of fashion in ancient times lie in the limited archaeological record and in the definition of fashion. The archaeological evidence and texts form an incomplete record, and therefore, an assessment of dress as worn styles versus idealized forms of dress in statues, bas relief, and other representations is critical. Several factors assist in confronting the problems of interpreting limited archaeological remains. First, new remains are routinely discovered providing additional information for pr eviously excavated artifacts. Second, constantly advancing technologies are applied and the resulting data may reveal additional information, even in regard to well-known artifacts. Third, interdisciplinary research that may propose new interpretations has gained ground, particularly in the study of dress and textiles (Harlow, Michel, and Nosch, 2014). The increasing evidence allows observation of
fashionability in operation. Another problem in establishing fashion in the ancient world is the definition of fashion as originating in the Middle Ages, as discussed previously in this chapter, or to an origin in the Industrial Revolution (Lipovetsky 1994). Such perspectives link fashion to capitalistic structures. However, the previous discussion has shown that the notion of the birth of fashion in Europe in the Middle Ages is flawed and indeed that Heller, for example, understands the occurrences of fashion more broadly. The discussion below presents examples of fashion in antiquity, long before the Middle Ages and capitalism.
Fashion History Page 21
