Fashion History

by Linda Welters,Abby Lillethun

  Following independence, dictatorships in both nations led to economic decline. The clubs experienced a new phase when in the late 1960s and early 1970s, disenfranchised Brazzaville youths began devoting considerable effort and resources to dressing in European designer garb, worn at selected times and events, in contrast to their work clothes. This sartorial engagement occurs as defiance of their overt poverty and of the legacies of French and Belgian colonialism (Gondola 1999; Martin 1994). A month’s wages as a laborer might be spent on shoes or other parts of an ensemble (Gondola 1999; Martin 1994). Even unemployed sapeurs, salient in the group, make the pilgrimage to Paris or Brussels to acquire the requisite designer items—suits, pocket squares, silk socks, crocodile shoes, watches, sunglasses, and scents with luxury designer labels: they gain prestige upon their return home (Gondola 1999). La Sap e clubs have now spread beyond the Congo to Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. Eventually women sapeurs were recognized, although men maintain the starring roles in la Sape.

  Rather than wholesale adoption of Zelinsky’s “Standard Suit,” sapeurs create their own looks. Rules or codes of dress and behavior guide members to perfect their fashion practice, or sapology: individuals create dandified elegance within the complicated system despite economic sacrifice and risk. Le Sape boasts its own legacy as the club claims its third generation of practitioners. The gentlemen in Figure 9.4 are from Bacongo, a working-class sector of Brazzaville, where the sartorial code limits to three the number of colors used in an ensemble (excepting white). The man on the left wears a pale yellow suit, blue shirt, and rust-orange tie and pocket square. The man on the right wears a black jacket, blue shirt, and peach-colored tie, gauzy pocket square, and cuffed trousers. Each holds a cigar and its metal storage case. In praise of sapology and characterizing its unique aesthetics, the musician Papa Wemba claimed, “White people invented the clothes, but we made an art of it” (Evans 2013).

  Figure 9.4 Gentlemen of Bacongo, ca. 2006. Photograph by Daniele Tamagni. Reproduced with permission. The two men are Sapeurs, a group of men in the Congo who practice the art of dressing as a cultural statement.

  Colonialism and fashion in Cambodia

  The spread of Euro-American styles from the colonizer to the colonized occurred in multiple countries in the twentieth century. Such was the case in Cambodia, which had been a colony of France for 100 years (1863–1953). Male Cambodians in government service adopted versions of Zelinsky’s Standard Suit. After independence, a period of instability followed in Southeast Asia due to communist expansionism. Cambodia suffered during the Khmer Rouge period (1975–79), during which more than 2 million people died.

  The man on the bicycle in Figure 9.5 grew up in Cambodia, serving as a police officer in the 1980s after the fall of the Khmer Rouge (Penh 2015). He related to his son that no fashion was available to buy during the Khmer Rouge period. In the 1980s and early 1990s, imported and secondhand clothing returned to the marketplace. It took until the late 1990s for Cambodian-made clothing to return. He married in 1989 wearing a Western-style suit rather than traditional Cambodian clothes. In Figure 9.5, he wears a white V-neck T-shirt, black pants, and sandals while off duty as a policeman. Zelinsky would call his outfit the Vernacular Version of the Standard Suit (e.g., pants and shorts). In increasing numbers, men in Southeast Asia wore Western-style pants—instead of a wrapped and draped rectangle of cloth on the lower body—with Western-style shirts as the world globalized.

  Figure 7.5 Man on bicycle, 1980s. Cambodia. Family Collection. Young Cambodian men wore Western styles like T-shirts, black pants, and sandals for daily wear after the fall of the Khmer Rouge government in 1979.

  Asian influences on Western dress

  Fashion history is replete with examples of non-Western influences on Western dress. For example, printed and painted textiles from India, the fashionable indiennes, entered the European marketplace via the seventeenth-century trade with India. Chinoiserie, or Chinese-inspired design, was especially fashionable in Europe during the eighteenth century in products ranging from fabrics to furniture. Turkish styles also appeared in the West, as discussed in Chapter 6. Such influences are often described as manifestations of Orientalism, a now contentious term that describes Western representations of Asia. Edward Said (1978) identified Orientalism as problematic because Western interpretations of eastern cultures, including all of Asia and North Africa, viewed the people and their societies as inferior to the West.

  Terminology/nomenclature aside, influences from the “Orient” continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Transfer of an indigenous Asian style to a Western culture, however, was never simply a straightforward fashion adoption. As with the Nigerian pelete bite and faux batik, Westerners modified material objects to meet local taste.

  In the nineteenth century, shawls originating in Kashmir, India, became wildly popular in Western fashion. The first shawls, displaying floral designs and pine cone (butah or paisley) motifs, had appeared in the London market in 1767 (Peck 2013). By 1800, fashionable women in Paris wore long Kashmir shawls with their Greek-inspired chemise dresses, originally made of white Indian muslin, as evidenced in David’s painting of Christine Boyer. Napoleon’s wife, Josephine, is reputed to have owned more than fifty Kashmir shawls (Peck 2013: 270). Made of cashmere fiber in a twill tapestry technique, they were extremely time consuming to weave and expensive to buy. Their growing popularity encouraged European manufacturers to imitate them using jacquard looms. At the same time, European importers were sending design ideas to India so that Indian weavers could better accommodate changing Western tastes. During the 1830s, women’s fashion in the West entered a phase in which skirts widened and large shawls provided the perfect substitute for coats and cloaks. Production of shawls inspired by the Kashmir originals boomed. Firms in France and in the towns of Norwich, England, and Paisley, Scotland, wove machine-made versions out of wool and silk, many of which survive in museum collections. The mills in Paisley produced so many shawls that they, and the butah designs, assumed the name of the town. Some paisley shawls were even printed, making the fashion affordable for all but the most indigent.

  Paisley shawls gradually fell out of favor when the bustle silhouette entered fashion at the end of the 1860s because the shawls covered the drapery of the bustle. To keep the mills working, manufacturers devised other products to make out of paisley-embellished cloth such as men’s narrow scarves and women’s dress fabrics. Paisley designs were tailored into bustle skirts and matching jackets as well as house dresses known as wrappers. Figure 9.6 illustrates a French bustle-style visiting dress made from paisley fabric. The University of Rhode Island’s Historic Textile and Costume Collection owns a partially assembled skirt of a paisley-printed wool fabric similar to the one illustrated in Figure 9.6 (accession number 1962.31.662). This demonstrates the extended duration of the fashionability of the Indian motifs in the West.

  Figure 9.6 “Toilette de Ville,” La Mode Artistique, 1874. Gustave Janet, Paris, France. Lithograph. Historic Textile and Costume Collection, University of Rhode Island. This bust le-style dress is shown in a paisley fabric. Paisley shawls, extremely popular in the mid-nineteenth century in Western fashion, evolved from Kashmiri shawls with butah (paisley) motifs.

  Japonism, the influence of Japanese art and design on Western culture, influenced the West in the second half of the nineteenth century after Commodore Perry negotiated the opening of trade with Japan. European and American artists became enamored of Japanese woodblock prints, many of which featured the fashionable beauties of Tokyo (William Merritt Chase 2016–2017). The main outer garment became known as the kimono in the West. Kimono-clad women became a favorite subject of European and American artists (Geczy 2013: 122). August Renoir, Claude Monet, James Tissot, James McNeill Whistler, and William Merritt Chase often dressed their sitters in kimono. William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), an American, used Japanese objects such as fans and screens for props in his full-length and bust-length paintings of Western wom
en in kimono (William Merritt Chase 2016–2017). He had several kimonos in his studio as his paintings depict women wearing them in different colors. In Figure 9.7, the woman wears a white kimono while contemplating a Japanese woodblock print.

  Kimono soon became fashionable for at-home wear in Western countries. Japanese department stores, such as Takashimaya in Kyoto, began exporting their own lines for the Western market (Geczy 2013). Initially their wares appeared in the Japanese pavilions at world’s fairs, but eventually the company opened offices in Paris and London. Takashimaya employed artists to develop kimono designs that would appeal to the international market. This is another variation of globalization; this time Japan capitalized on the West’s desire for fashionable Japanese kimono.

  Figure 9.7 “The Japanese Woodblock Print,” ca. 1888. William Merritt Chase (1849–1916). bpk Bildagentur, Berlin / Neue Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Munich, Germany. European and American artists became enamored of Japanese woodblock prints in the second half of the nineteenth century. Artists such as William Merritt Chase sometimes draped their sitters in kosode, a type of kimono.

  Japan, along with other Asian cultures, inspired Paris fashion in the early 1900s. The couture designer who best incorporated “Oriental” details was Paul Poiret. He used kimono sleeves on tunic dresses, turbans for headdresses, and Chinese-inspired robes as prototypes for coats. Other designers, dressmakers, and manufacturers quickly followed his lead.

  Postmodern global fashion

  On the heels of the Beat counterculture in the 1960s, youth rejected social norms that they found materialistic and motivated by conformity. Known as hippies, they became the dominant counterculture in the United States after the movement’s appearance on the national stage in 1967, during the “summer of love” in San Francisco and other cities. The name “hippie” came from the slang word “hip” that referred to being “in the know” in the Beat and jazz circles of the 1940s and 1950s. The hippie movement promoted human equality, opposed the Vietnam War (1955–75), and had liberal ideas regarding sex and recreational drug use. They emerged when postmodern philosophy (see Chapter 4) was taking hold in the academy; thus, college-age students comprised the prime members of the hippie movement. The movement’s actualization of the postmodern concepts of deconstruction and multiple truths resulted in breaking boundaries or social rules, giving voice to marginalized groups and engaging bricolage in their dress. This meant creating solutions from available elements such as mixing ethnic styles with mass-manufactured products to signify their anti-establishment and anti-fashion sentiments. Likewise, they incorporated secondhand clothes and military surplus into their wardrobes. Young people in other Westernized countries followed suit, notably university students in France and England.

  The hippie generation traveled with ease to international destinations, especially India, North Africa, and Central and South America. Their fashion incorporated their global trekking, and a global aesthetic extended to non-traveling hippies through textiles and garments imported from international sources, in particular India, North Africa, and Mexico. The woman in Figure 9.8 wore a cotton kaftan representative of the hippie preference for physical comfort and for colorful garb. Psychedelic design and the 1960s peacock revolution in men’s dress, which spread from London, also influenced hippie fashion.

  Figure 9.8 A woman in a colorful kaftan with her young child at the Sunbury Music Festival, Australia. 1973. Photo: The AGE / FairfaxMedia, Getty Images. Young people in Westernized countries adopted ethnic styles in the late 1960s and early 1970s to signify their anti-establishment and anti-fashion sentiments.

  Hippies identified with the working class whom the movement’s philosophy considered to be oppressed by the commercial-industrial establishment, and they adopted elements of workers’ clothing, in particular denim blue jeans from US manufacturers. The cultural meaning of blue jeans as symbolic of American identity links to prior historical moments, as well as to the hippie revolution. Miners, farmers, ranchers, railway men, and factory workers alike donned denim styles, such as overalls, jackets, and jeans in the United States since the later nineteenth century.

  Male and female hippies combined jeans with a range of tops. They might wear an Indian block-printed cotton top, or a natural cotton Mexican wedding shirt, or a T-shirt with a protest slogan printed on it. Outer garments included ponchos, Army fatigue jackets, and long coats inspired by Edwardian fashions. Among a panoply of choices from the global marketplace, leather accessories such as bags, wallets, wristbands, headbands, and shoes (including sandals and boots) added to the hippie look. These might be made by Native Americans, or made and embroidered in Morocco or India, or by a local hippie entrepreneur. Hippie fashions drew upon the available elements, which in the increasingly global market were materially and ethnically diverse, to create self-fashioned bricolage ensembles; hippies created fashions using unexpected combinations broadcasting their identity and aesthetic that contrasted with the dominant culture.

  Musicians Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin exemplified the i conoclasm of hippie fashion. Hippie style spread globally in part through the music scene of concerts and festivals. From the urban avant-garde centers of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Greenwich Village in New York City, Carnaby Street in London, and the Latin Quarter in Paris, hippie fashion flowed globally.

  The story of jeans becoming a mass market fashion phenomenon beginning in the 1960s starts with the initial selection of jeans by hippies as a core wardrobe item with multivalence. Jeans were long lasting and made of cotton, thus thought to be good for the environment. They could be personalized with embroidery and patchwork (Reich 1970). Jeans provided comfortable wear, freeing the body from the prevailing man’s Standard Suit and woman’s dress or skirt. Simultaneous to these signals, jeans projected an American identity within the cultural memory that grew from roots in the Gold Rush era sense of exploration and discovery. Wearing jeans moved into the mass market as manufacturers offered bell bottoms to a wide public. It was during the 1970s that jeans became a hot commodity on the international market, growing increasingly globalized as the years wore on. In the late 1970s, American designers offered their versions of jeans, which departed from functionality and responded to trends (Miller and Woodward 2011). This is a classic example of the trickle-up theory at work.

  Japanese subcultural fashion

  Kawaii, or “cute,” is a dimension of Japanese cultural aesthetics. It has been apparent in the well-known Hello Kitty product line, in the proliferation of cartoon character logos in Japan (e.g., for municipalities and government agencies), and in the globally popular Japanese manga (a style of comics and graphic novels). Artist Takashi Murakami, who deploys kawaii in his works—including in his multi-year leather accessory product collaborations with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton—declared that a “heritage of eccentricity” underlies Japanese creative culture (Matsui 2005: 226).

  Starting in the late twentieth century, a new type of Tokyo youth subculture emerged that incorporated the Japanese kawaii aesthetic and eccentric creativity in the expression of fashion. They were, and still are, centered in Tokyo’s Harajuku and Shibuya districts. The two districts flowered as sites where fashion-obsessed youth gathered to buy and show their idiosyncratic creations. Specific fashion subgroups took shape with such varied types as Ganguro with tanned skin and long bleached hair, and Yamamba with style references to a mountain witch (Kawamura 2011). Up-to-the-minute knowledge marked participation in a specific subgroup, and the age range for group membership was about fourteen to eighteen years when adult life took precedence (Kawamura 2011). In the early twentieth century, photographer Shoichi Aoki recorded passing looks for posterity (Aoki 2001, 2005).

  A style called Lolita was among the more widely adopted by females. It drew upon Western elite women’s fashions of the eighteenth century and of the Victorian era. The silhouettes required full-gathered skirts with net and ruffled petticoats, or bustle styles with ruffles. Trimmings and ru
ffles were essential. Colors such as pink and white dominated the style. An offshoot of Lolita style called Gousurori, or Gothic Lolita, developed, taking aspects from Western Goth subculture; looks were typically black from head to foot, but may incorporate white elements or red plaid elements. By 2005, the Gothic Lolita style gained global membership due to the ability to connect across space by the internet (Monden 2013). The American teenager in Figure 9.9 styled her all-black look with a ruffled choker, ruffled and lace petticoats, and an up-do hairstyle, all of which invoke past elite female fashions, in combination with knee-high stockings and platform lace-up shoes, which echo little girls’ dress as well as Goth style.

  Figure 9.9 American teen girl wearing authentic Japanese-style Gousurori or Gothic Lolita fashion. Duplass/Shutterstock.com. Subcultural styles that originated with teenage girls in Japan spread to Euro-American cultures in the early twenty-first century.

  Some scholars characterize the feminine styles of Lolita and its subgroups such as Gothic Lolita as childlike and infantilizing, as well as sexualizing and eroticizing (Monden 2013). However, the participants experience it differently. In an analysis of the global Euro-American Gothic Lolita community via blog conversations, Masafumi Monden found that Gothic Lolitas expressed emphases on “femininity, cuteness, elegance and elaborate details” and “opulently flounced dress styles” and resistance to casual dress (2013: 173). Clearly, they have engaged the materiality of their fashion. Monden (2013) proposed that the globalization of a culture, such as a fashion-centered subculture like the Gothic Lolita subculture, results in hybridity rather than homogeneity as the global and local intermix.