Fashion History

by Linda Welters,Abby Lillethun

  Another characteristic of fashionable dress is that individuals believe that they are expressing uniqueness through their appearance. This occurred in Greek villages even though the styles worn by an individual resembled those worn by the majority. Welters asked women how they decided which design to embroider. Repeatedly the women said that they embroidered whatever design they wanted. If they saw a design they liked, they copied it. Thus, the embroideries and woven patterns of the fabrics continually evolved rather than remaining static.

  Critics of fashion have long complained that people spend too much money follow ing the latest trends. This was also a complaint in the Messoghia villages of Attica, where the amount of gold incorporated into the wedding ensemble became a concern for local authorities. One interviewee from Markopoulo explained: “People were going to extremes and spent whole fortunes, all the money they had, on the costumes and jewelry” (Interview, July 9, 1983). The brides who had the richest-looking ensembles, covered in gold, provoked jealousy among poorer brides. One interviewee, sixty years later, still cried at the memory of the secondhand outfit she had to wear as a bride, while the better-off girls got to wear new gold-embroidered ensembles. Eventually, local authorities passed sumptuary laws preventing people from paying to have a professional embroider their wedding garments.

  Men’s clothing in Greece was not immune to fashion. During the Turkish occupation, men were depicted in Turkish-style vraka (baggy breeches). After the Greeks won their independence from the Ottoman Turks, they adopted the full white skirt known as the foustanella. This was the dress of the fierce Albanian soldiers who helped the Greeks during the war. Grooms who married in the mid- to late nineteenth century wore the foustanella, which had become standard formal wear (see Figure 8.4) By the turn of the century, men started wearing Western-style trousers with abbreviated foustanella shirts. As the twentieth century progressed, grooms gave up the foustanella and wore Western-style suits.

  The situation in Latvia was different than in Greece. Latvia, like Greece, had a long history of foreign domination. But unlike the Greek villagers studied by Welters, Latvian peasants were part of a feudal economy: German overlords controlled Latvian serfs, who worked their land. Prior to the arrival of Christian conquerors in the thirteenth century, Latvian tribes, who traded in amber, practised a pre-Christian religion. The women wore linen tunics, wool skirts, and mantles while men wore linen shirts, trousers, and woolen coats or wraps. This attire was similar to that of other northern European societies as revealed by archaeological finds in locations such as Danish peat bogs.

  During the medieval era, peoples of many nations traveled to or lived in Latvia, bringing European fashions. Latvian serfs lived in proximity to urban centers and the manor houses of the Germans. They saw new fashions and incorporated them into their own dress when possible. The landed rulers did not want their serfs to dress like they did, and discouraged wholesale adoption of Western styles through sumptuary legislation. Nevertheless, changes in cut and decoration ensued. Latvian folk dress gradually developed into regional variations by selectively incorporating urban styles. For instance, in the province of Kurzeme, Baroque-style silk caps entered women’s wardrobes in the eighteenth century (Latvian History Museum 1997: 341). In Vidzeme, the old bronze clasps that held the mantles in place were exchanged for brooches from the town jewelers (Latvian History Museum 1995: 281). Church attendance offered the opportunity for sartorial display. For instance, in 1841 German traveler J. Kohl noticed that the everyday footwear made from bast fibers or animal hides was laid aside on Sundays: “To imitate Germans out of pride some peasants wear boots or shoes on Sundays” (Latvian History Museum 1995: 282).

  Fashion manifested itself not only in fashionable German styles adapted for folk dress, but also in their own unique material culture. Latvians had a deep affinity for mittens and gloves, which they made themselves and gave away as gifts and at events such as weddings. J. Kohl, again, wrote: “These mittens they make themselves of soft wool, knitting red starlets, flowers or hooks from thousands of samples that they never tire of inventing” (Latvian History Museum 1995: 283). The repertoire of design motifs included pre-Christian symbols that had lost their original meanings by the nineteenth century, becoming decorative units to be utilized creatively by knitters.

  Nineteenth-century industrialization along with land reforms resulted in Latvians gradually switching to town dress. This occurred about the same time as romantic nationalism with its focus on languages, folklore, customs and traditions for determination of national identity. This prompted Latvian intellectuals to start recording folk songs and collecting material culture for newly formed national museums. Latvians returned to their regional costumes during the period of national independence between the First and Second World Wars. They wore them to festivals, parades, and weddings to demonstrate national pride. When the Soviets controlled the country after 1945, a bastardized version of cheap acetate was permitted for parades and other demonstrations of political allegiance. When the Soviet Union dissolved in the summer of 1991, the national costumes reemerged in a new form, in materials as close to the museum versions as could be produced. Welters observed these costumes at a song festival in the capital of Riga in 1991 just as independence was occurring (Figure 8.5).

  Figure 8.5 Women at a song festival in Riga, Latvia, 1991. Photograph by Linda Welters. These women are wearing Latvian folk costumes, which undergo their own style changes to conform to what is considered most authentic. The outfits function as costumes to be worn on festival days to demonstrate national pride.

  Similar use of folk dress as an expression of national pride has played out in Lithuania (Saliklis 1999) and Iceland (Aspelund 2011). In each country, folk dress has gone through sequential iterations that reflect political and cultural beliefs, and are often contested by competing cultural creators over what is perceived to be most authentic. One could say that these iterations represent a fashion system of their own.

  Fashion in the dress of enslaved people

  Enslaved people were brought to North America and the Caribbean in large numbers for more than three centuries. They came from thriving cloth cultures in Africa, memories of which they brought to America. They arrived from the Middle Passage naked, with only body modifications to individualize them. Slave owners were obliged to clothe their slaves, which they did by giving them new ready-made outfits once or twice a year, often at Christmas, or by giving them fabric to make their own clothes. Enslaved people also spun yarns and wove fabric for themselves and their masters. Sometimes the masters gifted them their own clothes, especially to house slaves who were expected to show a better appearance than field slaves. Typical slave attire for men was a shirt, breeches or trousers, and a vest or coat. For women, it was a shift, petticoat, short gown, or just before the Civil War, a dress. Children often went naked; boys were allotted long shirts called “shirt-tails,” and girls were given dresses termed “slips” (Knowles 2012: 32). Cheap uncomfortable shoes called brogans constituted the main footwear; however, slaves often went barefoot rather than s uffer the consequences of blistered feet. Cloth, clothing, and footwear were produced on the plantation itself, bought from local suppliers, or sourced from northern mills. Being provided with clothing did not leave much room for individual expression, but African-American and African Jamaican slaves found a way to participate in fashion just as the lower half of British society did.

  Helen Bradley Foster’s work helps us to flesh out the picture of American slave dress. Her work is grounded in the Works Progress Administration slave narratives assembled in 1937. She compiled those interviews with former slaves who discussed clothing and concluded that “the clothing worn during the period of slavery was not stylistically static; it changed as fashions always do” (Foster 1997: 12). Slaves sought to individualize themselves through fashion. Female slaves bought calicoes for dresses, bonnets, and ribbons, while male slaves bought cloth that they took to tailors to have fashioned into suits. They d
id this with money they earned on the side or by bartering with crops that they raised. During the period when hoopskirts were fashionable, slave women made their own hoops out of grapevines. They wore their fashionable attire on Sundays and to dances. One accessory that differentiated black women was the head tie, believed by some to have its roots in West African attire. Foster researched its connection to West Africa and found that it did not appear there until the eighteenth century. Thus, only slaves arriving in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have remembered it from their homelands. Enslaved African women in the Caribbean and in the antebellum South wore such headwraps, but they also wore caps, bonnets, and hats.

  Africans on the island of Jamaica learned how to make lace bark cloth, which they used for their clothing. It has been interpreted as a manifestation of resistance against enslavement (Buckridge 2016). Bark cloth had been manufactured by some cultures in West Africa, notably the Ashanti, although it had low status there because it was considered a mark of poverty. Jamaican slaves from West Africa learned from the indigenous Taino people that the inner bark of the lagetto tree made a lacy-looking cloth. The tree grew only in specific areas of the island, one of which was settled by a group of escaped slaves known as the Maroons. They developed its production, which consisted of collecting the bark, separating the inner bark, and stretching out the fibers to make the cloth (Brennan, Harris, and Nesbitt 2013). African Jamaican slaves and the Maroons used bark cloth to fashion cravats, collars, cuffs, shawls, veils, bonnets, and slippers.

  For many decades, the study of fashion history has been limited to Western dress worn primarily in urban environments beginning with the middle of the fourteenth century. The study of ancient dress, folk dress, and non-elite dress was framed within disciplines such as anthropology and ethnography, rather than as fashion. In this chapter, we have shown that dress in the ancient world and in Europe in the late eleventh century demonstrated features of a fashion system. Further, we have discussed research that shows how the dress practices of the common people in England, villagers in Greece and Latvia, and African slaves in America and Jamaica were not immune to fashion.

  9

  GLOBAL FASHION

  Perhaps the most successful cultural bequest from the West to the rest of the world has in fact been precisely Western dress. Mankind is getting rapidly homogenised by the sheer acquisition of the Western shirt and the Western trousers. The Japanese businessman, the Arab Minister, the Indian lawyer, the African civil servant have all found a common denominator in the Western suit.

  ALI A. MAZRUI

  African scholar Ali Mazrui made this observation in an essay ruminating on nakedness in the history of thought (Mazrui 1970: 22). He was responding to a new policy statement issued by the Tanzanian government in 1968, which attempted to modernize the Maasai by forcing them to dress in Western clothes instead of their own abbreviated skin garments, loose blankets, and “soiled pigtailed hair” (Mazrui 1970: 19). Called Operation Dress-Up, the policy equated Western dress with modernity and progress (Schneider 2006). As we observed in Chapter 5, European colonizers affected similar influence in attempting to Christianize indigenous groups in the Americas.

  In previous chapters, we have seen how new styles were initiated at times and in places that ordinarily are not included in fashion history. Also, we viewed how fashion innovations made their appearance in multiple ways including emulation of elites, cross-cultural exchange, trade, and subcultural rejection of mainstream styles. This chapter extends the discussion into modern times by examining the spread of European styles, the so-called Western dress, to societies around the world through globalization. The chapter also considers the inverse to the spread of Western dress: the adoption of non-Western styles by Westerners.

  Globalization and interdisciplinary Histories of dress

  Globalization encompasses the interaction of nations, states, or societies that creates and maintains interdependencies and that provides a process for the spreading of ideas. The globalization process expanded during the Silk Road era and continues today in multiple trajectories. The effects of globalization, about which numerous individuals and groups have written, intersect with fashion because the diffusion of technologies and ideas affecting dress travels along those same trajectories. A growing number of interdisciplinary scholars have examined fashion’s globalization by investigating the spread of Western dress from the onset of the Age of Exploration to the present.

  Among the first of those scholars was Wilbur Zelinsky, a cultural geographer, who undertook an impressive review of the literature to trace the global diffusion of what he termed “Modern Western Male Attire,” specifically the man’s “Standard Suit” of jacket, trousers, shirt, and tie (Zelinsky 2004: 84). He explained the phenomenon as a classic example of spatial and social diffusion that began around 1500 when fashion news spread from European style centers—notably London and Paris—to rural areas across Europe and beyond to colonies established by the English, Dutch, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and French. This spatial expansion of European style resulted from trade and then colonization of the Americas, parts of Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines followed by more recent inroads into places where Euro-Americans fanned out, such as Hawai’i, India, and Vietnam. Many indigenous peoples in the employ of the colonizers wore some version of Western styles. Men wore the “Standard Suit” when at work in colonial government offices or in private service, such as for the European trade companies, although they might not wear it at home. Catholic and Protestant Christian missionaries were also agents of change by encouraging converts to don Western dress. Finally, government decrees to adopt Western dress to visibly modernize a country, as occurred under Peter the Great’s rule in Russia in 1701, with Kemal Atatürk’s clothing reforms in Turkey in 1925, and the aforementioned Maasai of Tanzania in 1968, evinced change from local styles to international styles. Typically, locals only partially accepted Western ideas about dress and appearance, resulting in creolized or hybrid styles. Zelinsky also noted that men were more likely to adopt Western dress than women, who remained longer in their local attire.

  Robert Ross, an Africanist and historian, investigated the global homogenization of clothing from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century. He preferred the term “clothing” for his analysis of the globalization of Western dress, as opposed to “fashion,” which he saw as “ephemeral” (Ross 2008: 5–6). He concentrated on the spread of Western dress in early modern times rather than on the recent global expansion of Western styles. He touched on some of the same themes as Zelinsky, although his embrace of clothing went far beyond the man’s suit to include cosmetics and body modification, despite the “clothing” moniker. Like Zelinsky, he relied on published scholarship to substantiate his investigation, excepting his own area of Africa. He reported, for example, that African diamond mine workers in the 1870s spent most of their wages on clothing, acquiring trousers and tailcoats to signal worldliness. Ross includes the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the spread of Western-style clothing, but he also acknowledges the roles played by nationalism and resistance to colonialism. Further, he cited examples of colonists adopting the clothing of the colonized. He concluded with commentary on clothing production and distribution in the world economy, stating that “homogenization of clothing may be a symptom of globalization, but at the same time the profits deriving from the clothing industry have made that globalization possible” (Ross 2008: 172).

  In 2016, Robert DuPlessis, a historian, picked up on the economic thread of Western dress’s globalization. He examined trade records and other primary documents to trace the spread of globally produced and traded cloth and what he termed “dress regimes” in the geographical areas bordering the Atlantic Ocean. These areas included the eastern coasts of North America, Central and South America as well as the Caribbean, and coastal Africa down to Cape Town. Silks from China, cottons from India, and wools and linens from England and Holland circulated through t
he Atlantic world courtesy of Arab, African, and European merchants. DuPlessis stressed the role European colonialism and commerce played in the absorption of European commodities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He also noted that despite the similarity of the goods on offer, selective adoption resulted in hybrid fashions. Throughout the period studied, tastes changed after the introduction of new goods to markets.

  DuPlessis’s close attention to Caribbean fashion is refreshing. European settlement on the Caribbean islands brought Old World dress regimes despite their unsuitability for the climate. The French donned silk while the British and Dutch wore wool and linen. The slaves, meanwhile, displayed “self-fashioning” from available materials (DuPlessis 2016: 152–53). As the 1700s came to a close, the use of cotton materials rose while that of linen declined, which aligned with developments in European textile production. DuPlessis repeatedly pointed out that fashion overrode comfort.

  Other historians who have been instrumental in drawing attention to textiles and fashion in globalization studies are Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, both of whom have researched cotton and its expansion into the world’s wardrobes over the course of its long history (Lemire 1992, 2011; Riello 2013). Lemire dubbed cotton “fashion’s favourite” as she traced its path from East to West, linking it to the development of popular fashions in England prior to industrialization (Lemire 2011: 33). Riello explores cotton’s history over the past 1,000 years, from a widely traded commodity produced in India to its central role in Europe’s Industrial Revolution after which factory-produced European cottons found their way back into wardrobes in China, India, and the Ottoman Empire. He argues that the story of cotton exemplifies the history of globalization.