The Cambridge Global History of Fashion: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century [1, 1 ed.] 9781108495561, 9781108850353, 9781108752657, 9781108495554

Citation preview

the cambridge global history of fashion Volume I

Volume I surveys the long history of fashion from the ancient world to c. 1800. The volume seeks to answer fundamental questions on the origins of fashion, challenging Eurocentric explanations that the emergence of fashion was a European phenomenon and shows instead that fashion found early expressions across the globe well before the age of European colonialism and imperialism. It sheds light on how fashion was experienced in a multitude of ways depending on class, gender, and race, and despite geographical distance, fashion connected populations across the globe. Fashions flowered and were reseeded, through entanglements of empire, forced and voluntary migration, evolving racial systems, burgeoning sea travel and transcontinental systems. christopher breward is Director of National Museums Scotland. He has published widely on the history of fashion and masculinity, clothing and city life, and fashion’s relationship with modernity. beverly lemire is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair, University of Alberta, Canada. She publishes widely on the gendered and racialized history of fashion, global trade, and material culture (c. 1600–1840) from British, European, colonial, and comparative perspectives. giorgio riello is Chair of Early Modern Global History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and Professor of Global History and Culture at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. He has published on the history of trade, material culture, and textiles in pre-modern Europe and Asia.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Cambridge Global History of Fashion Split across two volumes, The Cambridge Global History of Fashion provides timely critical analyses of key topics and themes in the history of fashion, dress, and clothing. It foregrounds the trajectories of material and aesthetic transformation, as well as the thematic commonalities across time and space. Featuring over forty essays from experts across the field, the volumes unveil new perspectives on cultural, social, and economic change, and how these changes were expressed through fashion practice. The first volume presents a tight but comprehensive assessment of fashion from antiquity, through the early modern global era to c. 1800, engaging with colonial and imperial themes, as well as race and gender. The second volume advances the critique of ‘modernity’ from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century, providing analyses of the impact globalisation had on contemporary dress. This global perspective stands as a landmark work in the history of fashion.

Volumes in the set Volume I From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century Edited by Christopher Breward, Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello Volume II From the Nineteenth Century to the Present Edited by Christopher Breward, Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello

Published online by Cambridge University Press

THE CAMBRIDGE GLOBAL HISTORY OF FASHION From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century

volume i Edited by

christopher breward National Museums Scotland

beverly lemire University of Alberta

giorgio riello European University Institute, Florence, and University of Warwick

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108495561 doi: 10.1017/9781108850353 © Pasold Research Fund 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. isbn - set 978 1 108 75265 7 Hardback isbn - Volume I 978 1 108 49556 1 Hardback isbn - Volume II 978 1 108 49555 4 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

CONTENTS FOR VOLUME I

page vii

List of Figures List of Maps List of Table

xvii xviii xix xxi

List of Contributors Preface 1 Global History in the History of Fashion

christopher breward, beverly lemire, and giorgio riello

part i multiple origins of fashion

1 15

2 Towards a History of Fashion Without Origins 3 Fashion in the Ancient World 4 Fashion on the Silk Roads, 500–1300

17 buyun chen michael scott 51 susan whitfield 78

5 Distinguishing Oneself: The European Medieval Wardrobe maria giuseppina muzzarelli

109

6 The Material Regulation of Fashion: Sumptuary Laws in the Early Modern World giorgio riello

148

v

Published online by Cambridge University Press

vi

contents

part ii early modern global entanglements

191

7 Magnificence at the Royal Courts in the Islamic World suraiya faroqhi 8 Early Modern Fashion Cities: Italy and Europe in a Global Context eugenia paulicelli

193

231

9 Fashioning Possibilities: Early Modern Global Ties and Entangled Histories beverly lemire 271 10 Fashion Beyond Clothing: Early Modern Visual Culture of Eurasian Dress peter mcneil 314 11 Fashion and the Maritime Empires

meha priyadarshini 12 Garments of Servitude, Fabrics of Freedom: Dress of Enslaved and Free Diaspora African Communities in the Mid-Atlantic, c. 1700–1840 steeve o. buckridge

part iii many worlds of fashion

363

399 443

13 ‘Black Cloth’: Status and Identity in Islamic West Africa, c. 1500–1900 colleen

445 e. kriger 14 Fashion and Moral Concern in Early Modern Japan timon screech 472 15 Textiles and Fashion in Southeast Asia ruth barnes 500 16 Fashion in Ming and Qing China

rachel silberstein 17 Everyday Fashion in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1600–1800 james grehan 18 Imperialism and Fashion: South Asia, c. 1500–1800 jagjeet lally 19 Fashion Systems in the Indian Ocean World, from Ancient Times to c. 1850 sarah fee 20 Fashion and First Peoples in European Settler Societies, c. 1700–1850

Index

Published online by Cambridge University Press

melissa bellanta

533 571 599 630

672 706

FIGURES FOR VOLUME I

2.1 ‘A Lady of Distinction in her Habit of Ceremony’, from The Costume of China (late eighteenth century). page 29 2.2 ‘Femme de haut rang, avec son enfant et sa suivante’, from La Chine: moeurs, usages, 30 costumes . . ., 1827. 2.3 Banyan and waistcoat. Tailored in Italy; silk 38 textile woven in China. Dated 1800–10. 2.4 Sarasa benran no mokuroku (Catalogue 39 compendium of sarasa designs), 1778. 2.5 Compass cloak. Portugal, second half of 41 the sixteenth century. 2.6 Jinbaori. Japan, seventeenth century. 44 2.7 Velvet textile for dragon robe. Qing 45 dynasty, seventeenth century. 3.1 Fragments of silk from Palmyra with harvest 60 grape scene. Tomb 65 Palmyra. 3.2 Palmyrene funerary sarcophagus from Palmyra 64 Museum with trouser/kaftan ensemble. 3.3 Ancient woven wool wall-hanging, refashioned 65 into a pair of trousers. Sampula, Xinjiang, China. 3.4 Silk usage in the burials at Noin Ula, Mongolia. 74 4.1 Fragment of silk from an ecclesiastical tunic 83 made in southern Spain. 4.2 The Byzantine Empress Irene (1088–1134). 90

vii

Published online by Cambridge University Press

viii

list of figures

4.3 Women of the Tang court. The Qianling Mausoleum, Tang dynasty tomb site located in Qian County. 4.4 Kaftan open at neck to form lapels. Penjikent, Sogdiana (Tajikistan), early eighth century. 4.5 Linen kaftan, seventh–ninth century, originally with fur lining. 4.6 Belt of woven gold, dagger, and sheath from Tillya Tepe. 5.1 Missale et horae ad usum fratrum minorum, fourteenth century. 5.2 Beatrice di Lorena. 5.3 Filippo Lippi, Profile Portrait of a Young Woman, c. 1445. 5.4 Master John (attributed to), Portrait of Catherine Parr, 1545. 5.5 Christine de Pizan allo scrittoio. 5.6 Jean Clouet, Portrait of François I, King of France, c. 1525–30. 5.7 Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi (L’adorazione dei Magi), 1423. 5.8 Hans Wigel (attributed to), Habitus praecipuorum populorum, Nuremberg, 1577. 5.9 Tacuinum Sanitatis, Medieval Health Handbook, dated before 1400, Tailor. 6.1 Courtly dance fresco from the ‘jousting hall’, Castel Roncolo, Bolzano, Italy. 6.2 Miguel Cabrera, Pintura de Castas, 4. De español y negra, mulata, c. 1763. 6.3 Agostino Brunias, Market Day, in Roseau, Dominica, c. 1780. 6.4 Portuguese nobleman in India accompanied by servants, from Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s Itinerario, 1594–5. 6.5 Venetian courtesan, from Pietro Bertelli’s Diversarum nationum habitus, 1592.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

94 96 97 105 113 116 117 125 130 132 135

138 144 149 156 158

159

162

list of figures

6.6 King Caspar, Chapel of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1459–60, Florence, Italy. 6.7(a) Hanging of velvet, silk and metal thread, late fifteenth to mid-seventeenth century. 6.7(b) Silk panel, late fifteenth century. 6.8 Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Portrait of Doña Ana de Velasco y Girón, duchess of Bragança, 1603. 6.9 Fragment of red silk velvet, Italy, sixteenth century. 6.10 Torii Kiyonaga, ‘The Sixth Month’, from the series ‘Fashionable Monthly Visits to Sacred Places in the Four Seasons’, c. 1784. 7.1 A royal woman of the Mughal dynasty, from the Akbarnama (Book of Akbar), c. 1590–5. 7.2 Gentile Bellini, The Sultan Mehmet II, 1480. 7.3 Süleyman the Magnificent. Print by Melchior Lorck, 1526–after 1588. 7.4 Osman II on horseback, 1620. 7.5 Detail of Selim III in audience, between 1789 and 1807. 7.6 Shā h ‘Abbā s and his page. Ink drawing, signed Muhammad Qâsim, 1627. 7.7 Muhammad Riza Hindi, Portrait of Nā dir Shā h, c. 1740. 7.8 Akbar receiving the Iranian ambassador Sayyid Beg in 1562, by La’l and Nand. Mughal, c. 1590–5. 7.9 Jahā ngīr in a garden with his nobles, by Manohar. Mughal, c. 1610–15. 7.10 An Ottoman sash. Istanbul, first half of the eighteenth century. 8.1 The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci with Paulus Magnus in China, from Athanasius Kircher’s China Monumentis, 1667. 8.2 Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (Map of the Myriad Countries of the World), by Matteo Ricci, 1602. 8.3 Europa regina, from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, 1570.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

ix

164 166 167 169 172

176 210 213 214 215 217 219 220 223 225 227

232 234 236

x

list of figures

8.4 Set of adornments and emperors’ feather headdress, from Bernardino de Sahagun’s Florentine Codex, 256 sixteenth century. 8.5 Processing feathers, from Bernardino de Sahagun’s 257 Florentine Codex, sixteenth century. 8.6 Feather processing after the Spanish conquest, from Bernardino de Sahagun’s Florentine Codex, sixteenth 258 century. 8.7 Louise Hollandine of the Palatinate, Sophia of 259 Hanover dressed as an American Indian, c. 1644. 8.8 Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Laura Pola, 1543–4. 260 8.9 ‘The Young Mexican’, from Cesare Vecellio’s 262 Habiti antichi, Venice, 1598. 8.10 ‘The Nobleman from Cutzco’, from Cesare Vecellio’s 264 Habiti antichi, Venice, 1598. 9.1 Dutch Ships . . . Navium Variæ Figuræ et Formæ, by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1647. 278 9.2 Miguel Cabrera, Español e India, Mestizo, 1763. 281 9.3 Stoneware dish with peony design, sixteenth century, 283 made in Vietnam. 9.4 Chest (Baúl), made in the Philippines, seventeenth 286 century. 9.5 Pocketbook, front view, made c. 1700. 294 9.6(a) and (b) Deerskin coat with painted decorations, of European 296 and 297 pattern. 9.7 ‘Koopman De Koopman’, after drawing by Jan 298 Luyken, 1694. 9.8 William Blake, ‘A Coromantyn Free Negro, 305 or Ranger, Armed’, after John Gabriel Stedman. 9.9 Toussaint L’Ouverture, Haitian general and 309 liberator, line engraving, c. 1800–5. 10.1 Mantua court dress, embroidered ivory-coloured 318 Chinese silk, c. 1747. 10.2 Design for woven silk from the ‘Leman Album’, 323 possibly by Jean Revel, 1736–9. 10.3 Fan with scenes after Jean-Baptiste Pillement, 329 French, 1760–70.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

list of figures

10.4 ‘Whose Sleeves?’ (Tagasode), one of a pair of six-panel folding screens, late sixteenth to early seventeenth century. 10.5 Edo period kimono design book, Japan, 1737. 10.6 Kitagawa Utamaro, Umegawa Chubei no kihan (The Happy Companionship of Umegawa and Chubei), 1788. 10.7 Maki-e lacquer dowry box. Japan, first half of eighteenth century. 10.8 Mary Way (attributed to), Miniature Portrait of Jonathan Devotion, c. 1790. 10.9 Chinese export porcelain charger, c. 1750. 10.10 Pair of figures of a Jewish man and lady in porcelain. China, Qing dynasty, Qianlong period. 10.11 Amoy Chinqua, Figure of a European Merchant. Canton, 1719. 10.12 Pu-quà workshop, ‘Chinese artist copying a European print onto glass’, 1790. 10.13 (a) ‘John Pike and his wife’, reverse-painted Chinese and (b) mirror, Chinese frame with locking plate, Swedish-made upper mounts, c. 1730. 11.1 Michel Jean Cazabon, Mulatto Girl, c. 1854. 11.2 Jean Antoine Laurent (attributed to), Portrait of a Young Woman, c. 1795. 11.3 Pendant shaped as dragon, Spain, c. 1575–1600. 11.4 Unknown artist, The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, c. 1588. 11.5 Unknown artist, Portrait of Man with Clocks (Retrato del hombre de los relojes), eighteenth century. 11.6 Wedding mantle (lliclla), Peru, sixteenth– seventeenth century. 11.7 Osana, wife of John Bull, pelete-bite wrapper, Buguma, Nigeria, c. 1860. 11.8 Jacob Coeman, Pieter Cnoll, Cornelia van Nijenrode, their Daughters and Two Enslaved Servants, 1665.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

xi

336 337

340 342 347 350 352 354 356

357 365 367 370 371

374 375 380

382

xii

list of figures

11.9 Unknown artist, Portrait of Sebastiana Inés Josefa de San Agustín, 1757. 11.10 Tunic (unku), Peru, seventeenth century. 11.11 Agostino Brunias, Dance, Dominica, West Indies, 1770s. 11.12 Carl Nebel, Poblanas, colour lithograph, 1836. 12.1 Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica, 1770s. 12.2 Agostino Brunias, Servants Washing a Deer, 1775. 12.3 François Beaucourt, Portrait of a Haitian Woman, 1786. 12.4 Lagetta lintearia, from Curtis’ Botanical Magazine (1850). 12.5 Lagetta lagetto. 12.6 Lagetta lagetto. 12.7 Lacebark cap from Jamaica, donated in 1833 by the Marchioness Cornwallis. 12.8 Lacebark dress from Jamaica, donated in 1833 by the Marchioness Cornwallis. 12.9 Anon., Portrait of a Young Woman, late eighteenth century. 12.10 N. P. Holbech, Little Marie on Neky’s Arm, 1838. 12.11 Dressed Surinamese Woman, photograph by Julius Muller, c. 1885. 12.12 Richard Bridgens, ‘Sunday Morning in Town’, from Sketches Taken during a Voyage to, and Residence of Seven Years in, the Island of Trinidad, 1836. 13.1 Rev. A. W. Banfield with Nupe mallam, Pategi, Sokoto Caliphate, 1903. 13.2 Man’s cotton indigo-dyed bonnet, Tellem Cave C, eleventh to fifteenth century. 13.3 Man’s robe, collected before 1659. 13.4 Detail, Weickmann robe. 13.5 Detail, woman’s wrapper (turkudi), collected c. 1856. 13.6 ‘Black’ turban/veil (bakin rawani) worn by Ahmadu Barmo, the Sarkin Zamfara, Anka, Nigeria, 1961–2.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

384 386 392 394 413 415 417 426 427 428 430 431 434 435 438

439 446 455 460 462 466

467

list of figures

xiii

14.1 Tsubaki Chinzan, Nezu Uemon, 1835. 476 14.2 The Hikone Screen, Edo period. 479 14.3 Utagawa Toyokuni III, ‘Ichikawa Danjū ro¯ VIII in the role of Yosa the Mudlark, and Ichikawa Ebizo¯ V in the role of Yasu the Spiderman’, from the 484 series Konjaku ko no te-gashiwa, 1855. 14.4 Hishikawa Moronobu, page from Kosode no 489 sugatami, 1682. 14.5 Koikawa Harumachi, page from To¯sei fū zoku 490 tsū , 1773. 14.6 Koikawa Harumachi, page from Muda iki, 1781. 492 14.7 Kosode with ‘Genji fragrance’ design, first half 493 of the nineteenth century. 14.8 Anon., Interior of the Tama-ya Bordello, folding 497 screen, 1780s. 15.1 Bronze situla, Dong Son culture, Vietnam, 300–100 bce. 503 15.2 Male dancers at a temple ceremony, Sukawati, 508 Bali, Indonesia. 15.3 Ceremonial cloth (detail), collected in Lampung, South Sumatra, fifteenth century. 512 15.4 Shadow puppet (wayang kulit) of Bima, from the set Kyai Drajat, Solo (Surakarta), Central Java, late 513 nineteenth to early twentieth century. 15.5 Ceremonial cloth tampan, Lampung, South Sumatra, 516 eighteenth century. 15.6 Ikat frame showing patterns tied with palm leaf strips. 517 Lamalera, Lembata, Indonesia. 15.7 Tying the ikat knots. Lamalera, Lembata, Indonesia. 517 15.8 Patolu made in Gujarat, India for trade to 518 Southeast Asia. Silk, double ikat. 15.9(a)–(d) Four pages from a book demonstrating the different stages of batik patterning, Java, early twentieth 519–520 century. 15.10 Batik workshop at the Sultan of Yogyakarta’s 521 court, 1928. 15.11 Waist wrapper sarung, Lasem, North Java, c. 1910. 521

Published online by Cambridge University Press

xiv

list of figures

15.12 Women bringing gifts of cloth at a wedding. Lamalera, Lembata, Indonesia. 15.13 Cloth displayed at a funeral. Witihama, Adonara, Indonesia. 15.14 Woman’s cloth, Palembang or Bangka, eighteenth century. 15.15 Weaving on a back-strap loom. Lamalera, Lembata, Indonesia. 16.1 Anon., Amusements in the Four Seasons, handscroll, c. 1426–84. 16.2 White gauze skirt embroidered with birds and flowers. 16.3 Scene from ‘Intimate Scenes of Leisurely Love’ (Yanqin yiqing 燕寢怡情), 1750–1800. 16.4 Li Guanjian, ‘Playing cards in the Spring Boudoir’. 16.5 Yu Zhiding, ‘The three pleasures of Qiao Yuanzhi’, 1676. 16.6 Anon., ‘Two ladies playing cards’, Yongzheng period. 16.7 Anon., woodblock print, late nineteenth century. 17.1 A woman from the island of Mykonos shows off the local dress, from Jacques Le Hay, Recueil des cent estampes representant differentes nations du Levant (Paris, 1714). 17.2 A Bulgarian man wears a version of the kalpak, from Jacques Le Hay, Recueil des cent estampes representant differentes nations du Levant (Paris, 1714). 17.3 Albanian soldiers, from Marie-Gabriel Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage Pittoresque de la Grèce (Paris, 1782). 17.4 An upper-class woman from the town of Bursa. Miniature painting by the Ottoman artist Levni (c. 1720s). 17.5 Women from Istanbul drinking coffee at home. Painting by Jean-Baptiste Vanmour (c. 1720s). 17.6 A sleeping girl reclines in a gown. Miniature painting by the Ottoman artist Levni (c. 1720s).

Published online by Cambridge University Press

522 523 524 528 537 544 548 549 555 559 560

575

580

581

585 586 587

list of figures

17.7 A gathering of leading officials from Aleppo. From Alexander and Patrick Russell, The Natural History of Aleppo (1794). 18.1 Talismanic tunic. India, fifteenth to sixteenth century. 18.2 ‘Seated Youth’, Mughal court, by Abu’l Hasan, c. 1600. 18.3 ‘Jahā ngīr Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings from the St. Petersburg Album’, by Bichitr. Mughal court, c. 1615–18. 18.4 ‘A Lady at Her Toilette with Two Maids’, by Rodu. Bikaner, 1678. 18.5 ‘A Tanjore man in a white jama holding pan’, by unknown artist. Tanjore, c. 1770. 18.6 A group of Rajput nobles, possibly Raja Ajit Singh, by unknown artist. Jodhpur, c. 1720. 18.7 Man’s robe (jama) with poppies. South India. 19.1 Figure of a priest, steatite, from the Indus Valley, c. 2000 bce. 19.2 The king of Aksum (Ethiopia) receiving envoys from Arabia, 1314, produced in Tabriz. 19.3 Indian cotton fragment, found in Berenike (coastal Egypt). 19.4 Illustration of an Arabo-Persian boat in the Maqamat al-Hariri, 1237. 19.5 (a) King Kertarajasa as Harihara, andesite, Sumberjati and (b) Temple, East Java, fourteenth century. 19.6 Jean Baptiste Louis Dumas, ‘Manger de cheval; Porteur d’eau; Domestique indien; Commandeur’, c. 1828. 19.7 ‘The Dress of Arab notables in Yemen’, 1774. 19.8 Georg Franz Müller, ‘A Malay with his wife. A Sinhalese’, between 1669 and 1682. 19.9 Parsi child’s tunic, satin silk and silk embroidery, c. 1880s.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

xv

588 605 609

610 613 620 621 623 635 636 641 649 656

662 664 665 667

xvi

list of figures

19.10 B. F. Leguével de Lacombe, Voyage à Madagascar et aux iles Comores, 1823 à 1830. 20.1 J. J. Merrett, ‘Mā ori Girl in Cloak’, c. 1845. 20.2 Anonymous (copy after Charles Bird King), ‘ApaulyTustennuggee’, Creek chief, 1825. 20.3 George Catlin, ‘Wi-jún-jon, Pigeon’s Egg Head [sic], Going to and Returning from Washington’, 1837–9. 20.4 Richard Aldworth Oliver, ‘Mā oris Playing Cards in Front of Hut’, c. 1840. 20.5 Thomas Bock, ‘Truckanini [Truganini]’, 1833. 20.6 Henry Frith, ‘Portrait of Bessy Clarke, William Lanne, Mary Ann, and Truganini’, 1864. 20.7 David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, ‘Kahkewaquonabi [Reverend Peter Jones], A Canadian Chief’, 1847.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

669 673 674 678 686 689 693

698

MAPS FOR VOLUME I

3.1 The Silk Road network with key places in the text marked, alongside major areas of empire. page 55 4.1 Afro-Eurasia, c. 500 ce. 79 9.1 The North Pole and the parts adjoining, 1680. 289 9.2 Canada or New France, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Carolina, New Britain, and New York and the course 290 of the Mississippi River, Paris, 1703. 12.1 The Evening Post map of the West Indies, 1898. 402 12.2 A map of the original thirteen states, 1782. 403 13.1 The Sokoto Caliphate, c. 1895. 448 15.1 Southeast Asia. 502

xvii

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

TABLE FOR VOLUME I

6.1 Pre-modern ‘material regulation’ and present-day ‘immaterial regulation’

xviii

Published online by Cambridge University Press

page 182

CONTRIBUTORS FOR VOLUME I

ruth barnes is the Thomas Jaffe Curator of Indo-Pacific Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, a position she has held since 2010. Prior to that she was textile curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, United Kingdom. melissa bellanta is Associate Professor of Modern History at the Australian Catholic University, Sydney, Australia. christopher breward is Director of National Museums Scotland. steeve o. buckridge is Professor of African and Caribbean History and Dress as Material Culture at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, USA. buyun chen is Associate Professor of Asian History at Swarthmore College, United States. suraiya faroqhi is Professor of History at Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul, Turkey and a specialist early modern Ottoman history. sarah fee is Senior Curator of Global Fashion & Textiles at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada, and teaches in the Art Department of the University of Toronto. james grehan is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and Professor of History at Portland State University, United States. colleen e. kriger is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, United States. jagjeet lally is Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and Modern India at University College London, United Kingdom.

xix

Published online by Cambridge University Press

xx

list of contributors

beverly lemire is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History, Classics, & Religion at the University of Alberta, Canada. peter mcneil FAHA is Distinguished Professor of Design History at University of Technology Sydney, Australia. maria giuseppina muzzarelli is Professor of Medieval History, History of Cities and History and Cultural Heritage of Fashion at the University of Bologna, Italy. eugenia paulicelli is Professor of Italian, Women’s Studies and Comparative Literature at Queens College and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York where she founded Fashion Studies. meha priyadarshini is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. giorgio riello is Chair of Early Modern Global History at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy and Professor of Global History and Culture at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. michael scott is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. timon screech is Professor of the History of Art at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan. rachel silberstein is a historian of visual and material culture and gender. She is Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Puget Sound, United States. susan whitfield is Professor in Silk Road Studies at SISJAC, University of East Anglia and Honorary Associate Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

PREFACE

The Cambridge Global History of Fashion is a collective endeavour. The project was conceived by the editors in 2016 and developed over several years. It started as a conversation on the ways in which a history of fashion unbound from Eurocentric precepts should be framed. Forty-five international authors accepted our invitation to undertake a journey that has seen them exchanging ideas, reading each other’s drafts, and sometimes reframing their initial interpretations. We are extremely grateful to all authors and to colleagues who have helped us by reading and commenting on individual chapters. A work of this size would have been inconceivable without the support of Cambridge University Press whose expertise has been invaluable in shaping these volumes. Yet, the ambition for the publication of a Global History of Fashion is born out of the commitment of the Pasold Research Fund, an institution that in the past sixty years has had a fundamental role in shaping research on the history of textiles, dress, and fashion internationally. This has been achieved through financial support, conferences, a book series in the history of textiles and dress, and – perhaps best known to most – the publication of the journal Textile History. These volumes are published as a collaboration between Cambridge University Press and the Pasold Research Fund and follow, after an interval of twenty years, the much-celebrated Cambridge History of Western Textiles edited by David Jenkins and published in 2003. The Cambridge History of Global Fashion progresses the

xxi

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

xxii

preface

Fund’s research agenda and marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Pasold Research Fund. The Cambridge History of Global Fashion is divided into two volumes surveying respectively the period from ancient history to c. 1800 (including the European middle ages and the so-called early modern period, c. 1500–1800) in volume I, and the period from c. 1800 to the present in volume II. Each volume is formed of three parts. Volume I considers the fundamental question of the origins of fashion, challenging Eurocentric explanations that make claims for fashion’s emergence in Europe. It shows instead that fashion, in its many variations, finds early expressions in different areas of the world well before the age of European colonialism and imperialism. This is evidenced in chapters that underline the connected nature of fashion and the material and conceptual dialogue between people and regions which were often geographically distant or entangled in complex geo-political events. The volume also considers the plurality of fashion as experienced in different premodern areas of the world and most especially in Afro-Eurasia, including among colonized and subaltern peoples. Volume II moves to the period post–1800, often characterized by narratives of modernity and European dominance. Contributions to this volume challenge such accounts, questioning in the first instance the meaning of modernity and modernism when considered on a global canvas. Secondly, the volume reflects on important scholarship that has changed our understanding of the relationship between fashion and colonialism and promoted decolonized readings of fashion itself. The volume concludes with a critical view of fashion and globalization, and explores the deep connections between the fashion industry, the global economy, and the politics of production and wearing in the contemporary world. We conceived these two volumes as one work with chapters that should be read in conversation with each other. We decided to connect the volumes visually and conceptually via their covers by using a historical work of art and a contemporary artist’s reinterpretation. The re-reading of the past in light of the present and of the present in light of the past is at the core of our work. Our thanks go to Stana Nenadic (Director), Pat Hudson and Donald Anderson (Chairs) of the Pasold Research Fund, and

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

preface

Michael Watson and Liz Hanlon at Cambridge University Press. We also thank Helen Clifford without whose editorial expertise this work would not have been completed, and Möira Dato for her assistance in liaising with authors. We also acknowledge the financial assistance of the University of Alberta and the European University Institute. The editors’ collaboration with 45 contributors has been the greatest pleasure of this work. Sadly Djurdja Bartlett, contributor, friend, and fashion scholar well known to many, died suddenly after completing her chapter for this publication. This work is in her memory.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

xxiii

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press

1

w

GLOBAL HISTORY IN THE HISTORY OF FASHION christopher breward, beverly lemire, and giorgio riello

towards a global history of fashion Over the twentieth century, multi-disciplinary academic studies addressed dress practice and bodily adornment from a variety of perspectives, assessing the question of fashion, though few communities outside the West were awarded this term until the past generation. Anthropologists took an ethnographic stance, with works that from the late 1980s became more attentive to the lived significance of clothing that reflected ‘agency, practice and performance’ with local and global impact.1 Anthropological studies revealed how clothing resisted and critiqued imperial perspectives, including choices of bodily adornment, integral to community coherence, transforming priorities and social dynamism. These examinations, across world terrains, became richly nuanced with vital studies of evolving clothing systems, including those entangled with decolonization, political changes, and material challenges. The significance of this scholarship affected other disciplinary fields, from history and art history, to cultural and museum studies, with modes of close looking and analysis, as increasing numbers of scholars explored the important matter of ‘the social skin’. As Terence Turner observed: ‘Decorating, covering, uncovering or otherwise altering the human form in

1

Karen Tranberg Hansen, ‘The World in Dress: Anthropological Perspectives on Clothing, Fashion, and Culture’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), 370.

1

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

2

christopher breward et al.

accordance with social notions of everyday propriety or sacred dress, beauty or solemnity, status or changes in status, or on occasion of the violation and inversion of such notions, seems to have been a concern of every human society of which we have knowledge . . . the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted.’2 Studies of clothing revealed its variable efficacy as a tool to discipline colonized peoples, as well as a tool of resistance; while gender practices and the critical resistance of norms were also lively fields of study. Critical analyses of clothing modes opened wide-ranging, cross-cultural studies on the subject of dress and fashion, attentive to the dialogic relationship between colonies and metropoles and other societal forms.3 Within the West, mid-twentieth-century museum and university scholars approached the question of clothing from different perspectives. Among the predominantly male cohort of academics, quantitative analyses of cloth and dress components were prioritized in the 1960s and 1970s, attached to iconic paradigms like the industrial revolution. These scholars rarely (if ever) employed the term ‘fashion’ in their historical analyses. There was a deep resistance to the serious study of a subject of such seeming frivolity – a woman’s question? This blinkered approach was called out in 1973 by a historian of early modern England, Joan Thirsk. She challenged her colleagues to think more broadly about the sources of economic and social change and the rich cultural dimensions animating such processes, writing that: Fashion is accorded a lowly place by economic historians when they account for the rise of the clothing industries and the changing direction of their trade. They prefer to look for sterner economic explanations, such as the debasement of the coinage, war, new customs tariffs, and occasionally bad (or good) craftsmanship.

2

3

Terence S. Turner, ‘The Social Skin’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2/2 (2012 [1980]), 486–504. Ruth Barnes and Joanne B. Eicher (eds.), Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning (Oxford: Berg, 1992); Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins, Joanne B. Eicher, and Kim K. P. Johnson (eds.), Dress and Identity (New York: Fairchild, 1995); John L. and Jean Comaroff, ‘Fashioning the Colonial Subject’, in Of Revelations and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), ii, 218–73.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

global history in the history of fashion Thus they turn their back on the evidence of contemporaries, and on the evidence of their own eyes in the modern world.4

The frustration felt by Thirsk was shared by the predominantly female cohort of curators working in museums with clothing collections (historic and ethnographic). Their work was generally dismissed as lacking ‘seriousness’, as Lou Taylor observes: ‘much of this academic criticism [of fashion studies] came from male staff of “old” universities and was directed at a field still largely in the hands of women or gay men mostly in museum-based jobs or in “new” universities’.5 Studies bounded by national borders still predominated in both quarters and efforts to bridge the two solitudes and move beyond national themes only took root from the late 1980s onwards. Links across disciplinary boundaries were ultimately forged between museum and university researchers and with this emerged a range of collaborative projects, including those with global or cross-cultural aims. The global impact of Indian cotton and other Asian trade goods, for example, foregrounded the need for breadth to gauge the impact of pivotal commodities. It is a testament to the collaborative impulses and intellectual innovations that emerged that the ground-breaking initiatives of the 1990s and early 2000s now seem unremarkable.6 However, other troubling factors remained to be addressed in the last third of the twentieth century, intellectual hangovers from the West’s colonial past, evident in assumptions about the nature and compass of fashion. There was a widely shared prevailing notion 4

5

6

Joan Thirsk, ‘The Fantastical Folly of Fashion: The English Stocking Knitting Industry, 1500–1700’, in N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting (eds.), Textile History and Economic History: Essays in Honour of Miss Julia de Lacy Mann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 50. Lou Taylor, The Study of Dress History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 64. For example, material culture and apparel research resulted in exhibition and published accounts. Collaboration with Indigenous communities and museum scholars resulted in an exhibition and book – Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998); ‘At Home in Renaissance Italy’ exhibition, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006 – and an edited volume, Elizabeth Miller, Flora Dennis, and Marta Ajmar (eds.), At Home in Renaissance Italy (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

3

4

christopher breward et al.

that fashion was a Western phenomenon and that the rest of the world did not share this level of aesthetics and economic dynamism, or cultural creativity. Fernand Braudel, an eminent French scholar of the French and Mediterranean world, published his three-volume treatise, Civilization and Capitalism, in 1979, translated to English shortly thereafter. Importantly, he argued for the significance of the study of fashion as a key facet of history, but insisted that only elite segments of Europe enjoyed this phenomenon, while the rest of the world ‘stood still’ with no material change.7 Gilles Lipovetsky reiterated that Eurocentric treatise, insisting that fashion ‘took hold in the modern West and nowhere else’.8 This perspective arose as part of Western imperial thinking, where white Western society was conceived as the apogee of development, a blinkered manner of thought that neglected most of the world’s societies and populations and was only gradually upended.9 Eurocentric thinking and subtly racialized analyses seriously impeded this field, with claims about fashion and material culture that persisted into the 2000s. A profound rethinking ensued over several decades. Innovative scholarship presented new conceptual paradigms, such as a late medieval world system conceived ‘before European hegemony’, with expansive material culture defining diverse world regions. The evidence of regional generativity demonstrated the significance of proto-global commercial linkages, a system that flourished until undone by plague and retrenchment after 1350. Janet Abu Lughod laid out the complexities of different cultures and societies, acknowledging as well the absence of comparable evidence in every zone; but sufficient remained to confirm the weight of

7

8

9

Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, Volume I: The Structure of Everyday Life, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 323. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [French ed. 1987], 1994), 15. For a similar viewpoint, see Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (New York: Knopf, 1994), 17–18. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Books, 1995), 74–83; Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 6–14.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

global history in the history of fashion

a multi-centred world system at work.10 The analysis of great world regions, like the Indian Ocean ‘world’, offered additional evidence of global generativity, where textiles and other material culture forged connections within a far-reaching, dynamic zone.11 New thinking extended further, as critical theorists advocated ‘provincializing Europe’, denounced the effects of ‘orientalism’, and explored the charged materialities of Indigenous-made goods and adaptive modes of dress in colonial contexts, among other interpretive innovations.12 Gender and race studies produced new assessments of discrete communities, and opened a fuller understanding of ties between colony and metropole; indeed, the making of both emerged through a power relationship, expressed in clothing and fashion systems of profound significance.13 Among the new perspectives to shape the study of fashion was recognition of the agency of non-elites and marginalized peoples in generating fads and fashions, shown in global trade commodities, like Indian textiles, while also reflected in the humble byemployments and fashion-focused areas of (gendered) work that ignited interpretive possibilities.14 The theory of ‘entanglement’, 10

11

12

13

14

Janet Abu Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3–32. K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979); Karen Tranberg Hansen, Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Sewing Ourselves Together: Clothing, Decorative Arts and the Expression of Métis and Half Breed Identity’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Manitoba, 2004); Ruth B. Philips, ‘Dress and Address: First Nations Self-Fashioning and the 1890 Royal Tour of Canada’, in Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were (eds.), The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience (London: UCL Press, 2005), 135–56. Catherine Hall, White, Male, and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

5

6

christopher breward et al.

first proposed by Nicholas Thomas for the Pacific, has been applied with demonstrated utility in other regions and times, validating the power of things, with histories to be imagined and reimagined in new contexts, with equal power in the hands of Indigenous and enslaved peoples as well as colonizers, though differently manifested.15 Global history provides an invaluable platform from which to address connections, material catalysts, and their impact, while attending to the specificities of place and time, and the myriad actors at work. The correlations observable through a global analysis cannot be limited to one static world region, but necessarily incorporate material and cultural stimuli in cycles of exchange, as presented in these volumes and others.16 Fashion demonstrates its cultural variability, including the expressiveness of apparent status, equally with gradual and rapid change, even as different technologies shaped material use. Creative preferences in colour, cloth, garment shape and weight, head and footwear and adornments, are all elements that define local and regional fashions, whose significance is amplified from a comparative stance. Assorted disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies now shape our understanding of fashion from global perspectives, with a necessary emphasis on history from below, along with the titivations of elites. Material entanglements are also a feature of these fashion forms, with complexities that illuminate empires and resistances, gender performances and racial standing. A global platform allows richer discursive studies, challenging national boundaries as delimiting

15

16

1978); Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, c. 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Ann Smart Martin, ‘“Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds”: Clothing and Consumerism in Eighteenth-Century Virginia Store Trade’, paper presented at the ‘Clothing and Consumerism in Early Modern England and America Conference’, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1992. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Laura Peers, ‘“Many Tender Ties”: The Shifting Contexts and Meanings of the S BLACK Bag’, World Archaeology, 31/2 (1999), 288–302; Marcy Norton, ‘Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World’, Colonial Latin American Review, 26/1 (2017), 18–38. Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello (eds.), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

global history in the history of fashion

of taste, and acknowledging the movement of goods and people in defining and redefining the complex cultural, social, and economic phenomenon called fashion.

why a global history of fashion? The historical discipline arrived late in acknowledging that fashion has a history that is not just European. Chapters in this volume refer to several barriers that are methodological and relate to sources. On the one hand, historians of dress and fashion maintained traditional geographic categories of expertise, preferring in-depth studies of individual cities and countries (mostly European) rather than addressing topics and problems or considering manifestations of fashion across space and cultures. On the other hand, historians more broadly dismissed fashion as inconsequential in the great political and social narratives of history, be they local, national, or global. The rise of global history in the 1990s and 2000s did not necessarily help fashion to find a new global historical narrative.17 Comparative methods of analysis and an emphasis on economic forces affected only marginally the study of fashion, though as already noted it brought renewed attention and new interpretations to the global history of textiles such as cotton and silk. Even the interest in capitalism did not help: the question as to whether fashion was a European invention, posed in one of the first issues of the Journal of Global History less than two decades ago, found a negative response. Yet fashion was perceived as having a deep link with capitalist development thus making Europe’s a more ‘mature’

17

Exceptions are: Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Robert Ross, Clothing: A Global History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c.1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun, Fashion History: A Global View (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

7

8

christopher breward et al.

manifestation of fashion compared to Ming China or Mughal India, as some supposed.18 The Cambridge Global History of Fashion builds on scholarship of the last decade whose cumulative impact is only now being felt. It includes both specific studies on fashion in different world areas as well as wider attempts to conceptualize fashion beyond the confines of Western Europe and to create broader interpretive frameworks.19 Why should the global scale of fashion and its history be narrated? The simple acknowledgement that fashion, since at least the early modern period (1500–1800) but very likely well before, as argued in several chapters in these two volumes, was present in different areas of the world, is only part of the answer. Since global history has entered the realm of cultural and material study, fashion has found a new meaning and value as a tool for analysis. It is worth highlighting at least four reasons. First, postcolonial critiques of history have questioned classic diffusionist narratives that want fashion to be ‘invented’ in Europe and then be ‘exported’ to other parts of the world. Fashion thus appeared either as a tool of European control and domination (creating power over colonial bodies, reshaping them into European forms and imposing a regimentation of everyday habits) or as the embodiment of ‘civilization’ (the acceptance of European standards of living and their promotion across the world). Today these positions are untenable and take no account of the subtle ways in which resistance to imperialism and colonialism, as well as forms of integration and métissage, were materialized in dress and manifested through fashion. A dialogue between Indigenous agency and external forces 18

19

Carlo Marco Belfanti, ‘Was Fashion a European Invention?’, Journal of Global History, 3/3 (2008), 419–43. The literature is large and includes Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991); Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann (eds.), Ottoman Costumes: From Textile to Identity (Istanbul: EREN, 2004); Regina A. Root (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2006); Robert Ross, Clothing: A Global History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Rublack, Dressing Up; and Lemire, Global Trade.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

global history in the history of fashion

(European but often beyond) provides a wider framework for discussing taste, consumption, and the political meaning of dress. Second, stories of fashion that stretch backwards into the precolonial, and consider colonial as well as post-colonial spaces, are a corrective to Eurocentric assumptions. Eurocentrism is not just the attribution of key (positive) characteristics to Europe or the imbuing of European actors with agency claiming fashion for Europe and Europe alone. It is also manifested in historical narratives that consciously or unconsciously mobilize concepts and actors that place Europe centrally. We have already mentioned the alignment of the history of fashion with the rise of capitalism. Histories of fashion strongly align themselves to industrialization and the economic growth of the West. The very ‘origin’ of fashion is found in many books either in the period of political and economic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century (the French and the industrial revolutions) or in the economic flowering of late medieval Europe. These types of narratives exclude instances of fashion born outside these chronologies and geographies. Similarly, the importance attributed to the ‘fashion creator’ (the couturier, the designer, and the stylist) fits specifically a Western narrative of creativity in the arts that was born out of Renaissance humanism and individualism and developed through modernist and postmodernist discourse. By privileging certain actors and certain regions, the history of fashion has taken the European experience as paradigmatical and has thus often produced Eurocentric narratives.20 This is particularly evident in our third point: the relationship between modernity and fashion. In several Western languages such a relationship is born out of the linguistic similarity between mode (Fr. Mode; It. Moda) and modern (Fr. Moderne; It. Moderno).21 That fashion and modernity were claimed to develop in Renaissance Europe first and later expand in the nineteenth century, strengthened the double link between fashion and the transformation of 20

21

Some of these critiques are further developed in Giorgio Riello, Back in Fashion: A History of Western Fashion since the Middle Ages (London: Yale University Press, 2020). Eugenia Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

9

10

christopher breward et al.

time, the attribute of change that still today characterizes the very idea of fashion. Yet in accepting this politically charged historical chronology the concept of fashion is shaped to suit only the historical trajectory of the West. Writers on fashion and modernity have tended to locate its emergence in the context of the development of European industrialization and consumer culture, avant-garde artistic sensibilities, and urbanization from the eighteenth century onwards. However, as Anthony Giddens and others have argued, the subjective experience of life in the present and fashion’s role as a mechanism for the fabrication of the self are concepts whose agency has been felt beyond the geographical bounds of capitalist Europe and North America, stretching before and after the neat periodization of European modernization.22 Nevertheless, there is a risk of presenting fashion as omnipresent in time and space. This is why the work by experts on different world areas, as in these volumes, counterbalances a tendency towards uniform concepts and stories of fashion. In these volumes we present fashion both singular (as a concept and process) and plural (in its varying manifestations). A global history of fashion does not strive to create a comprehensive narrative in the way of works on fashion in Western Europe. It acknowledges instead the wide range of manifestations of fashion in different parts of the world and puts them into dialogue. What lies ahead is not about cancelling the histories of European fashion researched over more than a century, but balancing them with equally researched studies on Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australasia. Clearly the agendas are not the same; yet even a cursory glance shows how deeply these different areas of the world were connected not only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also well before. Second, studies on Mughal courts or the floating world of Tokugawa Japan allow us to revise established assumptions, for instance concerning the ‘centres’ of fashion or the dynamics between trade and fashion. This is an ongoing project and The Cambridge Global History of Fashion captures a moment of convergence and dialogue notwithstanding the many physical and institutional barriers brought 22

Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans (eds.), Fashion and Modernity (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 1–7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

global history in the history of fashion

about by a global pandemic at the time when these two volumes were written. It does so through different means: interdisciplinary methodologies have characterized the study of fashion over the past generation and history owes a great debt to anthropology, ethnography, and sociology. It is also a branch of history that has seen a healthy dialogue between the study of dress and that of fashion. While the latter engages with a theoretical conceptualization, the study of dress brings to the fore the material properties of artefacts and their social and cultural attributes. Material culture history and the associated field of material culture studies have been extremely important to the study of dress, fashion, accessories, and textiles. This work engages with artefacts that range from complete outfits, to small details of dress, to silk and cotton textiles, but also flags, ribbons, and headdresses to cite a few. While the majority of these artefacts are now preserved in museum collections, the engagement with material culture in these volumes goes beyond the classic confines of fashion or dress collections. To limit ourselves to artefacts that have already been classified as belonging to ‘fashion’ or that are deemed to be representative examples of the ‘dress’ of a particular age would be reductive. It would accept the very categories of selection and preservation that were produced in the past from readings and assumptions that today are seen as narrow and ‘exclusive’, in the sense that they exclude vast parts of the world.23 Equally important is the way in which the history of fashion engages with visual culture. The two volumes include prints and drawings, paintings and sculpture, photography and advertisements as well as other ephemera. Historians of dress and fashion are aware of the pitfalls of using visual materials to reconstruct a long-lost reality and equally longlost material remnants. Rather than filling gaps, visual materials are used to highlight the ‘silences of the past’ as in the case of 23

Examples that reflect this fashion diversity include: Cory Willmott, ‘Producing and Enacting Nationalisms: Contemporary Amerindian Fashions in Canada’, in Beverly Lemire (ed.), The Force of Fashion in Politics and Society: Global Perspectives from Early Modern to Contemporary Times (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 167–90; Victoria L. Rovine, African Fashion, Global Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Heike Jenss and Viola Hofmann (eds.), Fashion and Materiality: Cultural Practices in Global Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

11

12

christopher breward et al.

colonial contexts where photography entices us into worlds that remain opaque and whose contours are often little traced. Aside from considering fashion through object and representation, it is important to understand the systems of fashion that through recent processes of globalization and technological innovation (particularly fast fashion and digital connectivity) have impacted on the world’s natural resources, the movement and well-being of populations, and geo-political stability, in ways which will inform the work of historians and theorists of fashion in the decades to come. Questions of environmental sustainability, wealth and health inequalities, belief systems, and identity politics have increasingly come to dominate contemporary fashion history and demand an approach which considers the impacts of these developments from regional and global perspectives, historically and in the present. Moving from the emphasis on the commercial competition and connection between a series of fashion-focused ‘world cities’ that interested several cultural geographers and fashion historians in the first decade of the twenty-first century to a critical consideration of ‘affect’ in relation to the lived experience of fashion production, consumption, and representation in more turbulent, post-global times, is perhaps a pressing theoretical and historiographical concern for the present and future.24

histories and fashion A generation ago, historical approaches and methodologies were central to the study of fashion. We are conscious that this is not necessarily the case today. The development of fashion studies has brought about an interdisciplinary agenda that has greatly enriched the ways in which histories of fashion are narrated. Yet it is also undeniable that history is today perceived as less central to the study and practice of fashion. The Cambridge Global History of Fashion is thus an attempt to think about the ways in which 24

David Gilbert ‘From Paris to Shanghai: The Changing Geographies of Fashion’s World Cities’, in Christopher Breward and David Gilbert (eds.), Fashion’s World Cities (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 3–32; Jeremy Seabrook, The Song of the Shirt: The High Price of Cheap Garments, from Blackburn to Bangladesh (London: Hurst & Company, 2015).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

global history in the history of fashion

historical methods, narratives, and the great repertoire of the past might be both valuable and beneficial to anyone who wishes to acquire a critical understanding of fashion. Historians have the tendency to blame the flattening of time and the perils of presentism as the reasons for the insufficient attention given to historical processes, forces, and actors. From the vantage point of the summer of 2021 when these volumes were completed, present and past (at least the recent past) seemed to merge: after long periods of lockdown, we have been living in a ‘long 2020’ with world events currently televised in 2021 such as the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, changing and confusing our sense of passing time. It is this sense of ‘chronological dysmorphia’ more than a simple complaint about the scant attention given to history, that has caused us, as editors and researchers, to reflect on the conversation between the past, present (and future) of fashion. We consciously reject claims of history as magistra vitae, providing a lesson that allows the present to be ‘better’ than the past. Such simplistic and evolutionary understanding has long been dismissed by historians. We claim instead that the stories of fashion, dress, textiles, and the people and institutions who created and consumed them – as described in the chapters that follow – are the layers above which fashion as we know it has been built. We use an archaeological metaphor as it brings together the material, the emotional, and the conceptual memorializing qualities of fashion. Yet, in disentangling layers of the past, one has also to enquire whose past we are addressing. The second aim of The Cambridge Global History of Fashion is to broaden the past on which present-day fashion has been built. We have done so geographically and chronologically. The abovementioned references to global history have made clear both the remit and challenge of narrating fashion on a global canvas. This is work in progress that relies on the expertise of a number of colleagues in academia and museums whose scholarship has already done much to revise the very notion of fashion present and past. This is also a great challenge chronologically: the appreciation of history is often confined to the recent past and most especially to the post-Second World War period when fashion is considered. We have decided instead to start in the ancient world and follow some

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

13

14

christopher breward et al.

threads across centuries and millennia. While differences in time and space remain of fundamental importance in appreciating the richness of fashion, we also invite the reader to think about similarities and continuities without envisaging the passing of time as a simple linear narrative of development, or as a driver of improvement for the acquisition of a perfection that fashion alone will never achieve.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press

part i Multiple Origins of Fashion

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

2

w

TOWARDS A HISTORY OF FASHION WITHOUT ORIGINS buyun chen

Can it have been merely by coincidence that the future was to belong to the societies fickle enough to care about changing the colours, materials, and shapes of costume, as well as the social order and the map of the world – societies, that is, which were ready to break with their traditions? There is a connection.1

Locating fashion in time and space has long been an Eurocentric endeavour, one that depended upon the conflation of modernity with European progress. For Fernand Braudel, the connection between a fickle society and a modern one was inextricable: desire to change one’s clothes was evidence of a propensity for change on a broader scale. As encapsulated in his oft-quoted line, ‘if a society remained more or less stable, fashion was less likely to change’. Such was the state of China, Japan, and India, in which the rule of changelessness governed. In China, ‘the mask scarcely changed in the course of centuries’, while in Japan, the people ‘remained faithful to the kimono’ for centuries. Even in Europe, if one were to go back far enough in time, ‘still waters of ancient situations’ can be observed in the people’s sartorial practices.2 But the future was to belong to European societies, which centuries ago, cast off the straitjacket of tradition and thereby opened themselves up to

1

2

Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, Volume I: The Structure of Everyday Life, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 323. Ibid., 312, 316.

17

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

18

buyun chen

innovation and progress. Anticipating the great divergence debates, Braudel proposed the rise of fashion as crucial to the rise of Europe. For fashion is anything but trifling, it is ‘rather an indication of deeper phenomena – of the energies, possibilities, demands and joie de vivre of a given society, economy and civilization’. By linking fashion to the abstract potentials of a given society, Braudel tied fashion tightly to progress and emphasized ‘care about changing the colours, materials, and shapes of costume’ as a civilizational virtue.3 In the decades since the publication of Braudel’s tome, the claim that fashion was a distinctly European phenomenon has been challenged by historians and fashion studies scholars alike.4 The more dominant view shared by current scholars is that fashion, broadly defined as a social phenomenon underpinned by material change, can be found in all parts of the world and across history. Dress and bodily practices have been critical to how societies perceived self and other in and beyond Europe.5 Desire

3 4

5

Ibid., 323. These works include, but are not limited to: K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Suzanne Baizerman, Joanne B. Eicher. and Catherine Cerny, ‘Eurocentrism in the Study of Ethnic Dress’, Dress, 20/1 (1993), 19–32; Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London: Routledge, 1994); Sandra Niessen, Annemarie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones (eds.), ReOrienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010); Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun, Fashion History: A Global View (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton (eds.), Fashion and Postcolonial Critique (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019); M. Angela Jansen, ‘Fashion and the Phantasmagoria of Modernity: An Introduction to Decolonial Fashion Discourse’, Fashion Theory, 24/6 (2020), 815–36. See for example Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004); Yuming He, Home and the World: Editing the Glorious Ming in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Asia Center, 2013); Abu¯ Zayd al-Sı̄ rā fı̄ and Ahmad Ibn Fadlā n, Two Arabic Travel Books: Accounts of China and India and Mission to the Volga, ed. and trans. Tim Mackintosh-Smith and James E. Montgomery (New York: New York University Press, 2015); George Bryan Souza and Jeffrey S. Turley (eds.), The Boxer Codex: Transcription and Translation of an Illustrated Late Sixteenth-

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

to change one’s clothes was not symptomatic of an inclination towards change and novelty peculiar to European societies, and instead a condition shaped by myriad social, cultural, and material forces. To allow for fashion to exist in multiple places and time periods, scholars have worked to overturn the simple equation of fashion with modernity and its corollary, fashion as an epiphenomenon of capitalism. Returning to the root sense of the term, historical studies of dress have focused attention on fashion as a process of fluid self-fashioning within dynamic social worlds.6 In the turn to fashion as a global phenomenon, scholars have employed comparative approaches to underscore shared features and experiences across time and place.7 Textile histories have demonstrated how the circulation of both raw materials and finished goods shaped local and global desires, revealing the historical entanglements that fostered economic, technological, and cultural change.8

6

7

8

Century Spanish Manuscript Concerning the Geography, History and Ethnography of the Pacific, South-east and East Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Scholars of the early modern period have been the driving forces of this revision. See for example Ann Rosalind-Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sarah Grace-Heller, Fashion in Medieval France (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2007); Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Rachel Silberstein, ‘Eight Scenes of Suzhou: Landscape Embroidery, Urban Courtesans, and Nineteenth-Century Chinese Women’s Fashions’, Late Imperial China, 36/1 (2015), 1–52; Evelyn Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). See Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (eds.), How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Amelia Peck (ed.), Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500– 1800 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013); Marie-Louise Nosch, Zhao Feng, and Lotika Varadarajan (eds.), Global Textile Encounters (Oxford: Oxbow, 2014); Dagmar Schäfer, Giorgio Riello, and Luca Mola (eds.), Threads of Global Desire: Silk in the Pre-Modern World (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2018); Sarah Fee (ed.), Cloth that Changed the World: The Art and Fashion of Indian Chintz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

19

20

buyun chen

Recent scholarship on fashion has made explicit the methodological position that fashion must be interrogated within its historical contexts. If fashion systems are intimately related to economic forces, social relations, political hierarchies, as well as technological possibilities, then we must investigate them as historically-specific phenomena. To interrogate fashion-as-historical is to dispense with long-standing Eurocentric assumptions, including notions of a universal model of fashion and an allencompassing fashion theory derived from Euro-American experiences.9 A methodological and conceptual retooling of fashion history that is attentive to historical specificity would entail challenging the positivist approach that has been foundational to fashion studies, questioning the relevance of a national-historical framework, and moving beyond a stadial conception of history. Fashion histories remain, for example, bound by national (Chinese fashion), continental (African), or binary units (Western and non-Western). If we accept fashion to be historically conditioned – its emergence and maintenance contingent on, and its features distinctive according to, time and place – then can we speak of a monolithic Chinese fashion or Western fashion? The nation-state model of history further binds fashion to political chronology, subsuming changes (and continuities) in dress practices (and their broader implications) under a single narrative arc. In the case of Chinese studies, where the long-standing focus has been on the history of dress (fushi shi) rather than fashion, twentieth-century scholars in China and Taiwan adhered to the treatment of vestimentary change as conterminous with political change. These studies presented shifts in form and style in a totalizing narrative that considered dress as evolving alongside with Chinese dynastic history.10 As Rachel Silberstein’s 9

10

Fashion theory remains entrenched in Euro-American sociological and cultural studies traditions. See Malcolm Barnard (ed.), Fashion Theory: A Reader, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2020). Shen Congwen, Zhongguo gudai fushi yanjiu [Research on Ancient Chinese Costume] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1981); Wang Yuqing, Zhongguo fuzhuang shigang [An Overview of Chinese Clothing] (Taipei: Zhonghua Dadian Bianyinhui, 1967); Zhou Xun and Gao Chunming, Zhongguo fushi wuqian nian [Five Thousand Years of Chinese Costume] (Shanghai: Xuelin Chubanshe, 1984); Zhou Xun and Gao Chunming, Zhongguo lidai fushi

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

contribution on Ming and Qing fashion in this volume shows, it is more accurate to speak of multiple fashion systems across these two dynasties. There remains, as well, a preoccupation with fashion’s origins, rise, and transmission.11 In the search for fashion’s origins, scholars have maintained a teleological tendency inherited from social and economic histories – as well as sociological and anthropological studies – that views complex sartorial systems as manifestations of social and economic development and, thus, conceives of fashion in relation to some form of modernity in Europe and China alike.12 This chapter takes a closer look at the debate on fashion’s origins in Europe and fashion’s existence in China to discuss ongoing conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of fashion as a historical phenomenon. In so doing, this chapter raises more questions than it answers: Can we write fashion history without origins?13 In focusing on fashion-as-historical, how might we avoid substituting an insistence on particularism for the earlier insistence on universalism? In other words, how can we approach fashion as specific historical formations

11

12

13

[Chinese Dress and Adornment through the Ages] (Shanghai: Xuelin Chubanshe, 1984); Zhou Xibao, Zhongguo gudai fushi shi [History of Chinese Dress and Adornment] (Bejing: Zhongguo Xiju Chubanshe, 1984); Huang Nengfu and Chen Juanjuan, Zhongguo fuzhuang shi [A History of Chinese Dress] (Beijing: Beijing Luyou Chubanshe, 1995). This is especially true of European scholars who remain invested in a single heritage of fashion. See for example Gilles Lipovetsky, L’Empire de l’éphemère: La Mode et son destin dans les sociétés modernes (Paris: Gallimard, 1987); Carlo M. Belfanti, ‘The Civilization of Fashion: At the Origins of a Western Social Institution’, Journal of Social History, 43/2 (2009), 261–83. Antonia Finnane, ‘Yangzhou’s “Mondernity”: Fashion and Consumption in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Positions, 11/2 (2003), 395–425; Penelope Francks, ‘Was Fashion a European Invention? The Kimono and Economic Development in Japan’, Fashion Theory, 19/3 (2015), 331–61. See also Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), ch. 3. Sarah Grace-Heller has also challenged the use of ontogenetic metaphors in writing fashion history, asking: ‘Should fashion be understood anthropomorphically . . . The conclusion to which we must return is that fashion seems to stage its own birth again and again, because a fundamental characteristic of fashion is declaring the past invalid in favor of a new, improved present.’ Grace-Heller, Fashion in Medieval France, 59.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

21

22

buyun chen

without abandoning the project of identifying shared conditions of social-material worlds that grant meaning to human experience?14 Returning to the Braudel quotation at the beginning of the chapter, we might ask further, how can we disentangle fashion from ways of seeing and knowing, and ideals of progress inherited from Enlightenment values that have turned changing clothes into a measure of civilization?15 This latter tendency bespeaks the legacy of turn-of-the-twentieth-century formulations of fashion as an offspring of capitalism – and thus, (European) modernity – by Thorstein Veblen, Werner Sombart, and Georg Simmel, among others in the field of fashion studies.16 Theories of fashion, like fashion itself, must be historicized and scrutinized within their epistemological contexts. The stakes are as follows: to engage these questions is to advance methods that confront the power relations that have plagued the study of fashion from its inception. As Sandra Niessen succinctly put it, ‘Who has, who does not have fashion is politically determined, a function of power relations.’17 Fundamental to the matter of who has and who does not have fashion has been the question of – competition over – fashion’s origins. Shifting the narrative focus from origins to processes and practices, this chapter highlights how approaches informed by material culture studies may enable scholars to study fashion-as-historical without forsaking trans-historical and trans-cultural connections and

14

15

16

17

This question is rephrased from Sandra Harding, Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 6–7. Feminist and post-colonial Science and Technology Studies scholars’ efforts to redress Eurocentrism and its claims of universalism may be useful to think with. See Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria Unveiled’, in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 35–67; John L. and Jean Comaroff, ‘Fashioning the Colonial Subject’, in Of Revelations and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), ii, 218–73; Victoria L. Rovine, ‘Colonialism’s Clothing: Africa, France, and the Deployment of Fashion’, Design Issues, 25/3 (2009), 44–61. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Viking Press, 1967 [1899]); Werner Sombart, ‘The Emergence of Fashion’, in Nico Stehr and Reiner Grundmann (eds.), Economic Life in the Modern Age (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 205–26; Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’, International Quarterly, 10 (1904), 130–55. Sandra Niessen, ‘Afterword: Re-Orienting Fashion Theory’, in Niessen et al. (eds.), Re-Orienting Fashion, 245.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

comparisons. By following the material practices that have been fundamental to the perception of change – and in turn, the historical identification of fashion – we may continue to interrogate the relationship between matters of appearance and social status, gender relations, historical consciousness, structures of production, and dynamics of consumption without the a priori assumptions that have privileged Europe as the universal model. The final section of the chapter draws on one case study, velvet weaving in Ming China and its connections to global trading routes, to illustrate how by placing material things at the centre of fashion histories, we can engage with the ephemerality of our evidence to ask different questions – casting aside the master narratives that have long dominated scholarship. Tracing velvet across Europe and Asia in all its forms and meanings, such as its accrued value as both a desirable good and technology, invites us to think about the multiple, sometimes overlapping, and sometimes divergent practices of making, dressing, knowing, and fashioning across history.

fashion’s telos The use of ontogenetic metaphors in writing fashion’s history – birth, origin, growth, and the like – present fashion as launched from a moment of conception, coming into being from seemingly nothing.18 The moment of fashion’s birth is, in turn, a radical rupture from the past. Gilles Lipovetsky, for example, has made wide use of these metaphors, declaring that, ‘Fashion does not belong to all ages or to all civilizations: it has an identifiable starting point in history.’19 Before the mid-fourteenth century, 18

19

Ontogenetic metaphors were widely adopted by historians during the twentieth century to emphasize the significance of historical events and epochs. Titles include: Robert S. Lopez, The Birth of Europe (New York: M. Evans, 1962); Joseph S. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 15.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

23

24

buyun chen

when fashion was allegedly born, people lived without ‘inconstancy in matters of form and ornamentation’. Arguing against a universal and evolutionary view of fashion as fundamental to all civilizations, Lipovetsky classified the phenomenon ‘as an exceptional process inseparable from the origin and development of the modern West’, and concluded that ‘The mystery of fashion lies here, in the uniqueness of the phenomenon, in the way it sprang up and took hold in the modern West and nowhere else.’20 Echoing Lipovetsky, Carlo Belfanti has argued that, ‘the coming of fashion created a new world’.21 The ‘rise of fashion’ constituted a ‘turning point in human societies’ by replacing ‘costume’ and introducing a new system of values and forms of economic organization, but as Belfanti reasoned, fashion was not an European invention.22 On the contrary, fashion ‘first fully developed as a social institution in Europe, while in India, China, and Japan it only evolved partially in pre-modern times, without being able to obtain full social recognition’.23 Belfanti, nonetheless, defaults to the standard narrative that social and economic conditions specific to Europe allowed fashion to thrive there and nowhere else.24 Thus, by the nineteenth century, there was only Western fashion to speak of. Whereas Belfanti embraced the possibility of fashion’s multiple origins, Braudel located its singular origin in the mid-fourteenth century when men’s dress was revolutionized by the introduction of the short surcoat.25 Like other twentieth-century Euro-American scholars, Braudel’s dating was informed by German art historian Paul Post’s influential dissertation on the transformation of men’s

20 22

23 24

25

Ibid. 21 Belfanti, ‘The Civilization of Fashion’. Carlo Marco Belfanti, ‘Was Fashion a European Invention?’, Journal of Global History, 3/3 (2008), 419–43. Ibid., 443. See also Giorgio Riello’s discussion of Belfanti in ‘Fashion in the Four Parts of the World: Time, Space and Early Modern Global Change’, in Lemire and Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies, 41–64. ‘The really big change came in about 1350 with the sudden shortening of men’s costume, which was viewed as scandalous by the old, the prudent and the defenders of tradition . . . In a way, one could say that fashion began here. For after this, ways of dressing became subject to change in Europe.’ Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, 317.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

dress in fourteenth-century Burgundy.26 For Braudel, however, fashion did not become ‘all-powerful’ until the eighteenth century when the term itself spread rapidly and with its new meaning: ‘keeping up with the times’.27 Fashion’s rise entailed linguistic change, in addition to sartorial change, as it represented a more significant transformation – that of mentalité. The methods of fashion’s classification likewise have relied on both visual representation and textual documentation as evidence of deeper structural shifts in society. Art historian Anne Hollander proposed that fashion began in the West around 1300 based on her analysis of visual representations of the body and clothes in works of art. Hollander, following the tradition of early twentiethcentury scholars of dress, defined changes in fashion with changes in silhouette: ‘If fashion in dress means constant perceptible fluctuations of visual design, created out of the combined forms of tailored dress and body, then many early civilizations and much of the eastern hemisphere have not experienced “fashion” as we know it . . . The changes in true fashion, ongoing in the West since about 1300, demand reshaping of the body-and-clothes unit.’28 Other civilizations may have undergone variations in ‘surface fashion’ found in the trimming and colours of garments, but ‘basic shapes will have altered only very slowly by a long evolutionary process, not dependent on any aesthetic lust for perpetual changes of form’.29 Literary scholars have contributed alternative

26

27 28

29

Braudel cites François Boucher’s Histoire du costume en Occident (1965), which was strongly influenced by Paul Post. See Paul Post, ‘Die französischniederländische Männertracht einschließlich der Ritterrüstungen im Zeitalter der Spätgotik 1350–1475’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Halle a. d. Saale 1910); Paul Post, ‘La Naissance du costume masculin moderne au XIVe siècle’, in Actes du Ier Congrès International d’histoire du Costume (Venice: Centro internazionale delle arti e del costume, 1955), 28–41. Other work that adopted Post’s hypothesis includes: J. C. Flugel, Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930); James Laver, The Concise History of Costume and Fashion (New York: N. H. Abrams, 1969); Lipovetsky, L’Empire de l’émphemère. See also Grace-Heller, Fashion in Medieval France, ch. 2. Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, 316. Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 90. Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

25

26

buyun chen

timelines based on textual sources. In Sarah Grace-Heller’s study of medieval France, late twelfth- and thirteenth-century romances support her argument that a fashion system existed in the twelfth century, and was fully developed in the thirteenth century. In identifying ten criteria as the ‘sine qua non of a fashion system’, including a new temporal consciousness, a desire for constant change, and a gradual movement towards the equalization of appearances, she emphasized words as ‘crucial evidence for locating the growth stages of a fashion system’.30 Critical of the use of visual evidence to corroborate the mid-fourteenth-century dating of fashion’s origin, Grace-Heller contended that, ‘To study fashion’s presence we must look beyond visual images to expressions of desire for distinction, uniqueness and admiration.’31 Hollander’s and Grace-Heller’s approaches betray the larger methodological problems in the historical scholarship of fashion posed by formalism (mining the visual record for changes in style) and logocentrism (mining the textual record for changes in expressions), and its abiding concern with finding roots and origins. What this debate among scholars of Europe reveals is that the import of fashion’s singular origin lies in its relationship to larger claims about the origins and development of the modern West.32 Narrating fashion in ontogenetic terms reaffirms the event of fashion as a rupture from a benighted past, thereby maintaining the teleological view that ‘the future was to belong to the societies fickle enough’ to change (their clothes). The question of fashion’s origins parallels earlier debates about the birth of consumer society and early modernity, in which historians of material culture in China have made critical interventions. As Craig Clunas summed it up: ‘consumption has become precisely if not the linchpin

30 31

32

Grace-Heller, Fashion in Medieval France, 8. Ibid., 10. For a similar study, see Andrea Denny-Brown, Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High- and Late-Medieval England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012). See for example William Sewell’s discussion of the relationship between fashion and the rise of capitalism. William H. Sewell, Jr, ‘The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France’, Past & Present, 206 (2010), 81–120.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

then a major prop of the argument, spoken or unspoken, for an exclusively “Western” (actually, Anglo-American) modernity’.33 Fashion too has acted as a linchpin, but as the next section will show, it was the linchpin in Europe’s construction of knowledge about self and other.

discovering fashion in china In contrast to the fickle societies of Europe, Braudel observed that ‘The mandarin’s costume in China was the same from the outskirts of Peking, the new capital (1421), to the pioneer provinces of Szechwan and Yunan and had been so from well before the fifteenth century. And the silk costume with golden embroidery drawn by Father de Las Cortes in 1626 was the same shown in so many eighteenth-century engravings . . . Even the upheaval of the Tartar conquest in 1644 hardly interfered with a centuries’ old stability.’34 Braudel was neither the first nor the only thinker to single out China as the foil to Europe, contrasting the inertia of Chinese society with the dynamism of Europeans. Early modern writings about dress in the Chinese Empire, for example, reflected European self-perception and values more so than what people actually wore.35 Until roughly the mid-eighteenth century, European observers tended to discover parity in the habits of the Chinese.36 Over the course of the nineteenth century, as the power relations between the Qing Empire and the West (more specifically, Britain) shifted, the lack of fashion became part of a damning indictment of China’s

33

34 35

36

Craig Clunas, ‘Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West’, American Historical Review, 104/5 (1999), 1510. Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, 312. See Dorothy Ko, ‘Bondage in Time: Footbinding and Fashion Theory’, Fashion Theory, 1/1 (1997), 3–27; Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 20–9. Scholarship on the British imagination of China is extensive; see for example David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Chi-ming Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

27

28

buyun chen

perceived deficiencies.37 Perception of change and its representation, like the phenomenon of fashion itself, is also a historically and culturally embedded practice. Until well into the twentieth century, however, these earlier eyewitness accounts continued to serve as indispensable proof for arguments made by Euro-American scholars and writers about the inertia of Chinese society and culture. In Braudel’s discussion of China, he quoted from Sir George Staunton’s (1737–1801) An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China to buttress his claim about the stability of Chinese dress and society.38 Published in 1797, Staunton’s account circulated in other contemporaneous publications, including George Henry Mason’s The Costume of China (1800), which featured engravings based on the watercolours of Canton export artist Pu Qua (act. late eighteenth century) (Figure 2.1).39 Mason, like Staunton before him and Braudel after him, stressed the accuracy of both his descriptive content and his illustrations, stating that he had ‘obtained correct drawings of the Chinese in their respective habits and occupations’.40 Elaborating on Staunton’s observation that ‘Dress is seldom altered in China from fancy or fashion’, Mason added,

37

38

39

40

See Dorothy Ko’s discussion of the myth of an unchanging China. Ko, ‘Bondage in Time’, 6–7. Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, 312. See also Sir George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, Vol. II (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1797), 440. Accounts produced from the 1793 Macartney mission to the court of Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–96) were a major turning point in the appraisal of Chinese society and culture. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 177–93. Mason states in his preface, ‘. . . and wherever the recollection of the Editor is deficient, he has repaired it by careful selections from the narratives of almost every traveller, from Nieuhoff and Navarette to Staunton and Van Braam’. George H. Mason, The Costume of China, Illustrated by Sixty Engravings: with Explanations in English and French (London: W. Miller, 1800). William Alexander (1767–1816), a draughtsman with the Macartney embassy, had produced a folio of illustrations for Staunton’s account, but were published in 1805, under the title The Costume of China Illustrated in Forty-Eight Coloured Engravings (London: William Miller, 1805). Mason, The Costume of China, preface.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

Figure 2.1 ‘A Lady of Distinction in her Habit of Ceremony’, Plate lx from The Costume of China, Illustrated by Sixty Engravings: with Explanations in English and French, by George Henry Mason. Illustrations by Chinese export artist Pu Qua (act. late eighteenth century); his signature, ‘Pu-Qua, Canton, Delin’, appears at the bottom left of the engraving. Getty Research Institute.

‘The fashions of the Chinese never vary; they are almost of antediluvian invention, and are perhaps emblematic of the stability of their affections.’41 Similar illustrations were used to make like claims in Jean-Baptiste Joseph Breton de La Martinière’s China, its Costume, Arts, Manufactures: Edited Principally from the Originals in the Cabinet of the Late M. Bertin (1811–12) and D. Bazin de Malpière’s La Chine: moeurs, usages, costumes, arts et métiers, peines civiles et militaires, cérémonies religieuses, 41

Ibid., Plate lx.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

29

30

buyun chen

Figure 2.2 ‘Femme de haut rang, avec son enfant et sa suivante’ (Highranking woman with her child and maid), from D. Bazin de Malpière, La Chine: moeurs, usages, costumes, arts et métiers, peines civiles et militaires, cérémonies religieuses, monuments et paysages (Paris: L. Éditeur, Goujon et Mlle Formentin, F. Didot, 1827), vol. ii. The accompanying text reads: ‘La mode n’exerçant pas comme chez nous un empire sans limites sur la forme des habillements, les seules modifications qu’ils éprouvent tiennent à la differénce de saisons ou à la nature des étoffes.’ Bibliothèque nationale de France.

monuments et paysages (1825–7) (Figure 2.2). Braudel’s assessment of dress in China was not only in line with a tradition of historical and ethnographic writing that prioritized European traveller accounts, but also rested on the conviction that pictorial evidence was an objective documentation of the world. Like firsthand written accounts, the authenticity of images depended upon the viewer’s confidence in the truth of sight.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

Although sources for Chinese dress became more widely accessible over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the spread of new visual and media technologies, the content and tone of the accounts varied little. What is striking about Braudel’s interpretation of Chinese dress is its continuity with de La Martinière’s account, published over a century earlier: The fashions are not liable to change. The drawings of the costume transmitted by the missionaries in the time of Louis XIV are perfectly applicable, in shape and colour, to those of the present day. How different amongst the Europeans! The dress of the present year is not only unlike that of the last, but perhaps as different from those of twenty years before, to the fashions of the century preceding.42

Both de La Martinière and Braudel grounded their judgements in transmitted knowledge derived from earlier pictorial sources. The authority of their claims was dependent upon the assumed accuracy of a few depictions of Chinese dress over the span of centuries. But the comparison between China and Europe, from the outset, was asymmetrical: as Dorothy Ko has made clear, ‘at stake is not between China of yesteryear and of today, but between the Europe of today and a China suspended in time’.43 The belief that China lacked anything that could be considered fashion was thus part and parcel of the myth that only the West had fashion. In keeping with this myth, fashion only took root in China following the introduction of Euro-American goods and ideas, as The New York Times reported in a 1913 article, titled ‘The Fashions Change in China Just as They Do Here’.44 The shocking discovery that fashion existed in China became a trope in American popular print media in the twentieth century, notably in Vogue magazine. Although Vogue promoted and appropriated Chinese dress styles and aesthetics (as well as other visual and 42

43 44

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Breton de La Martinière, China, Its Costume, Arts, Manufactures, &c.: Edited Principally from the Originals in the Cabinet of the Late M. Bertin, With Observations Explanatory, Historical, and Literary, vol. ii, trans. Andrea Freschi (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1812), 96. Ko, ‘Bondage in Time’, 7. ‘The Fashions Change in China Just as They Do Here’, The New York Times, 3 August 1913, 9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

31

32

buyun chen

material cultures) in its features, cover designs, and advertisements, the editors continued to publish conflicting accounts of the state of fashion in China.45 Whereas in a 1924 piece, Betty Thornley learned from her Shanghai guest, Spring-Branch, that ‘Chinese women had them [fashions]’; in 1925, a feature article, titled ‘The Ancestor-Worshipping Mode of China’, related the conservatism of Chinese dress to the despotism of its rulers.46 In the latter, the Chinese woman of fashion is described as ‘painstakingly particular’ and ‘carefully precise’ about details that vary ‘tyrannically from season to season’ – demonstrating how well oriental despotism explains changing fashions as it does unchanging fashions.47 Familiar claims about the radical difference between East and West were made by the author too. Whereas Paul Post insisted on the shortening of men’s tunics as the impetus for fashion, the Vogue writer hypothesized that the corset was the driving force: The most fundamental difference between the modes of the East and those of the West lies, of course, in the fact that the East has never had the slightest use for the corset, and China is no exception to the rule. This immediately suggests that changes in silhouette must be rare in the Chinese mode, for the countless changes of the silhouette in Western lands are due, almost without exception, to the changes in shape, the presence or absence of the corset. As a matter of fact, we know that the feminine silhouette has not changed perceptibly in six centuries, and all that we know of the

45

46

47

For a study on the presentation of China in Vogue, see Heather Chan, ‘From Costume to Fashion: Visions of Chinese Modernity in Vogue Magazine, 1892– 1943’, Ars Orientalis, 47 (2017), 210–32. On Euro-American consumption of Chinese textiles in the twentieth century, see Verity Wilson, ‘Studio and Soirée: Chinese Textiles in Europe and America, 1850 to the Present’, in Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner (eds.), Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 229–42. See also Richard H. Martin and Harold Koda, Orientalism: Visions of the East in Western Dress (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994). Betty D. Thornley, ‘The Celestial at Home: A Member of the Chinese Aristocracy Shows Her Occidental Cousin How Delightfully the Other Half Lives’, Vogue, 63/1 (15 July 1924), 58–9, 96; ‘The Ancestor-Worshipping Mode of China’, Vogue, 66/6 (15 September 1925), 156, 158, 162, 166, 168, 186, 188. ‘The Ancestor-Worshipping Mode of China’, 158.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins earlier history of China would lead us to believe that it has changed but little in forty or more.48

Here, again, the author appealed to an all-knowing Western gaze to argue that changes in Chinese women’s dress over the past six centuries have been imperceptible. The consistent emphasis on silhouette is significant. Until recently, this contrast between the Western mode and the non-Western one centred on the presence or absence of modifications to the shape of clothes was the sine qua non of fashion writing – as captured in the description of classical studies of dress as ‘hemline history’. Such views – indeed the Western gaze itself – were adopted by many early twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals, who in upholding the West as a benchmark, participated in local and global discourses on dress as a measure of a society’s propensity for change.49 In Eileen Chang’s (1920–95) 1943 article in the English-language journal, XXth Century, she confirmed that ‘generation after generation of women clung to the same dress style’ due to ‘the stability, the uniformity, the extreme conventionality of China under the Manchus’.50 Not all twentieth-century intellectuals, however, were convinced by the superiority of Western dress nor persuaded by fashion’s virtues. Anticipating later postcolonial critiques of fashion, Lin Yutang (1895–1976) contended in an essay titled ‘The Inhumanity of Western Dress’ (1937) that: ‘The prestige of foreign dress rests on no more secure basis than the fact that it is associated with superior gunboats and Diesel engines. It cannot be defended on esthetic [sic], moral, hygienic or economic grounds. Its superiority is simply and purely political.’51 In a reversal of earlier nineteenth-century accounts, 48 49

50 51

Ibid. See Paul J. Bailey, ‘“Othering” the Foreign Other in Early-TwentiethCentury Chinese Women’s Magazines’, in Michel Hockx, Joan Judge, and Barbara Mittler (eds.), Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century: A Space of Their Own? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 282–301; Barbara Mittler, ‘The New (Wo)Man and Her/His Others: Foreigners on the Pages of China’s Women’s Magazines’, in ibid., 302–31. Eileen Chang, ‘Chinese Life and Fashions’, XXth Century, 4/1 (1943), 54–61. Lin Yutang, ‘The Inhumanity of Western Dress’, in Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1937), 261–6. An

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

33

34

buyun chen

Lin called out the fallacy that Western dress was inherently superior, pointing out that the perception of its prestige had more to do with gunboats and steam engines than with what Westerners actually wore. Twentieth-century writers in China were not unique in correlating sartorial practices to social and political change. A wealth of commentaries on dress and fashion can be found across earlier transmitted historical texts. Male intellectuals in Tang China (618–907) described the phenomenon of fashion in myriad ways: ‘keeping up with the times’ (rushi), being ‘of the age’ (shishi), and ‘adornment of the times’ (shishi zhuang).52 Attuned to changes in dress and adornment, these observers critiqued fashion as symptomatic of an unstable, decadent society. In Craig Clunas’ study of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), he argued that institutional and economic transformations over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries gave way to a ‘less uniform sense of spatiality’ that attached to ‘a new, less stable and much more troubling form of temporality’, expressed through ‘the idea of fashion, the “mode of the times” (shiyang)’.53 Si-yen Fei has shown how dress, and consumption more broadly, became part of how the late Ming literatus, Gu Qiyuan (1565–1628) imagined and narrated the southern capital of Nanjing.54 Gu, along with his contemporaries Zhou Hui (fl. late sixteenth century) and Shen Defu (1578–

52

53

54

earlier version was published as ‘On Chinese and Foreign Dress’ [Lun xizhuang], in The Little Critic: Essays Satires and Sketches on China (Second Series: 1933–53) (Shanghai: The Commercial Press Limited, 1935), 75–6. Suzanne E. Cahill, ‘“Our Women Are Acting like Foreigners’ Wives!”: Western Influences on Tang Dynasty Women’s Fashion’, in Valerie Steele and John Major (eds.), China Chic: East Meets West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 103–18; BuYun Chen, Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). Craig Clunas, Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Cultures of Ming China, 1368–1644 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 38. See also Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004 [1991]); Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Sarah Dauncey, ‘Illusions of Grandeur: Perceptions of Status and Wealth in Late-Ming Female Clothing and Ornamentation’, East Asian History, 25– 26 (2003), 43–68. Si-yen Fei, Negotiating Urban Space: Urbanization and Late Ming Nanjing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

1642), were staunch critics of the fashion impulses of urban elites. They bemoaned not only the pace of change, but also the erosion of social distinctions in dress.55 Tang and Ming male writers were responding to the vagaries of their historical contexts, but one commonality can be found: social change had a material referent. For Tang poet Yuan Zhen (779–831 ce), women’s cosmetic practices during the early ninth century signalled the force of fashion in dictating social cohesion. Changes in women’s hair and make-up were manifestations of a more profound shift, that of people aligning desires with the ‘trend of the times’ (shishi). Writing during China’s ‘silver century’ (roughly 1550–1650), Shen Defu lamented the rising prices of early Ming antiques such as Xuande-era (1425–35) incense burners, attributing the blame to ‘the leaders of fashion from Suzhou’, whom ‘imperial relatives and big merchants blindly and frivolously imitate’.56 In both Yuan’s and Shen’s critiques, a heightened awareness of difference – historical, social, cultural – was registered by material changes. Fashion is as material and ephemeral as the things it represents. Moving from discourse to things, the remainder of this chapter turns to an examination of the material foundations of fashion and the unknown makers, who were indispensable to fashion in the nonmodern world. Taking silk velvet as an illustrative case, I highlight a few of the methodological and conceptual contributions to the study of fashion offered by a material culture studies approach. Key among them is the diversion of attention away from the representation of change to the materials, the makers, and the processes of making (and of meaning-making) that informed those representations.57 The type

55

56 57

Wu Jen-shu, ‘Mingdai pingmin fushi de liuxing fengshang yu shidafu fanying’ [Popular Styles of Clothing among the Common People of the Ming, and the Reaction of the Gentry], Xinshixue, 10/3 (1999), 55–109. Quoted in Clunas, Superfluous Things, 137. For an overview of the multiple turns informing the study of things and their consumption, see Anne Gerritsen, ‘From Long-Distance Trade to the Global Lives of Things: Writing the History of Early Modern Trade and Material Culture’, Journal of Early Modern History, 20 (2016), 526–44. On the material culture turn in Chinese history, see Dorothy Ko, ‘Stone, Scissors, Paper: Thinking Through Things in Chinese History’, Journal of Chinese History, 3/2 (2019), 191–201.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

35

36

buyun chen

of fibre, twist of the thread, weave structure, as well as the use of dyes and pigments in textile-making all bear on the drape, cut, and shape of the final garment – conditioning its sensory perception and depiction. In short, a material difference makes a perceptual difference. This recognition has also led fashion studies scholars to champion investigations into fashion as a process of materialization, as well as new materialist orientations.58 To examine fashion-as-historical is to approach fashion as material and relational.

trade, innovation, and early modern fashion The long-standing focus on silhouette and shape by Euro-American writers has eclipsed the importance of the global textile trade that made an expanding selection of silk and cotton textiles from Asia available to consumers worldwide, fixing the locus of change to the tailoring of garments rather than the materials of dress.59 On a more fundamental level, histories that foreground silhouette as evidence of change have tended to treat the construction of form as separate from its material fabrication. By accentuating the work of tailors, such histories obscured the labour, skills, and knowledge of non-European weavers and dyers. Over the past few decades, scholarship on eighteenth-century trade has shown that multiple circuits of exchange linked local visual and material culture to transregional and global aesthetic practices that informed individual self-fashioning and knowledge-making.60 The popularity of the 58

59

60

Sophie Woodward and Tom Fisher, ‘Fashioning through Materials: Material Culture, Materiality and Processes of Materialization’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, 5/1 (2014), 3–23; Heike Jenss and Viola Hoffman (eds.), Fashion and Materiality: Cultural Practices in Global Contexts (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). See Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, ‘East & West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Social History, 41/4 (2008), 887–916. For studies on exchanges between eighteenth-century Europe and China, see Yu-chih Lai, ‘Reproducing Renaissance Naturalist Images and Knowledge at the Qianlong Court: A Study of the “Album on Beasts”’, Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 80 (2013), 1–75; Kristina Kleughten, ‘Chinese Occidenterie: The Diversity of “Western” Objects in Eighteenth-Century China’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 47/2 (2014), 117–35; Mei Mei Rado, ‘Encountering Magnificence: European Silks at the Qing Court during the Eighteenth Century’, in Petra Chu and Ning Ding (eds.), Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

banyan – an Anglo-Indian coinage used to refer to loose robes based on the kosode (literally, ‘small sleeve’) – among eighteenth-century men in Europe and America is a prime example of how dress styles and language also travelled alongside textiles to be adapted and adopted – thereby, shaping local practices of self-presentation and contributing to a global lexicon (Figure 2.3). Painted and printed cottons from the Coromandel coast of the Indian subcontinent were also traded further east to Tokugawa Japan and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these textiles (known as sarasa) became popular materials for inner robes, linings, obis, and other accessories (Figure 2.4).61 What this scholarship has illuminated is how weaving, dyeing, and patterning practices, as well finished textiles, connected communities of makers and wearers across long distances – reworking arguments about equivalence into frameworks for exploring interconnections that in tandem with the global turn, aim to decentre the nation as the dominant unit of analysis. More significantly, this scholarship has demonstrated that ‘fashion’ like ‘global’ are historically produced realities, and not a priori constructs. The lens for interpreting early modern exchanges of textile knowledge and skills has been modelled on the worldwide trade system on the one hand, and the modern fashion system on the other. Such a framework privileges the view that monolithic empires manufacture goods for a foreign market, resulting in the transmission of designs and techniques across cultures, and in turn, produces a classification scheme of these goods based almost entirely on style and origins. The path of transmission is imagined as a linear trajectory between two points or alternatively, as a direct relationship between producer and consumer.62

61

62

the West (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015), 58–75; Kristel Smentek, ‘Chinoiseries for the Qing: A French Gift of Tapestries to the Qianlong Emperor’, Journal of Early Modern History, 20/1 (2016), 87–109; Anna Grasskamp and Monica Juneja (eds.), EurAsian Matters: China, Europe, and the Transcultural Object, 1600–1800 (Cham: Springer, 2018). John Guy, Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998). Historians of science and technology have proposed alternative models for exploring exchange that may be generative for fashion historians too. See Pamela O. Long, ‘Trading Zones in Early Modern Europe’, Isis, 106/4 (2015),

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

37

38

buyun chen

Figure 2.3 Banyan and waistcoat. Tailored in Italy; silk textile woven in China. Dated 1800–10. The textile has been identified as produced for the Qing court; however, the design is unlike contemporaneous official robes. There is some resemblance to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dragon robe silks that were turned into Tibetan chubas. Examples of these robes worn by Tibetan elites may be found in the Mactaggart Art Collection, Edmonton, Canada. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

This model of exchange further assumes that textiles, especially trade textiles, circulate in a fashion system in the modern sense: producers creating for a market that is shaped by demand.63

63

840–7; Dagmar Schäfer, ‘Introduction’, in Dagmar Schäfer (ed.), Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1–18; Pamela H. Smith, ‘Nodes of Convergence, Material Complexes, and Entangled Itineraries’, in Pamela H. Smith (ed.), Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 5–24. See Carlo Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production: The Strategies of the Lyons Silk Merchants in the Eighteenth Century’, in Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (eds.), World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 2.4 Sarasa benran no mokuroku (Catalogue compendium of sarasa designs), 1778. In the late eighteenth century, Osaka book publishers began producing compendia of sarasa patterns, called sarasabon. Osaka was the centre of the cotton trade in Edo Japan. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

40

buyun chen

Among the 134 works exhibited in the 2013 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, ‘Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800’, was a late sixteenth-century man’s cloak, remarkable for both its cut and fabrication (Figure 2.5). The garment, known as the ‘compass cloak’ for its circular shape, has been identified as Portuguese in construction. Made from cut and voided velvet, the compass cloak features an alternating diaper pattern with each diamond-like shape composed of four pommel scroll motifs. Lined in a sumptuous red silk satin and trimmed in metallic thread, the cloak surely was made for display. From the twist of the thread and the metallic thread technique (gilded paper wrapped around a silk substrate), the textile is believed to have been produced by Ming dynasty weavers. The curators of the exhibition speculated that the silk velvet of the cloak may well have been a diplomatic gift, taken home to Portugal to be fashioned into the latest style.64 Viewed in this light, the compass cloak is the example par excellence of the early modern fashion system. Textiles traverse geographic and cultural boundaries to be made and remade by local hands to suit local tastes. Increased movement of luxury and everyday goods not only generated new ideas about what was desirable, but also contributed to the making of a shared visual language of design. Indeed, the emergence of a system recognizable to us as modern fashion was forged by this economic conjuncture from the sixteenth century onwards. The emphasis placed on the principle of the market as the primary motor for fashionable change subsumes the early modern fashion system under a single lineage of modern fashion. In this way, studies on the textile trade have also remained faithful to modern geographical units of analysis and a stadial conception of history. The study of textile history in China, like dress history, has followed political chronology.65

64 65

Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37–74. Peck (ed.), Interwoven Globe, 180 (cat. no. 32). See Dagmar Schäfer’s critique of this approach in Schäfer, ‘“Power and Silk”: The Central State and Localities in State-Owned Manufacture during the Ming Reign (1368–1644)’, in Schäfer et al. (eds.), Threads of Global Desire, 21–47.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

Figure 2.5 Compass cloak. Portugal, second half of the sixteenth century. Textile: velvet, cut and voided, silk, with silk lining and metallic trim; China, sixteenth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The history of velvet production in China and its connections to the wider world, however, is instructive for its ambiguous origins. The mystery surrounding velvet’s origins raises a key question about trade and fashion: What were the mechanisms through which textiles (and their technology) secured value, shaped knowledge and tastes, across different locales? Transmitted textual sources have been employed to make two hypotheses about the beginnings of velvet production in China. The first hypothesis, citing accounts penned by European travellers who relayed that locals both desired velvet textiles and knew of its technology, proposes that velvet was not woven in China until about the end of the sixteenth century.66 If Ming velvet production began in the late sixteenth century, implying that local European production of 66

Harald B. Burnham, Chinese Velvets: A Technical Study (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959), 14–15.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

41

42

buyun chen

velvets was still ahead of Ming workshops, then how do we explain the compass cloak according to the logics of early modern trade and fashion? The second hypothesis, relying on a philological approach, posits that velvet weaving was practised during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) based on a reference in the dynastic annals to winter garments made from qiemianli, which may have referred to velvet-like silks.67 A third theory, grounded in the discovery of a group of proto-velvet fragments unearthed from the tomb of Lady Dai (d. 186 bce) at Mawangdui (near modern-day Changsha, Hunan), suggests that knowledge of pile weaving existed already in the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce).68 Bringing together the textual and material evidence, the next section briefly surveys the production and circulation of velvet in and beyond sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China to emphasize an earlier conclusion that fashion is as material and ephemeral as what it represents. To approach fashion as material and relational is to engage critically with the irreducible multiplicity of socialmaterial worlds.

thinking with velvet: from origins to relational fields Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, velvet production flourished in multiple centres across Western Europe, Safavid Iran, Ottoman Turkey, and Ming–Qing China. Velvet refers to all fabrics with a pile. The foundation weave of velvets can be of any structure, such as tabby or twill. To turn a simple weave into velvet, a supplementary warp is introduced over a series of small rods. The weaver draws the supplementary warp over the 67

68

Yoshida Masako, ‘Chu¯goku ni okeru berubetto no keisei: Chiho¯ kokorozashi-to¯ ni okeru yo¯go no hensen o to¯shite’ [Formation of Velvets in China], Hata, 5 (1998), 35–47. Textile scholar Zhao Feng has also argued that the technique was transmitted during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, based on similar evidence. See Zhao Feng, Tian’e rong [Chinese Velvet] (Suzhou: Suzhou University Press, 2012). Specifically, polychrome warp-faced compound tabby with pile loops (qirong jin). See Angela Sheng, ‘The Disappearance of Silk Weaves with Weft Effects in Early China’, Chinese Science, 12 (1995), 41–76; Angela Sheng, ‘Why Velvet? Localised Textile Innovation in Ming China’, in Schäfer et al. (eds.), Threads of Global Desire, 49–74.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

rods, creating a series of loops. As the weaving progresses, the rods are removed. The loops are then cut, resulting a raised surface pile. Variations to this basic weaving process produce different types of velvets, including plain velvet (cut loops cover the entire surface), voided (alternating areas of pile and non-pile), ciselé (alternating areas of cut and uncut pile), and pile-on-pile (constructing pile in two levels). The general term for velvet in Chinese, rong, can refer to any kind of pile fabric. Fabrics with pile were perhaps first produced in imitation of animal fibre. In Ming and Qing texts, the most frequent terms for what would be considered true velvet are: tian’erong, zhangrong, and jianrong. Tian’erong or ‘swan’s-down velvet’ is a cut velvet, made using a rod to create a loop pile on the face and then cut with a knife, leaving a sumptuous high pile made of single threads. Zhangrong may have referred to the same kind of velvet as tian’erong, but its name was derived from its place of production – Zhangzhou in Fujian province. Jianrong commonly describes a sculpted velvet, in which the pattern is formed by cutting the pile to different lengths that may have developed from a shorn pile fabric produced under the Mongols for winter wear (possibly, qiemianli). Specific references to velvet weaving in Ming and Qing texts are limited and contradictory, which may suggest that velvet weaving began in private workshops in places like Zhangzhou, Fujian.69 The near-absence of references to velvet in official dynastic records further supports this theory. Produced for court and elite consumption, surviving examples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century velvets display a wide range of design and technique. Two notable seventeenth-century pieces of Ming–Qing velvet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection are a cut and voided velvet tailed into a jinbaori (surcoat, worn over armour by samurai) and an uncut dragon robe (Figures 2.6 and 2.7). The jinbaori was made from a cut and voided silk velvet with a yellow ground and featuring a pomegranate motif that has led to the conclusion that the textile was produced for the European market.70 Textile historian Masako Yoshida has argued that 69 70

Sheng, ‘Why Velvet?’, 59–67. The Cleveland Museum of Art is in possession of two seventeenth-century fragments of cut and voided silk velvet with a similar floral design featuring a bilateral symmetry.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

43

44

buyun chen

Figure 2.6 Jinbaori. Japan, seventeenth century. Body: velvet, cut and voided, silk; China, for the European market, late sixteenth–seventeenth century. Lining: silk damask; China, late sixteenth–seventeenth century. Lapels: lampas, silk and gilt-paper strips; Japan, probably eighteenth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

velvets brought to Japan during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were likely Chinese copies of European textiles that were made into jinbaori. While the Portuguese imported these velvets into Japan via Macao, behind the commissions and trade were Chinese merchants from Guangzhou, Fujian, and Huizhou.71 The other velvet textile was intended to be cut into a robe for a high-ranking elite of the early Qing court. Two large-scale mang (four-clawed) dragons, 71

Masako Yoshida, ‘Metoroporitan bijutsukan shu¯zo¯ no chaji so¯ka mon’yo¯ biro¯do jinbaori’ [The Warrior Jacket of Flower Pattern Velvet Preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art], Kokusai fukushoku gakkai shi [Journal of the International Association of Costume], 22 (2002), 40–9; Masako Yoshida, ‘Den Hideyoshi shoyo¯ no kayo¯mon shishu¯ biro¯do jinbaori – seisaku-chi, seisaku nendai, seisaku haikei no suitei’ [The Embroidered Velvet Jinbaori Jacket Purportedly Owned by Toyotomi Hideyoshi: Its Place of Production, Date, and Background], Bijutsushi [Journal of the Japan Art History Society], 59/1 (2009), 1–16.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

Figure 2.7 Velvet textile for dragon robe. Qing dynasty, seventeenth century. Velvet with weft patterning in silk, metallic thread, and feather thread. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

vertically oriented along the central axis, confront a flaming pearl and are surrounded by swirling clouds on a dark-blue ground. Another uncut dragon robe in yellow ciselé velvet with additional embroidery has been dated to the seventeenth century, currently stored in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Velvet garments have been excavated from elite Ming tombs, including from the imperial mausoleum, dating to the early seventeenth century.72 The complexity of the weaves and the motifs suggest that by turn of the seventeenth century, specialized velvet weaving was practised in both local and

72

See Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan kaogu yanjiusuo (et al.), Ding Ling [Ding Ling: The Imperial Tomb of the Ming Dynasty], 2 vols. (Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe, 1990); Beijing shi Changping qu shisanling tequ banshi chubian (eds.), Dingling chutu wenwu tudian [Catalogue of Relics from the Dingling Mausoleum], 2 vols. (Beijing: Beijing Meishu Sheying Chubanshe, 2006).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

45

46

buyun chen

court workshops. The use of velvet for court dress further implies that velvet may have been more commonplace in the seventeenthcentury sartorial world, across the Ming and Qing dynasties. The textual archive reveals a significant discrepancy between European and Chinese accounts on the origins of velvet weaving, which accordingly has led to divergent theories about when and through what means silk workshops in Ming China began to produce the luxury textile. An inventory of goods confiscated from the Grand Secretary Yan Song (1480–1567), dated to 1562, listed seven items of jianrong including bolts of different colours, a woman’s cape, and headpieces, as well as one headdress made from tian’erong.73 According to seventeenth-century scholar Song Yingxing (1587– 1666), the technique for velvet (woduan) weaving was transmitted to weavers in Zhangzhou and Quanzhou in Fujian from the Japanese archipelago.74 Song, however, dismissed velvet as a distasteful novelty, claiming that: ‘Today both the Han Chinese and the barbarian tribes despise it. In the future, it will be discarded as a thing. No need to transmit its weaving techniques.’75 His prediction was ill-founded. There is also no material evidence supporting Song’s claim that velvet weaving was obtained from Japan. What is striking about the Ming texts is the absence of references to Europe as the source for velvet. Several accounts point to the Fujian coast as the site of velvet weaving. The southeastern coast had served as a key point of entry for goods, people, and technology for centuries. It is plausible that the techniques for velvet production entered China via the trade routes that linked the Fujian coast to the islands in the South China Sea and beyond.76 73

74

75

76

Tianshui bingshan lu [Heavenly Waters Melting the Iceberg], in Mao Qiling, Ming Wuzong waiji (Taipei: Guangwen Shuju 1964). Pan Jixing, Tianggong kaiwu yizhu [Translation and Annotation of Tiangong Kaiwu] (Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 2008 [1993]). For an English translation of Song’s text, see Sung Ying-Hsing [Song Yingxing], T’ien-kung k’ai-wu: Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century, trans. E-tu Zen Sun and Sun Shiou-Chuan (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966), 60. The title of the entry is translated as ‘Japanese satin’. Goods brought into Ming China recorded in Ma Huan’s Yingyai shenglan [The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores], preface dated to 1433, include what may have been a type of cotton velvet. This evidence suggests that cotton velvet may have been another conduit of transmission into Fujian.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

To sum up the current state of research on velvet, the origins of this coveted early modern textile and technology remain elusive. Neither philological method nor formalist analysis of surviving textiles will provide answers for how, when, and by whom velvet was first woven. The early modern corpus of velvets highlights the circularity of transmission, and points to the existence of many and multiple agents who produced, distributed, and disseminated textiles and knowledge. But what if we shifted our perspective back to the material and the weaving itself? Instead of searching for meaning of the object in the idea it expresses or confirms – fashion or cultural exchange – we examine the process through which things (and their relations) come into existence. How might thinking about the artefact along the terms described by Tim Ingold, as ‘the crystallization of activity within a relational field, its regularities of form embodying the regularities of movement that gave rise to it’, yield new questions for fashion historians?77 Relational fields are generative spaces, in which things are constituted and reconstituted through coordinated action, or activity. Centring the process of making in the study of fashion may enable scholars to trace the varied social-material interactions that comprise multiple fashion worlds. In the case of velvet, we might investigate its movement through relational fields – material, social, epistemic – rather than across modern geographical units in order to understand the plural mechanisms and nonlinear trajectories that made it mobile and desirable.78 To put it differently, how might we narrate the history of fashion by

77

78

For an English translation, see Ma Huan, Ying-Yai Sheng-Lan: ‘The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores’ (1433), trans. and ed. Feng Ch’eng-Chun, with introductory notes and appendices by J. V. G. Mills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). See also Haraprasad Ray, Trade and Diplomacy in India-China Relations: A Study of Bengal during the Fifteenth Century (New Delhi: Radiant Publishers, 1993). Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 345. See also essays in Smith (ed.), Entangled Itineraries.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

47

48

buyun chen

foregrounding skills, techniques, and embodied practices within relational contexts rather than predetermined cultural ones? Taking this line of enquiry further, we might conceptualize fashion in terms of the weaving process itself: immanent (located within the environment in which it is enacted), relational (shaped by its interactions with other things), and situated (embedded in specific social and spatial formations).79 To explore these connections is not to reduce fashion to them, but rather, to interrogate how matters of presentation were and continue to be fundamental to the organization of knowledge about self and other, as well as the production of value, and how ways of knowing, perceiving, weaving, and cutting were inextricable from people’s ongoing engagement with their environments. To do so would demand a break from the stadial approach to fashion and universalizing frameworks.

conclusion This chapter has surveyed how Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism shaped the study of fashion in both Europe and China. While such views have been contested by fashion studies scholars and historians alike, calls for more inclusive studies of fashion and new conceptual frameworks continue.80 The conceptual and methodological problems posed at the beginning of the chapter highlight the enduring legacies of colonial power relations and knowledge regimes that have maintained the binary frameworks – fashion/costume, West/non-West – that dominate fashion discourses. Redressing the forms of inequality that persist in fashion scholarship, as well as in popular discourse, requires a critical evaluation of the foundational knowledge and methods of the field. We must approach fashion as a historical or critical category of analysis, rather than an inert space to be populated by societies deemed

79

80

Ingold extends “weaving” to all human activity. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 346–8. See Toby Slade and M. Angela Jansen, ‘Letter from the Editors: Decoloniality and Fashion’, Fashion Theory, 24/6 (2020), 809–14.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

towards a history of fashion without origins

fashionable according European experience.

to

terms

established

by

Western

select bibliography ‘The Ancestor-Worshipping Mode of China’, Vogue, 66/6 (15 September 1925), 156, 158, 162, 166, 168, 186, 188. Belfanti, Carlo Marco, ‘Was Fashion a European Invention?’, Journal of Global History, 3/3 (2008), 419–43. Braudel, Fernand, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, Volume I: The Structure of Everyday Life, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1981). Chang, Eileen, ‘Chinese Life and Fashions’, XXth Century, 4/1 (1943), 54–61. Clunas, Craig, ‘Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West’, The American Historical Review, 104/5 (1999), 1491–511. de La Martinière, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Breton, China, Its Costume, Arts, Manufactures, &c.: Edited Principally from the Originals in the Cabinet of the Late M. Bertin, With Observations Explanatory, Historical, and Literary, vol. ii, trans. Andrea Freschi (London: J. J. Stockdale, 1812). Grace-Heller, Sarah, Fashion in Medieval France (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2007). Hollander, Anne, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Ingold, Tim, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000). Ko, Dorothy, ‘Bondage in Time: Footbinding and Fashion Theory’, Fashion Theory, 1/1 (1997), 3–27. Lin, Yutang, ‘The Inhumanity of Western Dress’, in Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1937), 261–6. Lipovetsky, Gilles, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Mason, George H., The Costume of China, Illustrated by Sixty Engravings: with Explanations in English and French (London: W. Miller, 1800). Niessen, Sandra, ‘Afterword: Re-Orienting Fashion Theory’, in Sandra Niessen, Annemarie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones (eds.), Re-

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

49

50

buyun chen Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 243–6. Thornley, Betty D., ‘The Celestial at Home: A Member of the Chinese Aristocracy Shows Her Occidental Cousin How Delightfully the Other Half Lives’, Vogue, 63/1 (15 July 1924), 58–9, 96.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press

3

w

FASHION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD michael scott

introduction ‘Show me the clothes of a country and I can write its history.’1 Scholarship on the ancient world has been, in many ways, slow to embrace the value of the study of clothes, costume, and fashion. Research on the Greek and Roman worlds, for example, had, up until the second half of the twentieth century, overwhelmingly focused on the male experience of ancient society at the expense of the female. Scholarship had thus been preoccupied chiefly with a technical understanding of military clothing; a marvelling at the expense of the clothing of the emperor; or, a little more widely, with the practicalities of how the toga (in the Roman world) or the chiton (in the Greek world) was worn. Moreover – especially in the Greek world – the prioritized male focus resulted in a keen and ongoing interest in the absence of clothes entirely and on the sociocultural importance of nudity in ancient Greek society (which has, ironically, enveloped the idea of nudity ‘as costume’ within ancient society).2 It was not in fact until the 1990s that the study 1

2

Anatole France, cited in Lloyd Llewellyn Jones (ed.), Women’s Dress in the Ancient Greek World (Swansea: Duckworth, 2002), vii. Emphasis on the (male) naked body: Liza Cleland, Mary Harlow, and Lloyd Llewellyn Jones (eds.), The Clothed Body in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxbow, 2005), xii; Larissa Bonfante, ‘Nudity as a Costume in Classical Art’, American Journal of Archaeology, 93/4 (1989), 543–70. Indeed the strong association of dress, clothing, and fashion with the female meant that these topics were even often ignored in the first wave of writing, which sought to redress the gender imbalance and the sexist focus in scholarship on this

51

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

52

michael scott

of clothing, dress, and costume – of both men and women – as a key indicator of society’s mores became a serious topic of scholarship.3 Since the 1990s, again within the wider ancient Mediterranean world, scholarship, beyond facilitating a greater understanding of what was worn in different cultures around the Mediterranean, has focused principally on how clothing was used for the negotiation of three key socio-cultural issues: gender, identity/ethnicity, and social hierarchy/class.4 Yet this young area of research has also begun to articulate more clearly the particular difficulties it faces compared to that of clothing from other eras. The ancient, sparse, and often fragmented nature of the evidence means that scholarship must embrace a particularly wide range of research specialists: from archaeologists and textile conservationists to ancient historians, art historians, and literary scholars, as well as theatre costume designers and re-enactment enthusiasts. At the same time, it must be sensitive to the ways in which its insights reflect, and are governed by, the characteristic survival of particular kinds of evidence from different geographical locations (e.g. the survival of cloth in dry desert areas of Egypt and Asia Minor but not in Italy;

3

4

period: clothing and fashion were, it seems, just too ‘feminine’, cf. Mireille Lee, Body, Dress and Identity in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 19. Indeed the study of the impact of the Greek and Roman periods on later fashion trends from the Renaissance onwards was an established scholarly field before the study of Graeco-Roman clothing itself: Lloyd Llewellyn Jones (ed.), Women’s Dress in the Ancient Greek World (Swansea: Duckworth 2002), ix. Key early works on the socio-cultural importance of clothing include Larissa Bonfante and Judith Lynn Sebesta (eds.), The World of Roman Costume (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Georges Losfeld, L’art grec et le vêtement (Paris: De Boccard, 1994). Gender: e.g. Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise: The Veiled Women of Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Kelly Olson, Dress and the Roman Woman: Self-Presentation and Society (London: Routledge, 2008); Kelly Olson, Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity (London: Routledge, 2017). On identity/ethnicity, see Margaret Miller, Athens and Persia: A Study in Cultural Receptivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); François Chausson and Hervé Inglebert (eds.), Costume et société dans l’antiquité et le haut moyenâge (Paris: Éditions Picard, 2003). On social class/hierarchy, see Mireille Lee, Body, Dress and Identity in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Florence Gherchanoc and Valérie Huet (eds.), S’habiller, se déshabiller dans les mondes anciens (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2008).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world

the alluring prevalence of art and sculpture from ancient Greece).5 Perhaps most importantly, it must be careful to articulate what these particular kinds of evidence can be understood to reveal about day-to-day ancient style. Ancient sculptors, for example, enjoyed the interplay of light and shadow that folds of cloth afforded and so were keen to sculpt such items of clothing. Conversely they were not at all interested in depicting the very detailed work of jewellery, hairpins, and the like.6 Scholars of the ancient world have, however, also been reticent to use the term ‘fashion’ (as exemplified by its absence from the book titles so far quoted in the footnotes) to describe their topic, preferring instead to refer to ‘dress’, ‘clothing’, or ‘costume’. Such reticence seems to stem from a reading of the term ‘fashion’ as delineating a world in which everyone always willingly changes their clothing style in response simply to what is new (‘change for change’s sake’), at the expense of other (perhaps unchanging) signifying aspects of dress.7 Yet the ancient evidence makes clear that changing trends in clothing, motivated by a wide range of different factors, were a perceptible part of ancient society. The ancient Greek poet Sappho noted, for example, that purple headbands from Lydia, worn a generation earlier, were no longer in fashion in her time.8 The Roman writer Pliny postulated that the new Roman fashion for rougher textured materials in his day may have been influenced by the clothing of recently conquered ‘Barbarian’ groups.9 Instead of dispensing with the term ‘fashion’ in relation to ancient world, I would argue that instead we need to nuance our understanding of fashion to incorporate the conscious decision to change, as well as the conscious decision not to do so, 5

6

7

8 9

Liza Cleland, Mary Harlow, and Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, ‘Introduction’, in Cleland et al. (eds.), The Clothed Body in the Ancient World, xii. Alexandra Croom, Roman Clothing and Fashion (Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2000), 13. Cf. Liza Cleland, Glenys Davies, and Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, Ancient Greek and Roman Dress from A to Z (London: Routledge, 2007), 67. Sappho, Fragment 98. Pliny, Natural History 8.73. Equally, the ancient Greek writer Thucydides comments that while archaic Athenians wore elaborately decorated and colourful clothes based on Eastern styles, by the fifth century bce these fell out of favour to be replaced by a more austere look reflecting the politics of democracy and equality in Athenian society: Thucydides 1.6.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

53

54

michael scott

by both individuals and communities as a whole, based on a wide array of stimuli and cultural customs. In this chapter, I thus seek to do two things. First, to embrace a wider definition of the ancient world than has been covered so far in this brief review of scholarship, by engaging with case studies both from within the Mediterranean and from across Eurasia, and particularly issues of fashion choice arising from the connections between cultures, which lay across this wider geographical expanse. Second, to embrace an understanding of fashion as not only the adoption of the new (thanks to new trade links, the arrival of new materials and technologies, the desire to imitate – or indeed influence – foreign cultures), but also as the refusal of the new and the self-conscious continuity of existing traditions, as well as a mix of the two (e.g. the incorporation of some new elements of clothing as expressions of unchanging social mores). In so doing, I argue that fashion in the ancient world is not only an important topic for the better understanding of individual ancient cultures, but one which also actively undermines the still strongly guarded boundaries between the study of different ancient communities, precisely because it reveals the complex and nuanced ways in which these cultures were, in reality, regularly affected by one another.

silk and the roman empire There is perhaps no more famous example in the ancient world of the impact of connections between ancient communities on clothing fashion than the spread of silk from China through to the Mediterranean along the emergent Silk Roads (Map 3.1). While the Mediterranean world had its own sources of silk (in particular Coan silk, coming from the island of Kos) that had been noted since the time of Aristotle, its fibres were shorter and more prone to breaking and tangling, than those of the imported silk coming from the East (from the Bombyx mori silkworm).10 Silk originating 10

Cf. Aristotle, History of Animals 5.9. Coan silk was a wild silk, its fibres extracted from the broken cocoons of moths, requiring spinning to produce longer threads for making textiles. Silk from the Bombyx mori could be extracted from unbroken cocoons, producing longer and thinner fibres without the need for spinning, and in turn producing a smoother weave.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Map 3.1

ROMAN EMPIRE

SCYTHIA

Minusinsk Basin

N

Chu State (Warring States Period)

HAN EMPIRE

Xigoupan

Noin Ula

Nay Yun state (Western (Former) Han period

CHOLA

SAKAS

Loulan

XIONGNU

Pazyryk

The Silk Road network with key places in the text marked, alongside major areas of empire.

SINHALESH

SATAVAHANAS

INDO SCYTHANS

Samarkand Kashgar BASIN TARIM pula Sam KUSHAN PARTHIAN EMPIRE REALM

NABATEA

Palmyra

Black Sea

DACIA

Ancient Kingdoms and Empires (first century AD)

56

michael scott

in China was traded across the Silk Roads often in a thick weave, although also on occasion as unwoven silk thread.11 In Mediterranean hands, according to the surviving literary sources, the thicker silk weave seems to have been unpicked and spun in workshops in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, particularly in cities like Alexandria and Tyre, resulting in the creation of lightweight and even transparent silk weaves.12 According to surviving literary sources, it was this transparent quality (of both cheaper Coan silk and re-spun Chinese silk), that, in the decades following the arrival of imported Chinese silk, made silk such a fashionable luxury product in the late first century bce and first century ce (initially for the ‘disreputable’ elements of Roman society, and subsequently for Roman female elites), as well as the object of significant moral objection.13 The dramatist and philosopher Seneca, writing in the middle of the first century ce, summed up the problem as follows: I see silk clothing – but how can this be called clothing when it offers nothing that could possibly afford protection to the body or provide any modesty? When a woman wears these silks she can scarcely say with a clear conscience that she is not naked. These silks are imported at vast expense from nations unknown to us even through trade. Silk is imported so that our married women can show

11

12

13

Richard McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes to the Ancient Lands of Arabia, India and China (London: Continuum, 2010), 148 and 162; John Thorley, ‘The Development of Trade between the Roman Empire and the East’, Greece and Rome, 16 (1969), 209–23. Cf. Lucan, Pharsalia 10.169–71, who imagines what Cleopatra’s breasts looked like, ‘splendidly visible through the fabric, produced as closetextured weave by the skill of the Seres, but which the needle of the Nile worker has separated and loosened by stretching out the web’. The Chinese also on occasion created transparent silk gauze (see the surviving plain gauze gown from the Han dynasty unearthed in Han Tomb No. 1 at Mawangdui, Changsha City, currently on display at the Hunan Museum). Cf. Horace, Satires 1.2.101–3 (about a prostitute apparently appearing naked while wearing Coan silk); Petronius, Satyricon 55 (brides wearing silk ‘as transparent as air’). On the mix of Coan and foreign silk inspiring these reactions, see Rebecca Woodward Wendekelin, ‘Wefts and Worms: The Spread of Sericulture and Silk Weaving in the West before 1300’, in Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (eds.), Medieval Clothing and Textiles 10 (New York: Boydell & Brewer, 2014), 59–78.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world as much of their bodies to people in the street as they display to their lovers in the bedroom.14

The writer and moral critic Pliny the Elder, writing at the same time as Seneca in the first half and middle of the first century ce, had the same concerns: To the females of our part of the world the Seres [the Chinese] give the twofold task of unravelling their textures and of weaving the threads afresh. Great is the labour and distant are the regions that are exploited to supply a dress through which our Roman ladies may expose their bodies to the public.15 By the smallest computation, India, the Seres and the Arabian Peninsula take 100 million sesterces from our empire every year – so much do our luxuries and our women cost us.16

Roman men also quickly developed a taste for wearing equally finely woven, but coloured and thus opaque, silk to brighten up their togas and tunics, and by extension to show their wealth and cosmopolitan status. By 16 ce, the Roman Senate enacted a sumptuary law restricting the wearing of silk among the male nobility, on the basis both of the cost of such extravagance and on its ‘feminizing’ influence on men.17 Such laws failed, not least because later emperors like Caligula ignored the prohibition and wore silk in public.18 Pliny felt that when men chose to wear the lightweight silk in place of heavier traditional materials like wool, 14 15

16

17

18

Seneca, De Beneficiis 7.9. Pliny, Natural History 6.20. Rome’s engagement with the luxury goods of the outside world was often seen as the source of Rome’s ills: Livy 39.6–7; Polybius 31.25; John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 68–75; Andrew Dalby, Empires of Pleasure: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 2000). Pliny, Natural History 12.41. Yet Pliny also seems proud that Romans traded with those so far away: ‘We should be struck with wonder and admiration that, coming from a primitive state, we are now . . . reaching the Seres to obtain our clothing’, Natural History 12.1. There has been much debate over the soundness of Pliny’s economic calculations, cf. Stephen Sidebotham, Roman Economic Policy in the Erythra Thalassa 30 BC–AD 217 (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 36–44. Tacitus, Annals 2.33. Emperor Tiberius forbade any man to wear silk clothing: Cassius Dio 57.15. Suetonius, Caligula 52.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

57

58

michael scott

something of the upstanding and masculine male character – the male virtus – was being lost: Now even men will wear silk clothing in the summer because of its lightness and they do not feel ashamed. Once we used to wear leather cuirasses, but our fashions have become so bizarre that even a toga is now considered to be unnecessarily heavy.19

The use of silk continued for both men and women despite objection and official censure. A famous silk market was established in Rome at the Vicus Tuscus, and fine transparent and coloured silk was available not only for clothes, but also for brightly coloured silk parasols. Nor was its use confined to the metropolis. It was used, for example, in outposts like Roman Britain, for Roman military banners.20 Silk imports into the Roman Empire only increased over the course of the second century ce as the use of silk spread more widely (although always with an urban rather than rural focus).21 The Roman state happily taxed its import, alongside numerous other luxury goods coming from Eurasia.22 Its cost remained high: the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, reigning 160s–180s ce was able to raise enough money for war by selling ‘his wife’s silk and gold clothes’.23 Yet wearing excessive amounts of silk was still not without censure – even (and perhaps especially) for the emperor. The famously extravagant, and disliked, Roman emperor Elagabalus (r. 218–222 ce), was censured in surviving 19 20

21

22

23

Pliny, Natural History 11.27. Cf. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.17. Cf. Martial, Epigrams 11.27, 14.28; Ovid, Fasti 2.209; Juvenal, Satires 9.50. Apuleius, The Golden Ass 4.31. Military banners: a Palmyrene merchant called Barates was buried at Corbridge in Northumberland (possibly late second century ce), having been based in Roman Britain supplying silk banners to frontier military units: Peter Salway, The Frontier of Roman Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 25, 60–2, 228, 256. Cf. Berit Hildebrandt, ‘Silk Production and Trade in the Roman Empire’, in Berit Hildebrandt and Carole Gillis (eds.), Silk: Trade and Exchange Along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxbow, 2017), 34–50. The Alexandrian Tariff lists fifty-six imports into the Roman world coming through Alexandria, which were subject to tax including ‘raw silk, silk or part-silk clothing, silk thread’: Justinian Digest 39.4.16.7. Cf. Gary Young, Rome’s Eastern Trade (London: Routledge, 2001), 209. Historia Augusta, Life of Marcus Aurelius 17.4

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world

literary sources for being the first emperor to wear a garment made entirely of silk, alongside tunics made wholly from cloth of gold, and bejewelled shoes.24 Yet during this period we get a different picture from the east of the empire. At Palmyra a number of different silk textiles have been found in graves dating securely from 40 ce through to the 220s ce. These silks are far from the re-woven transparent garments of Rome. Some are typical weaves of Han dynasty (206 bce–200 ce) China, namely warp-faced tabby with warp floats and warp-faced compound tabbies (complex weaves not found elsewhere at this time), most likely produced in Han government-run workshops for redistribution as prestige items.25 Thirty surviving pieces are woven with Chinese characters, and a number incorporate patterns and emblems (such as dragons, tigers, concentric circles, and zigzag lozenges) similar to Han dynasty silks found in the kingdoms of the Tarim Basin.26 At the same time, one surviving fabric of uncertain date from Tomb 65 at Palmyra, reveals a scene – of camels, and men harvesting grapes – that is rare in Han China (Figure 3.1). As such, this is potentially an example of a motif made in Han China for direct export to appeal to a central/western Asian market.27 Silk of different qualities and costs was also being imported from multiple points of origin: threads of wild cocoon silk made from the 24 25

26

27

Historia Augusta, Life of Elagabalus 23.3–4; 26.1. Lothar Von Falkenhausen, ‘Inconsequential Incomprehensions: Some Instances of Chinese Writing in Alien Contexts’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 35 (1999), 42–69. Chinese characters: e.g. Fragment K10, Tower Tomb of Kitot, early third century ce. Chinese designs: e.g. Kat 449 (from Tomb 13, dated to 103 ce) with tigers, concentric circles, etc. Both in Andreas Schmidt-Colinet, AnneMarie Stauffer, and Khaled Al-Asad (eds.), Die Textilien aus Palmyra: Neue und Alte Funde (Mainz: Philip von Zabern, 2000). Kat 449 also discussed as S9 in Otto Maenchen-Helfen, ‘From China to Palmyra’, Art Bulletin, 25 (1943), 358–62. Tomb 65: Kat 260 (Taf. 96–7; Fig. 105) in Schmidt-Colinet et al. (eds.), Die Textilien aus Palmyra, 145; Marta Zuchowska, ‘Palmyra and the Chinese Silk Trade’, in Christian Meyer, Elvind Seland, and Nils Anfinset (eds.), Palmyra: City, Hinterland and Caravan Trade between Orient and Occident (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2016), 29–38. Grape ornaments on silk produced in China from third century ce: Marta Zuchowska, ‘“Grape Picking” Silk from Palmyra: A Han Dynasty Chinese Textile with Hellenistic Decoration Motif’, Światowit: Annual of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, 12/53 (2014), 143–62.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

59

60

michael scott

Figure 3.1 Fragments of silk from Palmyra with harvest grape scene. Tomb 65 Palmyra. Image published in Andreas Schmidt-Colinet, AnneMarie Stauffer, and Khaled Al-Asad (eds.), Die Textilien aus Palmyra: Neue und Alte Funde (Mainz: Philip von Zabern, 2000), Figure 105.

Antheraea species commonly used in India (and in southern China) have also been found in the surviving textiles at Palmyra.28 And the style of these international silk garments was simultaneously 28

Schmidt-Colinet et al. (eds.), Die Textilien aus Palmyra, 12–13. Cf. Irene Good, Mark Kenoyer, and Richard Meadow, ‘New Evidence for Early Silk in the Indus Civilization’, Archaeometry, 51/3 (2009), 457–66.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world

being imitated in other materials: we also see examples at Palmyra of local manufacturers of woollen cloth striving consciously to imitate the appearance, decoration, and even woven structure of Chinese textiles.29 The cost of silk remained very high: in the third century ce, pure silk was literally worth its weight in gold.30 Diocletian’s price edict at the end of the third century ce fixed one pound of silk dyed purple (the most expensive colour in the Roman world) and spun into fine threads at 125 aurei (nearly three pounds of gold).31 Yet it was in the following century that the wearing of imported silk stopped being a matter of censure even for the emperor, replaced instead by approval of conspicuous status display coupled with an interest in the use of pattern and decoration from further east. The owning and wearing of such garments was now understood as a symbol of the emperor’s global power and reach (as well as his separation from the world of merely mortal men). When the Emperor Honorius was made consul (for the fourth time) in 398 ce, the writer Claudian praised how ‘Tyre lent her dyes, China her silks and Hydaspes her jewels’ to make Honorius’ outfit fitting for the occasion.32

trousers and belt plaques across eurasia In this section I will focus on a number of different clothing and ornamental fashions that were particular to Asia in the first century ce (incorporating the Parthian Empire, the Kushan 29

30 31

32

Von Falkenhausen, ‘Inconsequential Incomprehensions’. For discussion of cloth fragments found at other border trading settlements: Thelma K. Thomas, ‘Perspectives on the Wide World of Luxury in Later Antiquity: Silk and Other Exotic Textiles Found in Syria and Egypt’, in Hildebrandt and Gillis (eds.), Silk: Trade and Exchange Along the Silk Roads, 51–81. Historia Augusta, Life of Aurelian 45.5. Edict on Maximum Prices 23.1–2, 24.1–1a; Kenneth Harl, Coinage in the Roman Economy 300 BC–AD 700 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 300. Claudian, Honorius 599–600. For further discussion of the power of textiles in the Mediterranean period of ‘Late Antiquity’, see Thelma K. Thomas (ed.), Designing Identity: The Power of Textiles in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

61

62

michael scott

Empire, and the wider world of pastoralist Steppe cultures and empires). Across this vast expanse, fashions were, on the one hand, being dictated by many of the same triggers we saw within the Roman Empire: first and foremost the growing number of non-heavy luxury goods being transported, bought, and sold across the trading and political network of the Silk Roads bringing hitherto unavailable items to new markets, and the desire among elites to wear rare items coming from far afield as a marker of status. On the other hand, what distinguished the complex ways in which fashions spread and metamorphosed across Asia in this period, compared with the Mediterranean Roman Empire, was the constant movement and interaction of communities themselves. On occasion some of these pastoralist communities, like the Yuezhi in the mid-second century bce, were tipped into mass migration out of the Steppe and into Central Asia, conquering and subsuming local communities in the region before morphing into a sedentary community and establishing an empire of their own (the Kushan Empire).33 Accompanying this was the regular expansion, contraction, and complete change-over of empires across Asia. As a result, particular regions of Central/South Asia (for example that of Bactria/ Hindu Kush/Gandhara) saw, over the last centuries bce and first centuries ce (whether through direct conquest, the subsequent splitting of empires, the growth of new local power centres, or the arrival of new migrants), a kaleidoscopic series of different cultural fashions, ideologies, goods and technological possibilities layered on top of one another, that, collectively, became part of the cultural landscape of whichever community next came to occupy the region.34

33

34

Cf. Kazim Abdullaev, ‘Nomad Migration in Central Asia’, in Georgina Herrmann and Joe Cribb (eds.), After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 73–98; Craig Benjamin, Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era 100 BCE–250 CE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 36–40. Cf. Christoph Baumer, The History of Central Asia: The Age of the Silk Roads (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world

Starting again with Palmyra, at the eastern edge of the Roman world, we can begin to see something of the impact on fashion of the greater movement of people across political boundaries. Palmyrene residents were specialized in the movement of goods across the Romano-Parthian border.35 Palmyrene culture was, as a result, a mix of Roman and Parthian and this applied also to the local fashions. Wealthy inhabitants of Palmyra seem to have adopted a particular type of costume, the trouser-suit, which, while it had originally had been the preferred dress of those involved in overland trade due to its practicality, was from the first century ce fashionable for Parthian kings and their entourage.36 We see this not only in the survival of textile fragments from the graves at Palmyra, but also, perhaps more importantly, in surviving funerary portraiture (Figure 3.2).37 The number of figures wearing Parthian dress in Palmyrene funerary banquet scenes (for which the practicality of a trouser-suit was not required) rises from 37 per cent in the period 50–100 ce, to 49 per cent in the period 200–273 ce.38 As such it seems that the trouser-suit, particularly after its adoption by Parthian kings, became an increasingly attractive symbol of wealth and prestige in Palmyra worn particularly at luxury events. While some of these examples were no doubt worn/set up by Parthians living in Palmyra, many must have been by Palmyrenes importing/copying Parthian high fashion, and doing so while other members of the Palmyrene community continued to wear Roman fashion (not to mention all those also wearing imported silk clothing as we have already seen). 35

36

37

38

Cf. Peter Edwell, Between Rome and Persia: The Middle Euphrates, Mesopotamia and Palmyra under Roman Control (London: Routledge, 2008). Cf. the mural (mid-third century ce) from Dura-Europos, another community on the Roman border, of Persian King Mordecai, dressed in kaftan and trousers, compared with four onlookers in Western toga-style dress: Anna Hedeager King, ‘The Caftan: Fashion across the Silk Road’, in Susan Whitfield (ed.), Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019), 112–17. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, ‘The Parthian Haute-Couture at Palmyra’, in Andreas Kropp and Rubina Raja (eds.), The World of Palmyra (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2016), 52–67. For surviving textile fragments: Schmidt-Colinet et al. (eds.), Die Textilien aus Palmyra, 33–5. Tracey Long, ‘The Use of Parthian Costume in Funerary Portraiture in Palmyra’, in Kropp and Raja (eds.), The World of Palmyra, 68–83.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

63

64

michael scott

Figure 3.2 Palmyrene funerary sarcophagus from Palmyra Museum with trouser/kaftan ensemble. Sean Leatherbury / Manar al-Athar (Resource ID: 98240).

Clothing fashion in Palmyra perhaps became a marker of cultural and economic allegiance within a community based on a culturally diffused (but militarily contested) geo-political border. As has often been pointed out, however, the wearing of trousers accompanied by a short jacket was by no means simply a Parthian fashion. It was, in fact, a costume (not least due to its practicality for horse-riding and long-distance travel) spread widely across the Silk Roads and their constituent communities.39 Perhaps the most famous pair of trousers from this period comes from a grave at Sampula, Lop, in the Tarim Basin, dating to the first century bce (Figure 3.3). These wool trousers (they were found with human leg bones still inside them) had been fashioned from a wall-hanging created as early as the third or second century bce, bearing a depiction of a Hellenistic-esque warrior with a spear (as well as a decorative pattern that included the image of a centaur with a cloak) and possibly created in Central Asia/ Bactria.40 Yet one place where trousers were much slower to be 39 40

King, ‘The Caftan’. Zhao Feng, ‘Wall Hanging with Centaur and Warrior’, in James Watt (ed.), China: Dawn of a Golden Age 200–750 AD (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), Cat. No. 101; Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road:

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world

Figure 3.3 Ancient woven wool wall-hanging, refashioned into a pair of trousers and found at the Tarim Basin settlement of Sampula, Xinjiang, China (often referred to as the ’Sampul Trousers’). Image shows close-up of warrior’s face (left) and a centaur (right). Alamy, 2B028C5 and Alamy, 2B028C9.

adopted was China. Their adoption for military commanders and staff accompanied the introduction of cavalry and the importing of foreign horses into China, for more effective defence against nomadic communities, during the last centuries bce, and then slowly spread as an identifiable ‘foreigner’s dress’ in the first centuries ce. The adoption of trousers at elite, and particular formal, occasions, had to wait for the establishment of an elite equestrian culture within China in the late sixth century ce and later (not least also following numerous nomadic invasions of China and the resulting cultural influence).41

41

A New History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 201; Mayke Wagner, Wang Bo, Pavel Tarasov, Sidsel Maria Westh-Hansen, Elisabeth Völling, and Jonas Heller, ‘The Ornamental Trousers from Sampula (Xinjiang, China): Their Origins and Biography’, Antiquity, 83 (2009), 1065–75. Xinru Liu, ‘Migration and Settlement of the Yuezhi-Kushan: Interaction and Interdependence of Nomadic and Sedentary Societies’, Journal of World History, 12/2 (2001), 261–92. See also Susan Whitfield’s chapter in this volume.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

65

66

michael scott

Alongside the prevalent use of trousers, another example of a widespread fashion item during this period was the belt plaque. Worn as an elite decorative piece on the belt, the fashion of large belt plaques can be found throughout the Steppe by the first century bce. Belt plaques, as well as having a practical use, were widely used as an indicator of social and spiritual status, power, and wealth and rank, as indicated by the material used for their creation and the imagery they incorporated. But there were also favoured fashionable images within particular regions, as well as imagery that seems to have spread widely as a fashion choice across communities. The image of two confronting bulls, for example, is found exclusively in the Minusinsk Basin, north of the point today where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan come together. In contrast, scenes of dragon-like creatures, originating in China, are also found in the Black Sea Steppe region, as are those of camels, perhaps coming from Central Asia. On occasion however, these similar images seem to have been adopted by very different sections of distinct communities. Animal combat scenes, for example, were popular on the western end of the Steppe and among the Xiongnu communities of the eastern Steppe: yet in the west they seem to have been mostly worn by men and in the east they have been found mostly in the graves of women.42 What makes the example of belt plaques particularly interesting is their manufacture and use in China, a place where, as we have seen above, the wearing of trousers was much slower to be adopted, and where the traditional Chinese long gown was not traditionally worn with a belt. We have already noted above the adoption of Chinese imagery (dragons) on belt plaques across the Steppe, and belt plaques have equally been found in the graves of rulers in China. For instance, the grave of the king of the Chu state in eastern China, Liu Wu (who ruled

42

Ursula Brossder, ‘Belts, Daggers and Earrings of Gold: Steppe Luxuries’, in Whitfield (ed.), Silk Roads, 105–11.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world

in the second century bce), contained gold belt plaques with Chinese characters inscribed on the back, giving their weight and details of the subject matter depicted on the plaque, indicating that they were made in Chinese workshops or at least by Chinese craftsmen.43 A series of glass plaques with gilt bronze frames have been found in the tomb of Zhao Mo, ruler of Nan Yue in southern China in the late second century bce. From their size, shape, and position in the grave around the middle of the body, they seem to have been intended as belt plaques.44 Zhao’s family originated from northern China on the border of the Steppe world, which scholars have indicated may explain why he had an interest in such ‘foreign’ Steppe items at a time when the clothing which required them had not been embraced within China outside of military use.45 More intriguing is the find of another gold belt plaque, in grave M2 at Xigoupan, also dating to the second century bce when the region was under the control of the Xiongnu nomadic confederacy.46 This gold belt plaque, inscribed with a Steppewide popular scene of animals attacking one another (in this case a tiger attacking a boar), also has Chinese characters on the back indicating weight and subject matter, and seems to have been manufactured using the Chinese ‘lost-wax lost-textile’ technique. As a result, it has been argued that this too was a belt plaque manufactured in China, probably explicitly for the foreign Steppe market.47 It may have come to the Xiongnu warrior it was buried with through trade, or through more formal diplomatic and gift exchange, and as such it marks the beginning of Xiongnu elite

43

44 45 46 47

Susan Whitfield, Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 21–3; Emma Bunker, ‘Lost Wax and Lost Textile: An Unusual Ancient Technique for Casting Gold Plaques’, in Robert Maddin (ed.), The Beginning of the Use of Metals and Alloys (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 222–7. Whitfield, Silk, Slaves, and Stupas, 48–9. Lukas Nickel, ‘The Nanyue Silver Box’, Arts of Asia, 42/3 (2012), 98–107. Brossder, ‘Belts, Daggers and Earrings of Gold’. Katheryn Linduff, ‘Production of Signature Artefacts for the Nomad Market in the State of Qin during the Late Warring State Period in China (4th–3rd century BCE)’, in Jianjun Mei and Thilo Rehren (eds.), Metallurgy and Civilisation: Eurasia and Beyond (London: Archetype, 2009), 90–6.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

67

68

michael scott

distinction not merely through military leadership, but also through the power derived from their foreign connections and involvement in trade.48

fashion to achieve cultural change Having seen how fashions can be introduced to social applause and simultaneous censure in the Mediterranean, as well as how fashions can have enormous and simultaneously very specific geographical spreads across Central and Southern Asia, we now turn to focus on East Asia and to an example of the varied impacts on fashion and community culture of clothing and materials initially sent as part of an official elite gift exchange between rulers. Roughly contemporaneous with the arrival of the Han dynasty at the end of the third century bce was a new nomadic phenomenon on the Steppe: one nomadic tribe, the Xiongnu, became the head of a larger nomadic imperial confederacy. The Xiongnu’s survival and stability depended, like any individual nomadic tribe, on raiding neighbours as well as gifts, trade, and tribute extracted from them in addition to their own pastoral production (we have seen above in the Han manufactured belt plaque an example of this early trade/ gift exchange).49 The Xiongnu raided with formidable force, almost capturing the Han emperor himself in his first years as ruler.50 In the first decade of the (Western) Former Han, in the early second century bce, there emerged the heqin ‘peace and friendship system’ between the Han and the Xiongnu.51 Its goal

48

49

50 51

Nicola di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 85; Nicola di Cosmo, ‘Aristocratic Elites in the Xiongnu Empire as Seen from Historical and Archaeological Evidence’, in Jürgen Paul (ed.), Nomad Aristocrats in a World of Empires (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2013), 23–53. Cf. Thomas Barfield, ‘The Xiongnu Imperial Confederacy: Organisation and Foreign Policy’, Journal of Asian Studies, 41 (1981), 45–61. Sima Qian, Shiji 110. Peter Golden, Central Asia in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 27–8; Ying-shih Yü, Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 36–51; Sophia-Karin Psarras, ‘Han and Xiongnu: A Re-examination of Cultural and Political Relations I’, Monumenta Serica, 51 (2003), 55–236; Sophia-Karin Psarras ‘Han and

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world

was first and foremost to secure a limit to hostilities across China’s borders by exchanging goods (principally silk – as clothing material as well as a form of currency – but also foodstuffs) for a mutual promise of non-aggression.52 This was by no means the first, or indeed the only, way in which the nomadic communities came into contact with silk. Silk had, during the Qin era, been exchanged for goods much desired by the Chinese, in particular the strong Steppe horse.53 More widely, frontier trade between nomads and the Chinese had been ongoing for centuries. By the time of the fourth to third centuries bce, there was already enough silk circulating in nomadic communities for it to be a dominant feature of their tombs as for instance at Pazyryk.54 Yet this moment did mark the beginning of the use of silk as an object of formal gift exchange between rulers. The heqin gift exchange was portrayed in Chinese sources as the exchange of gifts between equal rulers as part of a marriage alliance (the Han emperor had sent a princess from the imperial court to marry the Xiongnu leader at the outset of the agreement).55 At times, the exchange is recorded between the Han and Xiongnu rulers as being extremely personal, with the Han emperor, in the early 170s bce, claiming to be sending clothes from his own wardrobe for the Xiongnu ruler Maodun: We therefore send you from our own wardrobe an embroidered robe lined with patterned damask, an embroidered and lined underrobe, and a brocaded coat, one each: one comb; one sash with gold

52

53 54

55

Xiongnu: A Re-examination of Cultural and Political Relations II’, Monumenta Serica, 52 (2004), 37–93. For a wider range of possible motives: Nicola di Cosmo, ‘The Relations Between China and the Steppe: From the Xiongnu to the Türk Empire’, in Nicola di Cosmo and Michael Maas (eds.), Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 35–53. Sima Qian, Shiji 129. Cf. Manfred Raschke, ‘New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Romische Welt, 9/2 (1978), 604–1378; Xinru Liu and Linda Shaffer, Connections Across Eurasia: Transportation, Communication, and Cultural Exchange on the Silk Roads (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 21. Pazyryk: Barry Cunliffe, By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 236–43. Sima Qian, Shiji 110; Ban Gu, Hanshu 94.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

69

70

michael scott ornaments, one gold-ornamented leather belt; ten rolls of embroidery; thirty rolls of brocade; and forty rolls each of heavy red silk and light green silk.56

Despite this seemingly happy fashion exchange, there were those in China who saw the exchange, of silk and other goods, for peace as belittling of the state – especially as nomadic demands for increased gifts continued unabated year after year (and their raiding was, according to the historian Sima Qian, only ‘less often than before’, rather than a complete cessation).57 As it was described by one observer at the court of Emperor Wen (the same emperor who had sent his own clothes to the Xiongnu ruler): Now the Xiongnu are arrogant and insolent on the one hand, and invade and plunder us on the other hand, which must be considered an act of extreme disrespect towards us. And the harm they have been doing to the empire is extremely boundless. Yet each year Han provides them with money, silk floss and fabrics.58

Yet there was simultaneously a view that this exchange could in the long term help the Han overcome the Xiongnu threat, not simply by lessening the degree to which they raided Han China, but also by changing their nature (and particularly that of the Xiongnu ruler) to become more like the Han (and thus more amenable), through the provision of Han goods and fashions.59 Sima 56

57 58

59

Sima Qian, Shiji 110. The Han emperors and court were themselves in the process of codifying their own use of ritual clothes at this time, a process not complete until rule of Emperor Ming (58–75 ce): Xinru Liu, ‘Silk Robes and Relations between the Early Chinese Dynasties and Nomads Beyond the Great Wall’, in Stewart Gordon (ed.), Robes and Honour: The Medieval World of Investiture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 23–34. Sima Qian, Shiji 110. Ban Gu, Hanshu 48: 6a–b; cf. Thomas Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China 221 BCE–AD 1757 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 53–7. This view was also summed up by Jia Yi in the theory of the ‘five baits’: ‘to give them elaborate clothes and carriages in order to corrupt their eyes; to give them fine food in order to corrupt their mouths; to give them music and women in order to corrupt their ears; to provide them with lofty buildings, granaries and slaves in order to corrupt their stomachs; and for those who surrender, an imperial reception party to corrupt their minds. These are what may be called the five baits.’ Yen Shih-ku, Commentary to the Hanshu 48.13a. This idea – of clothing as cultural symbol and its adoption as

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world

Qian comments that by the time of Emperor Wen, the Xiongnu already ‘had a liking for Han silks and foodstuffs’. He goes on to quote a Han envoy to the Xiongnu, who later turned traitor and became a much-admired Xiongnu adviser, warning the Xiongnu of the slippery slope they were on: The Shanyu [Xiongnu leader] has this fondness for Chinese things and is trying to change the Xiongnu customs. Thus, although the Han sends no more than a fifth of its goods here, it will in the end succeed in winning over the whole Xiongnu nation. From now on when you get any of the Han silks, put them on and try riding around on your horses through the bush and brambles! In no time your robes and leggings will be torn to shreds and everyone will be able to see that silks are no match for the utility and excellence of felt or leather!60

This Han outlook, that adopting fashions in clothing could lead to deeper cultural change, had long been a part of Chinese culture and outlook. Indeed, in the fourth century bce, during the Warring States period, concern had been expressed in the state of Zhao, which bordered the nomadic communities, about the ways in which King Wuling had instructed his army to adopt the methods (and thus clothing) of the Xiongnu armies in order to retaliate more effectively: Now your majesty is giving up our high standards to follow the clothing styles of outsiders, thereby changing the teachings of our ancestors and the ancient ways. This will upset your people and make scholars angry, as it deviates from the values of the Middle Kingdom.61

Such concerns only abated once the effectiveness of the military reforms had been demonstrated. The Han traitor to the Xiongnu, in the time of Emperor Wen in the second century bce, echoed the criticisms that had been

60

potentially making foreign ‘barbarian’ cultures more like the Chinese – has been identified in multiple periods of Chinese history: cf. Dorothy Ko, ‘The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth-Century China’, Journal of Women’s History, 8/4 (1997), 8–27. Sima Qian, Shiji 110. 61 Ibid., 43.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

71

72

michael scott

levelled at the king of Zhao, by summing up the Xiongnu’s strength as lying: in the very fact that their food and clothing are different from those of the Chinese, and they are therefore not dependent upon the Han for anything.62

Despite these warnings, over the course of the following decades, the heqin relationship was renewed with each subsequent Xiongnu and Han emperor.63 The successor to Emperor Wen, Emperor Jing, added to the peace alliance the right for the Xiongnu to buy/ exchange goods in the markets along the Han border, and this was continued by his successor Emperor Wu.64 Such trade was, it seems, meant to quicken the process of Xiongnu desire for, and adaptation to, Chinese culture and way of life: every larger border market we establish must be fitted with shops . . . And all shops must be large enough to serve between 100–200 people. The Xiongnu will then develop a craving for our products and this will be their fatal weakness.65

The exchange was later recorded not only as simply hoping to continue the process of changing Xiongnu tastes and thus culture,

62

63 64 65

Ibid., 110. Cf. the description by the Emperor Wen of the Xiongnu as those ‘who wield the bow and arrow’, and the Han ‘whose inhabitants dwell in houses and wear hats and girdles’, ibid. Golden, Central Asia in World History, 29–30. Sima Qian, Shiji 110; Ban Gu, Hanshu 94B. Jia Yi even indicates that the Xiongnu displayed extreme keenness to have access to these markets: ‘The Xiongnu need the border markets and they have sought desperately to obtain them from us, even resorting to force’, Jia Yi, Hsinshu 4.41. Cf. Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 119. Although such encouragement of border markets, and of Han people acting as traders, was also in tension with Han Confucianist beliefs in the primacy of agriculture and self-sufficiency over the ‘secondary’ occupations of crafts and commerce. The same minister who encouraged the markets (Jia Yi), also argued that ‘those who eat [without cultivating] are [proportionally] large in number – this is a great outrage upon the empire!’ He goes on to argue that the empire is like a boat, which, if too top heavy with secondary occupations, will capsize: Ban Gu, Hanshu 24A.8b–10a. Cf. Thomas Barfield, ‘Steppe Empires, China and the Silk Route: Nomads as a Force in International Trade and Politics’, in Anatoly Khazanov and André Wink (eds.), Nomads in the Sedentary World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), 234–49.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world

but also to reduce their financial resources.66 The first-century bce text ‘Discourses of Salt and Iron’, in discussing the trade exchange taking place in the border markets, remarks that ‘a piece of Chinese plain silk can be exchanged with the Xiongnu for articles worth several pieces of gold and thereby reduce the resources of our enemy’.67 Over the rest of the second and first centuries bce, the amount of luxury goods exchanged as part of the heqin relationship continued to increase (not to mention the unknown amounts traded and bought-in border markets). In 89 bce, the Han sent to the Xiongnu 10,000 pi of silk cloth (approximately 92,000 m of silk).68 By 51 bce, the Han were sending to the Southern Xiongnu (the Xiongnu by this time had split into two competing groups) 6,000 catties of silk floss and 8,000 bolts of silk fabric, alongside 20 catties of gold, 200,000 bronze coins, 77 sets of clothes, and an ‘enormous quantity of rice’.69 By 1 bce the amount of most items had increased again fivefold.70 The archaeological evidence for silk in Xiongnu communities by the early first century ce is overwhelming: more silk has been found at Xiongnu sites than in any other period in Siberian or Central Asian history.71 In the burials at Noin Ula for instance, dating to c. 13 ce, silk is used to cover every possible surface: under the body, on the body, glued to the exterior of the coffin, and nailed to walls and beams of grave chambers, and it was often torn into strips irrespective of the pattern (Figure 3.4).72 The Chinese willingness to offer ever greater quantities of clothing and materials as part of the ruler gift exchange tells us much more about their own strong attachment to the idea that clothing choice represented a cultural boundary (and thus the potential take-up of clothing to effect cultural change among their enemies) than it does about whether the policy was demonstrably successful. Indeed, as we have seen, Xiongnu aggression only abated, rather than stopped altogether in this period. Moreover, the heqin gift 66

67 69 71 72

For the Xiongnu’s, as well as other nomadic tribes’, desire to use the border markets for trade: Yü, Trade and Expansion in Han China, 92–132. Huan Kuan, Yan Tie Lun 2.14. 68 Ban Gu, Hanshu 94A: 12b. Ibid. 94B: 6b–8a. 70 Cf. Liu, ‘Silk Robes’. Cf. Raschke, ‘New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East’. Sergei Rudenko, Die Kultur der Hsiung-nu und die Hugelgraber von Noin Ulas (Bonn: Habelt, 1969).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

73

74

michael scott

Figure 3.4 Silk usage in the burials at Noin Ula, Mongolia. Fragment of silk. Barrow no. 23, E. corridor, lower beam of external corridor. 150 × 18.5 cm. Inv. no. 35. Image published in Camilla Trever, Excavations in Northern Mongolia (1924–25) (Leningrad: J. Fedorov Printing House, 1932), 38 pl. 19/3.

exchange may, in reality, have actually strengthened the position of the Shanyu ruler of the Xiongnu within his own community. The Shanyu was the primary receiver of the heqin exchange. But they were obligated in turn, by Steppe values and protocols, to redistribute this wealth to valued members of their retinue so that they too could share in the chief’s display of power and prestige.73 The key outcome of this liberal sharing was to ensure the ongoing loyalty of their retinue. The possession of Chinese silk among the nomad community thus helped nomad chieftains – eventually at all levels – maintain and indeed strengthen their alliances and power bases. Yet it is not impossible to see certain moments when the Chinese attempt to achieve cultural change

73

Cf. Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. The worst insult it was said that could be thrown at a Xiongnu leader was that they were stingy!

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world

through fashion exchange does seem to have taken hold, at least when part of formal regalia to be worn at particular times. During the period of the Eastern (Later) Han, we hear of one nomadic group, the Fuyu, whose leader wore white linen at home (as per his tribe’s custom), but put on his fine embroidered silks and woollens when meeting with the Han (to celebrate the formal alliance between them).74

conclusion Across this vast geographical expanse in antiquity from the Mediterranean to China, we have seen changing fashions motivated by a range of factors: the arrival of new raw materials into a particular community; the desire to own objects coming from afar as a symbol of prestige and status; the desire to copy the fashions of foreign elites to symbolize cultural loyalties; the movement of peoples and communities as well as traders across vast distances; the adoption of new military tactics requiring new clothing; the establishment of exchange alliances and the desire to effect deep cultural change in an enemy through the adoption of different fashions. At the same time we have seen how each community was not merely a passive receiver of those fashions, but were themselves also contributors to and shapers of those fashions, making them their own: the Romans who re-wove Chinese silk to make the transparent cloth so popular with Roman women; the individual Palmyrenes who decided whether to copy Parthian or Roman dress or wear Han silk garments (or a mix of all of them); the different Steppe communities who used the same kind of belt plaque design but for different sections of their community; the kings of Chinese warring states who had belt plaques made for and buried with them when they had little use for belt plaques at a time when the clothing etiquette of the Han elite was only slowly being formalized. We have also seen how, in the case of the heqin exchange between the Xiongnu and Han, clothing and fabrics could be sent with at least the strong hope (by the sender) and fear (by the 74

Chen Shou, Sanguo Zhi 30; Liu, ‘Silk Robes’.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

75

76

michael scott

receiver) that their adoption would bring about cultural change in the receiver’s society, even if in reality those clothes and materials were actively adapted more to fit the receiving culture’s own customs than to change them. Perhaps most importantly, this chapter has underlined, through its focus on fashion, the interconnectedness of communities across vast distances in the ancient world. As such, I hope that it serves to strengthen further the drive to study the ancient world as a connected whole rather than as a series of isolated civilizations.

select bibliography Brossder, Ursula, ‘Belts, Daggers and Earrings of Gold: Steppe Luxuries’, in Susan Whitfield (ed.), Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019), 105–11. Falkenhausen, Lothar Von, ‘Inconsequential Incomprehensions: Some Instances of Chinese Writing in Alien Contexts’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 35 (1999), 42–69. Hedeager King, Anna, ‘The Caftan: Fashion across the Silk Road’, in Susan Whitfield (ed.), Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019), 112–17. Hildebrandt, Berit, ‘Silk Production and Trade in the Roman Empire’, in Berit Hildebrandt and Carole Gillis (eds.), Silk: Trade and Exchange Along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxbow, 2017), 34–50. Ko, Dorothy, ‘The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth-Century China’, Journal of Women’s History, 8/4 (1997), 8–27. Linduff, Katheryn, ‘Production of Signature Artifacts for the Nomad Market in the State of Qin during the Late Warring States Period in China (4th–3rd century BCE)’, in Jianjun Mei and Thilo Rehren (eds.), Metallurgy and Civilisation: Eurasia and Beyond (London: Archetype, 2009), 90–6. Liu, Xinru and Linda Shaffer, Connections Across Eurasia: Transportation, Communication, and Cultural Exchange on the Silk Roads (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007). Long, Tracey, ‘The Use of Parthian Costume in Funerary Portraiture in Palmyra’, in Andreas Kropp and Rubina Raja (eds.), The World of Palmyra (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2016), 68–83.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in the ancient world Nickel, Lukas, ‘The Nanyue Silver Box’, Arts of Asia, 42/3 (2012), 98–107. Sarkhosh Curtis, Vesta, ‘The Parthian Haute-Couture at Palmyra’, in Andreas Kropp and Rubina Raja (eds.), The World of Palmyra (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2016), 52–67. Schmidt-Colinet, Andreas, Anne-Marie Stauffer, and Khaled Al-Asad (eds.), Die Textilien aus Palmyra: Neue und Alte Funde (Mainz: Philip von Zabern, 2000). Thomas, Thelma K., ‘Perspectives on the Wide World of Luxury in Later Antiquity: Silk and Other Exotic Textiles Found in Syria and Egypt’, in Berit Hildebrandt and Carole Gillis (eds.), Silk: Trade and Exchange Along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity (Oxford: Oxbow, 2017), 51–81. Wagner, Mayke, Wang Bo, Pavel Tarasov, Sidsel Maria Westh-Hansen, Elisabeth Völling, and Jonas Heller, ‘The Ornamental Trousers from Sampula (Xinjiang, China): Their Origins and Biography’, Antiquity, 83 (2009), 1065–75. Whitfield, Susan, Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). Zuchowska, Marta, ‘“Grape Picking” Silk from Palmyra: A Han Dynasty Chinese Textile with Hellenistic Decoration Motif’, Światowit: Annual of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, 12/53 (2014), 143–62.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.005 Published online by Cambridge University Press

77

4

w

FASHION ON THE SILK ROADS, 500–1300 susan whitfield

4000 embroidered qabā ’s, 4000 ridā ’s of silk lined with sable, mink and other furs, 10000 qamı̄ ses and ghilā las, 10000 khaftā ns, 2000 pair of sirwâl of different kinds, 4000 imā mas, 1000 hoods, 1000 capes of different kinds, 5000 kerchiefs of different kinds, 1000 special suits of armour, 50000 ordinary suits of armour, 10000 helmets, 4000 pair of khuff, most lined with sable, mink, and other furs, 4000 pair of jawrab.1

This inventory of the clothing in the storehouses of Hā ru¯n alRashı̄ d (r. 786–809) gives a snapshot of the richness of elite dress of the time. Al-Rashı̄ d, as caliph of the Abbasid Empire (750–1268) in West and Central Asia, was not exceptional among rulers of the empires of the Silk Roads. Dress went beyond a matter of practicality, it was an expression of the wealth, status, and cosmopolitanism of the ruler and the elites and the aspirations of others. The Silk Roads is a term used to describe interactions across a network of interregional and international trade routes that formed a web of connections covering Afro-Eurasia by land and sea (Map 4.1).2 Usually seen as starting several centuries before 500 ce and continuing to the Mongol Empire (1205–1368) and 1

2

Made after his death.Yedida Kalfon Stillman, Arab Dress: A Short History – From the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times, ed. Norman A. Stillman (Leiden: Brill, revised 2nd edition, 2003), 43. A longer discussion of this term is found in Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Roads (Oakland: University of California Press, revised 2nd edition, 2015), 1–7. The term does not imply continuously used trade routes over this period: contacts between empires and along certain routes waxed and waned depending on politics, economics, and natural events.

78

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Kh o

nP eo

isa

Western Bantu Tribes

Ea

ple s

Khoisan Peoples

Ga ng hra as s

Sin (Ra dh is)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press 21. Regia 22. Gothos 23. Kasmir 24. Monyul 25. Manipur 26. Gaya

anagar a

Vijayapura

Tarum

Afro-Eurasia, c. 500 ce.

11. Rheged 12. Strathclyde 13. Creones 14. Caledoni 15. Gododdin 16. Elmet. 17. The Fens 18. Luitcoyt 19. Durotrigia 20. Atrebatia

oli

Map 4.1

1. Altava & Mauretania 2. Cantabria 3. Vascones 4. Oriel 5. Ulaid 6. Dumnonia 7. Dyfed 8. Credigion 9. Gwynedd 10 Powys

Numbered Countries:

as

Datt

Kh

st Au

n lia ra

Malays

les op Pe

nu

Papuans

Ai

S

Melanesians

amo Saami Arctic Marine Mammal Hunters yed Paleo-Siberian Peoples i ic P om Finno eop Su - Ugria les n people Swedes Yakuts ni Caeren n Taezali s Gra Gutar Vacomagi Angles 13 14 Jutes Gotar Aileach Epidii Bryneich 15 Aesti es Tung les 12 EbraueFrisians Dan eop Connaught Kyrgyz usic 5 Prus ic P Lindsey Peop 9 11 16 Balt 4 Proto-Magyars les Anglia Saxons Germani 8 10 18 17 Thumond Oghuz London 7 Venedi Laigin Shiwei 6 20 ngBavari Lomba GroatsSlovenes ri Nivkhs Gaoche u 19 21 Kent Munster h T Sabirs rd Cerniw Antes Kutrigurs RugiHeruls Franks (Dingling or Tiele) Turks (Tujue) Avars Alamannia Oroks Sklaveni Tata Mohe Tribes Armorica Ogurs Yueban Utigurs Kangly b Burgundy Acatiri i Gepids Huns (Brittany) Yilou Rouran Khaganate Saragurs Ostrogoths Onogurs Sklaveni Alans Goguryeo Fufuluo Abasgi 2 3 Uzes? Wusun Lazica Suevi Iberia Albania Hephthalites Visigoths Emishi Usan (Aran) (White Huns) Tuyuhun (A-zha) Northern Wei g Baekje Vandals SillaIzumo Nobi 1 Tingitania g-Zhun 26 Roman Empire Dynasty Zhan zabiAures Kyushu Kibi Persian Empire (In Huna Em 23 (Byzantine) Tanguts Tamna Mauri (Moors) Yamato d (Kumaso) p o ir s -Hep AustorianiArzugltana Saitobaru (Japan) (Sassanid Dynasty) hthalite nid Tibetans Liao sa Lakhmid es) (Hayato) Laguantan Gaetulians Southern Qi s as Gh Nepal Dynasty 24Kamarupa G Garamantes Ryukyuans hi Burmans fa 25 Phasania r hKindah i Gupta Empire s Tuaregs h Thais Taiwanese y ra lab Saharan Pyu tiaBlemmyesQuHawazin Va an Peoples Pastoral N Vakatakas Yamama Arakan omads ba Cities Om Khmers Azd Nalas Kottura No diBega Az 22 Makuria s Erandapala Mon States leGao Himyar p Chenla Ghana Devarastra Kadambas W eo Alodia Zaghawas P es Pistapura Axum Champa tA de Chadians (Alwa) Pallavas Avumkta Funan tla an Gur (Lâm Ap) nt M Lu ic o T Ethiopian Pe Nil rib Highland s op Sao Langkasuka ot le e Moriyas le ic s Kadaram Kwa op s Peoples Pe Pe Kampe Pan Pan Northwestern op Chu-Po itic les Po-Lo sh Bantu Tribes Cu Malays

n er

es Tr ib u

nt Ka

nt

es

Ba

tat

Ma lag Peo asyan ple s

S lay Ma

st

lab

Ka

ita ns

s lay Ma

Polynesians

80

susan whitfield

sometimes beyond, this was a time when powerful empires with relative parity of power covered much of the Eurasian and North and East African worlds and interacted with each other on several stages. Fashion was one of these. The Silk Road elites had a degree of flexibility, both economically and conventionally. They also had connections with and knowledge of other cultures. Nevertheless, most people remained too poor to have more than basic clothing, often second-hand, which had to last them for a lifetime. Others, such as Christian and Buddhist monks, were bound by regulations controlling their dress.3 But this is not to presume that these groups did not notice changing styles of dress, designs, and materials.4 We see, for example, monks being chastised for wearing silk in Christian Europe and Buddhist Central Asia. The elites, despite their economic flexibility, were restrained by convention and law: sumptuary regulations for dress are found across empires and regimes. Despite this, during this period we see the spread and adoption of certain clothing styles, accoutrements, and motifs within and across cultural boundaries, subverting conventional or legally imposed dress codes. In Matthew P. Canepa’s words, the powers of the time ‘defined themselves in a self-consciously global fashion and strove with one another not only to control trade, but also to gain control of the symbolic as well as economic capital that flowed through them, informing international aristocratic common cultures’.5 3

4

5

Buddhists from the start of this period had monastic rules. Those for Christian monks and nuns only came in later in this period with the establishment of orders, such as Benedictines. For example, Ge Hong’s (283–343) ridicule of the Chinese court: ‘Since the loss of and chaos [in the North], fashions keep changing. [The styles of] caps, shoes, gowns, and garments and the tailoring of sleeves and cuffs vary from day to day, month to month, and do not remain constant . . . Those who are interested in such things imitate [the fashions] from dawn to dusk. Thus there is a saying: “[When] the capital urbanites prize thick eyebrows, all those who live in far corners [paint their eyebrows to cover] half their foreheads.”’ Quoted in Jessey J. C. Choo, ‘Between Imitation and Mockery: The Southern Treatment of Northern Cultures’, in Wendy Swartz, Robert Ford Campany, Yang Lu and Jessey J. C. Choo (eds.), Early Medieval China: A Sourcebook (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 68–9. See also discussion on sleeves below. Matthew P. Canepa, ‘Distant Displays of Power: Understanding Cross-Cultural Interaction Among the Elites of Rome, Sasanian Iran and Sui-Tang China’, Ars Orientalis, 38 (2010), 121.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

The paucity and patchiness of the evidence – both in terms of time and geography – restricts what can be said of fashion and limits the conclusions we can confidently draw. Clothing sometimes survives in burials; but burials are not found or have not survived everywhere owing both to climate and to funerary practices such as exposure or cremation. In certain areas, such as the desert regions of northern Africa and Central Asia, there are some wonderful finds, including from the early period, but there have also been equally spectacular discoveries in, for example, the Caucasus and northwestern Europe and the Steppe. Another major source of textile remains, especially from the eighth and ninth century onwards, are Christian reliquaries in Europe: silk was used to wrap saints’ bones. But these are fragments with little indication of their original form or use, although their designs can be informative. Some ecclesiastical vestments from later in the period have been handed down. Sculpture, carvings, and both wall and manuscript paintings provide rich information but, again, this is patchy and limited by factors such as whether figures are depicted wearing conventional rather than actual costume of the period.6 The textual sources are also very limited and their information often compromised by our lack of understanding of the terminology.7 To avoid confusion, and given the extremely wide remit of this chapter, I avoid using specialist terms either cited in these sources or in use now whose scope is uncertain or unknown.8 Where possible I use generic terms such as 6

7

8

The statement by Cyril Mango, for example,that Byzantine artists in religious painting ‘carefully avoided any intrusion of contemporary costumes’ (Byzantium and Its Image (London: Variorum Reprints, 1984), 51) is, as Timothy Dawson points out, ‘a distinct oversimplification’ but not without some justification. Dawson goes on to suggest that depictions of donors are probably free of such conventions.Timothy Dawson, ‘Propriety, Practicality and Pleasure: The Parameters of Women’s Dress in Byzantium, A.D. 1000– 1200’, in Lynda Garland (ed.), Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800–1200 (London: Routledge, 2017), 41–76. An example of convention is the depiction of women in the Roman chiton on classical scenes depicted in Sasanian, Gandhā ran, and Bactrian art: it is unlikely that this would have borne any relationship to the actual clothing of the region. David Jacoby, ‘Silk Economics and Cross-Cultural Artistic Interaction: Byzantium, the Muslim World, and the Christian West’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 58 (2004), 207. For example, terms used in Byzantine sources such as scaramangon/skaramangion and divitision which cannot be firmly identified.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

81

82

susan whitfield

draped clothing, jackets, tunics, and trousers, with qualifiers for precision (i.e. by indicating the length, width of sleeves, any tailoring, etc).9 This chapter covers the Steppe, Mediterranean, West, Central, and East Asian worlds from about 500 to 1300 ce and, by necessity, gives a very broad brush stroke coverage of these regions. North and Western Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and East and North Africa are mentioned only in passing owing to lack of space and, in many cases, evidence. They were all part of this connected network of the Silk Roads and undoubtedly were influenced by it. I approach fashion through several topics, including the spread of silk, means of transmission, various forms of clothing styles such as trousers and jackets, and decorative motifs and accoutrements. For each I consider how styles of clothing and personal adornment were influenced by innovations in distant lands and different cultures: the spread of fashions.

silk and its spread across eurasia The first and most obvious topic to cover here is the spread of the desire for cultivated silk, the product of the Bombyx mori caterpillar – the silkworm – domesticated in China millennia before. By the start of the first millennium ce, the cultures in China had perfected the technologies of sericulture, moriculture, production and dyeing of yarn, and weaving. Distinguished from other available textiles by its fineness, strength, and lustre, as well as its ability to take dyes, silk became desirable in all the cultures it reached driving its spread across Eurasia.10 As well as importing silkworm cocoons, yarn, and woven textiles, cultures across the Silk Roads also mastered the complex technologies and were able to establish their own 9

10

Trousers vs. leggings; tailored loose leg coverings fastened at the waist with a cord or belt vs. material wrapped around the legs. Wild silk, i.e. taken from cocoons from other species gathered after the moth had hatched, is found in several cultures, including in India and the Greek and Roman empires. For the latter, see Rebecca Woodward Wendelken, ‘Wefts and Worms: The Spread of Sericulture and Silk Weaving in the West before 1300’, in Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (eds.), Medieval Clothing and Textiles 10 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014), 63–4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

Figure 4.1 Fragment of silk from an ecclesiastical tunic made in southern Spain and worn on the feast day of Saint Valerius. The Arabic inscription in naskhi reads: ‘Good luck and glory and exaltedness and magnificence’. Silk, gilt animal substrate around a silk core; tapestry weave. 8 × 21 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1946. Accession Number: 46.156.10.

production centres during this period exporting silk to other places. Sericulture probably reached Central Asia from the second or third centuries, Persia soon after and into West Asia by the fourth or fifth centuries. It reached Spain by the early eighth century with the Umayyad conquest (711–1031 ce). It continued to be a major industry under the Abbasid Empire, with North Africa becoming an important centre, and spread from there to elsewhere in Southern Europe (Figure 4.1).11 The original spread of sericulture out of China is told in an appealing but misleading story of the ‘silk princess’. This, as heard and then recounted by the Chinese pilgrim monk Xuanzang (fl. 602– 44), tells of a Chinese imperial princess promised as a bride to the ruler of Khotan, a Central Asian kingdom.12 The ruler’s envoys, sent to accompany her, told her that there was no silk in Khotan and she 11

12

More precise dates remain elusive. For a recent summary, see Wendelken, ‘Wefts and Worms’. See also Anna Muthesius, Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving (London: Pindar Press, 1995), 20, 176, and Susan Whitfield, Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 191–8. M. Aurel Stein, Ancient Khotan: Detailed Report of Archaeological Explorations in Chinese Turkestan, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

83

84

susan whitfield

would have to wear wool. Horrified by the prospect, she selected maidservants skilled in sericulture and weaving and hid silkworm cocoons in her elaborate headdresses to avoid detection at the border: the salient point being that it was forbidden to take the knowledge of silk technology out of China. In fact, there is no evidence of such restrictions and, indeed, we can find examples in historical sources of Chinese sending experts to neighbouring cultures to teach them about silk.13 But the story is indicative of an important conduit for the movement of fashions: that of diplomatic missions and marriages, discussed further below. It also shows the importance of skilled workers, travelling by choice or otherwise, as part of diplomatic missions, slaves, or relocated in conquests. To give three examples among many: when the Sasanians captured Antioch in 260, silk weavers were relocated to Gundeshapur and Nishapur.14 Almost a thousand years later, Greek and Jewish silk workers from Thebes, probably then the major centre of Byzantine silk production, were sent to Palermo, previously a centre of Islamic silk production. And during the Mongol expansion, many weavers producing silks woven with gold were relocated, including one thousand households moved in 1222 from Herat to Beshbaliq.15 During this period silk became the preferred material for much elite clothing across Afro-Eurasia. But silk also was desired and worn more widely. This is reflected in sumptuary laws which sought to restrict usage, both for economic reasons but also to maintain differentiation between groups in society.16 For example,

13

14

15

16

1907), i, 230. As noted by Wendelken, similar stories exist elsewhere, ‘Wefts and Worms’, 65, n.28. M. G. Raschke, ‘New Studies in Roman Commerce with the East’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der Romischen Welt, pt. 2, Principat, 92 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1976), 622–3. Although considered suspect by some scholars, the inscription of Shapur I (r. 241–72) at Naqsh-e Rostam records ‘Roman’ prisoners including many technicians settled in the new cities of Gundeshapur and Nishapur (J. Housego, ‘Carpets’, in Ronald W. Ferrier (ed.), The Arts of Persia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 152, n.9. James C. Y. Watt, The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), 248. Watt further notes that some were allowed to return to Herat in 1236–9 to revitalize its textile industry. The effect of silk consumption on the Roman economy is often discussed (see Scott’s chapter in this volume) but it was also an issue in China,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

in China where, in BuYun Chen’s words, ‘the Tang court [618–907 ce] established a hierarchy of fabrics which mapped onto social and political hierarchies . . . To challenge the hierarchy of silk was to attack both the legitimacy of the Tang ruling house and its claim as fashion’s elite.’17 Or in Byzantine Rome where certain fabrics and colours were restricted to Romans.18 Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that such hierarchies were challenged. The clergy were not immune to silk’s seductive qualities, despite some expectations that they should dress modestly. Buddhist monastic rules originally stipulated that monks show frugality with outer robes made of rags.19 But silk given by donors was later allowed in dress and by the seventh century, Indian monks were also wearing silk.20 Secular laws also sought to regulate its use. A law passed in

17 18

19

20

especially when they were paying the Uyghur Empire for horses with silk as war reparations, as Chen notes. BuYun Chen Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), 67. Chen, Empire of Style, 48. A tenth-century embassy to Constantinople was stopped at the city gates and its belongings searched. Those garments reserved for Romans were confiscated. Jill Condra (ed.), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Clothing Through World History, Volume I: Prehistory to 1500 CE (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 2008), 119. The earliest rules were formulated in India where cultivated silk was not readily available but they later adapted to allow monks to use donated cloth, including silk, in their robes. An Indian god became adopted as a god of sericulture: Stuart H. Young, ‘For a Compassionate Killing: Chinese Buddhism, Sericulture, and the Silkworm God Asvaghosa [Dia]’, Journal of Chinese Religions, 41/1 (2013), 25–48; John Kieschnick, The Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 32; John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 98–9. Reported by Yijing (635–713), a Chinese monk who travelled to India. It is not clear if this was cultivated or spun silk. As Kieschnick notes, Yijing complained about self-righteous Chinese monks who refused to wear it on account of the silkworms’ death, countering this with the argument that earthworms die in the making of other cloth (The Eminent Monk, 32). In some Buddhist regions, the moths were allowed to hatch and discontinuous silk was produced from the distorted cocoon (Sophie Desrosiers and Corinne Debaine-Francfort, ‘On Textiles Fragments Found at Karadong, a 3rd to Early 4th Century Oasis in the Taklamakan Desert (Xinjiang, China)’, Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, 958 (2016), 72–3). This was spun like cotton or wool.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

85

86

susan whitfield

China in 637 forbade its wear by Buddhists and Daoists.21 The need for such laws and evidence from other sources, such as monastic accounts, shows that silk was far from rare as clerical wear. Christian clerics were also criticized for their extravagance – their vestments were often fashioned of silk and jewels (see Figure 4.1).22 A Byzantine story tells how a mother rejected several Christian nunneries for her daughter because their clothes were not fine enough.23 In Judaism a biblical prohibition against wearing sha’atnez, cloth combining fibres from vegetable and animal origin, was followed. Originally referring to cloth of wool and linen, it was sometimes later applied to silk with cotton or linen.24 In Islam there were prohibitions against men wearing silk.25 Nevertheless, there is ample evidence of the elites of both these faiths wearing silk.26

21

22

23

24

25

26

Livia Kohn, Monastic Life in Medieval Daoism: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 68. There was a Japanese counterpart. Both also forbade clothes of ‘aristocratic colours’, discussed further below. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) considered it inappropriate. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 410. Charlemagne (742–814) warned the Archbishop of Canterbury that none of his entourage should wear silk. Anna Muthesius, ‘Eastern Silks in Western Shrines and Treasuries Before 1200’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., Courtauld Institute, University of London, 1980), n.21. Elizabeth Coatsworth and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 306–7, 386–8; see also 120–38 for pre-1300 silk chasubles. Jennifer Ball, ‘Byzantine Clothing’, in Condra (ed.), The Greenwood Encyclopedia, 120. David Jacoby, ‘The Jews in the Byzantine Economy (Seventh to MidFifteenth Century)’, in Reuven Bonfil, Oded Ir-Shai, Guy Stroumsa, and Rina Talgam (eds.), Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 236. Stillman, Arab Dress, 22–3, although silk clothes were promised to those in Paradise. It has been argued that this shows the influence of Zoroastrian strictures that silkworms are creatures of Ahram, the spirit of darkness and evil; Alezzandro Bausani, Persia religiosa (1959) quoted in Ehsan Yarshater, ‘The Persian Presence in the Islamic World’, in Richard G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh (eds.), The Persian Presence in the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39. Stillman, Arab Dress, 31–4. Manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, for example, suggest that in certain periods Jewish and Muslim women dressed similarly in fine silks.Yedida Kalfon Stillman, ‘The Importance of the Cairo Geniza Manuscripts for the History of Medieval Female Attire’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 7 (1976), 579–82. Stillman

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

Colour was used, along with the quality of textile, to differentiate groups within societies.27 An oft-cited example is that of the restrictions in early Byzantium (395–1453) against commoners wearing silk dyed with ‘Tyrian purple’ – extracted from the murex snail – or that woven with gold thread.28 Both were reserved for the elite and purple robes were especially associated with the emperor. The rulers of Sasania (224–651 ce) also wore Tyrianpurple dyed clothes although red was traditionally the imperial colour.29 In China from the Han (206 bce–221 ce), the imperial colour was yellow, with every rank also assigned a colour. In the Tang, purple, produced by vegetable dyes, joined this list.30 It was

27

28

29

30

also discusses the spread of fashion within the Islamic world, from West Asia to North Africa and Spain. ‘More and more, hierarchy – civil, military and ecclesiastical – came to be expressed in a hierarchy of dress employing luxury fabrics.’ Stewart Gordon, ‘A World of Investiture’, in Stewart Gordon (ed.), Robes and Honour: The Medieval World of Investiture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 10–11. Analysis of manuscripts long assumed to have been dyed with the rare Tyrian purple often show the presence of orchil lichen. For one example, see Elijian Hixson, Scribal Habits in Sixth-Century Greek Purple Codices (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 28–9. Madder-indigo combinations are also found used on Coptic textiles. Gerald W. R. Ward (ed.), The Grove Encyclopedia of Materials and Techniques in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 176. See also Dominique Cardon, Natural Dyes, Sources, Traditions, Technology and Science (London: Archetype Publications, 2007), 495. The fashion for silks woven with gold and silver thread is discussed further below. Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 41 for purple. For red, see C. Manson Bier, ‘Textiles’, in P. Oliver Harper (ed.), The Royal Hunter: Art of the Sasanian Empire (New York: Asia House, 1978), 123. Previously these had been blue, red, yellow, white, and black, corresponding to the five elements of the universe, yellow reserved for the emperor from the Han. For Tang official clothing, see Tung-tsu Ch’ü, Law and Society in Traditional China (Paris: Mouton & Co, 1961), 137. Edward Schafer suggests that murex purple might have been taken to China in the Sui (589–618) from Persia, named ‘snail kohl’ and used as an eyebrow pencil (The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of Tang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 211). The appearance of purple for elite clothing in China might also have been the result of influence from Sasania although a purple pigment had been developed in the Han period and used to colour clothing of figures on wall paintings and statues, such as the terracotta warriors. Elizabeth West Fitzhugh and L. A. Zycherman, ‘A Purple Barium Copper Silicate Pigment from Early China’, Studies in Conservation, 37/3 (1992), 145–54.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

87

88

susan whitfield

also bestowed on eminent monks.31 The Umayyad caliph Walid II (r. 709–744 ce) was noted for his fine clothes, including saffron yellow silk, possibly an influence from India where the ruling family wore yellow.32 The Abbasid caliphs favoured red, the Persian colour, avoiding yellow.33 Thus we see clothing styles, colours, and decorations spreading between courts from Chang’an to Constantinople.34 How were they transmitted?

diplomats, princesses, and slaves In numerous ways the powerful empires of the Silk Roads, whether unwittingly or deliberately, emulated or appropriated what they saw as the best of the other: in Canepa’s words, the end result was at various times ‘the fusion of the two realms’ ritual-visual practices to form an extra-cultural and extra-religious language of

31

32

33

34

Its use started in 690 with a decree by Empress Wu Zetian (Kieschnick, The Eminent Monk, 31). Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, The History of al Tabari, Vol. 26: The Waning of the Umayyad Caliphate, trans. Carole Hillebrand (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 27, n.106. Stillman, Arab Dress, 34. See R. Hillenbrand, ‘La Dolce Vita in Early Islamic Syria: The Evidence of Later Ummayad Palaces’, Art History, 5/1 (1982), 12, 27. In Rose’s words ‘Sasanian royal iconography continued for many decades after the end of the dynasty, influencing courtly fashion in Islamic Iran as well as in Byzantium and central Asia.’ Jenny Rose, ‘Sasanian Splendour: The Appurtenances of Royalty’, in Gordon (ed.), Robes and Honor, 47–8. For the stricture against yellow, see the chapters by Adı̄ b Abu al-Tayyib Muhammad al-Washashā (d. 936) on tasteful clothing in his book On Elegance and Elegant People, https://richardcullinan.wordpress.com/2016/12/17/an-overview-of-mensabbasid-9th-10th-century-persian-clothing/ (accessed 25 April 2023). The practice of Byzantine rulers wearing silk decorated with designs of animals resembling dragons, as seen in the report of the clothing of Emperor Theodosius (r. 379–95), might also have been the result of influence from China where the dragon had long been associated with the emperor. On the origins and spread of the dragon motif, see Sara Kuehn, The Dragon in East Christian and Islamic Art (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Although, as Jennifer Ball has discussed in relation to the Byzantine Empire, sometimes the provinces or neighbouring kingdoms were the original influence: ‘the Georgian and Armenian of courts were arbiters of style; the Norman stimulated new fashions on the western border of the empire’. Jennifer Ball, Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighthto Twelfth-Century Painting (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 58.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

debate and legitimacy’.35 Close links also existed between the empires of the Steppe and those to their south, between what David Christian calls Inner and Outer Eurasia, and these were often maintained through diplomatic marriages.36 The legend of the silk princess reflects this tradition and ties it to the transmission of textile technology and fashion. We have many examples attested in historical record of such marriages and at least one in which a Steppe princess is said to have brought a new fashion. In 732, the Byzantine emperor sent an embassy to the Khazar court (c. 650–969) to propose a marriage between his son and Tzitzak, the kaghan’s daughter. The Book of Ceremonies, commissioned by Constantine VII (r. 913–59), noted that the Byzantine dress called tzizakion ‘is a Khazar costume that appeared in this God-protected imperial city since the empress of Khazaria’. It is hypothesized that the gown was named after her – hence the suggestion that her Khazar name was Tzitzak. The story highlights the role that diplomatic missions played in transmission of fashion. During the seventh and eighth centuries several Chinese princesses were sent to marry kaghans of the Tibetan (618–842) and Uyghur empires (744–840). A diplomatic marriage involved not only the relocation of a prince or princess, but also their considerable entourage. The story of the silk princess tells how she selected maidservants skilled at weaving, and there is no reason to doubt that this reflected reality: it is recorded that Princess Wencheng (628–680) took looms, weavers, and finished silks to the Tibetan court. A similar situation is described in medieval French romances.37 In 1231 a Mongol princess left the Steppe to marry a prince in Goryeo (918–1392) on the Korean peninsula. While close links with the Steppe were reflected in the dress of cultures of this region for

35 36

37

Canepa, ‘Distant Displays’, 144. David Christian, ‘Inner Eurasia as a Unit of World History’, Journal of World History, 5/2 (1994), 173–211. E. Jane Burns, Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 37–41.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

89

90

susan whitfield

Figure 4.2 The Byzantine Empress Irene (1088–1134), originally from Hungary, wearing a gown with wide sleeves and with braided hair, both newly introduced fashion (see also note 38). Photo by DeAgostini / Getty Images.

over a thousand years, with short jackets worn over trousers for men and a long skirt for women, the Later Silla kingdom (668–935) had adopted elements of traditional Chinese dress, including the wide-sleeved robe (Figure 4.2).38 The princess’s arrival saw a return

38

Dresses with wide sleeves became fashionable in Constantinople, seen in the portrait of Empress Irene (1088–1134), a princess from Hungary, in the Hagia Sophia (see Figure 4.2). Bell argues that this was an import from the Normans, transmitted through Kastoria on their border as this was ‘closer to outside influences of transplanted Armenian, Georgian, Norman and Bulgarian populations’ and was ‘a breeding ground for the crosspollination of styles’. Ball, Byzantine Dress, 74. Irene is also noted for a new hairstyle – long braids.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

to aspects of Steppe style, narrow sleeves again becoming fashionable.39 Other travellers, including exiles and slaves, could also be influential as exemplified by Ziryab (b. 789) who, in the words of one scholar, ‘almost singlehanded transformed the Umayyad court’ in Spain.40 Ziryab was from a slave family who rose in the Abbasid court in Baghdad, becoming highly educated and a skilled musician. He fell out of favour and found sanctuary at the court in Cordoba. Here he established a conservatory, introducing the oud – a form of lute – to Spain and also became an arbiter of fashionable life, introducing styles and customs for dining, hygiene, dress, and hairstyles from Baghdad. For example, men cut their hair short, trimmed their beards, and tinted them with henna.41 Another of his innovations was the introduction of spring and autumn fashions: bright coloured silk gowns (jubba) made with silk and cotton (mulham) for the spring and ‘Merv quilted and light coloured cloaks for the autumn’.42 The Umayyads in Spain had sericulture and weaving centres but these were expanded, with a tiraz workshop established to produce textiles woven with the caliph’s name as gifts.43 39

40

41

42

43

Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun, Fashion History: A Global View (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 135–6. Renata Holod, ‘Luxury Arts of the Caliphal Period’, in Jerrilynn Dodds (ed.), Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 42. His real name was Abul-Hasan Ali Ibn Nafi. The spread of henna is a story in itself, but space allows no more than a footnote here. From the Lawsonis alba and L. inermis, it was used in ancient Egypt but spread more widely in this period, and especially during the expansion of the caliphates. While there is clear evidence of its use, for example, as hair dye in the Roman world, generally the evidence suggests widespread distribution as a body paint with the spread of Muslim culture and populations, and then transfer to other, local cultures. Holod, ‘Luxury Arts’, 42. On mulham, see also R.B. Serjeant, ‘Material for a History of Islamic Textiles up to the Mongol Conquest’, Ars Islamica, 15/ 16 (1951), 29–85. Carl Johan Lamm discusses the introduction of cotton to Europe. Carl Johan Lamm, ‘Some Mamluk Embroideries’, Ars Islamica, 4 (1937), 64–77. The tiraz system was established by the Umayyads, borrowed, it is argued, from the Byzantines or Sasanians. Stillman, Arab Dress, 122–3. The fashion for silk bands and clothes woven or embroidered with gold is discussed below.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

91

92

susan whitfield

trousers At the start of our period, cultures were split between those whose male elite wore trousers and those who went largely bare legged beneath cloaks, tunics, or robes.44 The latter included warmer regions such as Arabia, India, China, and the Greek/Roman fringes of the Mediterranean, but also extended into the north of the Roman Empire: woollen cloaks, long jackets, furs, and sometimes leggings provided warmth – it was not simply a matter of climate. The peoples of the Iranian plateau also wore trousers and while on his campaigns here Alexander (r. 336–323 bce) adopted a mixed Macedonian-Persian dress but eschewed trousers as being one of the ‘outlandish and theatrical varieties of barbarian attire’.45 The Steppe Scythians are depicted with belted jackets and baggy trousers tucked into boots.46 Trousers were made of leather or fur as well as cloth and some included feet, obviating the need for boots. For court wear, textile trousers were probably more common. The habitual male dress of trousers and a short, belted tunic and/or jacket across Central and West Asia continued into this period. Sometimes a longer jacket was worn over the tunic, or draped over the shoulders – a style discussed further below.47 To the east, in early China, elite dress was a long robe, worn without trousers by both men and women.48 So we see trousers as elite dress throughout Inner Eurasia and in the middle of Outer Eurasia but not at either end. This changes over this period, partly due to Steppe influence.

44 45

46

47

48

As noted above (n. 9), I make a distinction between trousers and leggings. Eratosthenes quoted in E. A. Fredricksmeyer, ‘Alexander the Great and the Macedonian Kausia’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 116 (1986), 215–27. This style of coat is often referred to as a kaftan/caftan. See discussion below. See also Adrienne Mayor, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Steppe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014) who notes Greek traditions that attributed trousers to warrior Steppe women. T. Kawami suggests that some jackets/coats were only wearable in this way because of the narrow sleeves. T. Kawami, ‘Archaeological Evidence for Textiles in Pre-Islamic Iran’, Iranian Studies, 23 (1989), 16, n.50. Although trousers were worn by their military, farmers, and others for practical purposes.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

The elite of the Northern Wei (386–535 ce), a kingdom in northern China, were from the Steppe. Their traditional court dress was a jacket with a round or V-neck worn over trousers for men and a long high-waisted skirt for women.49 In the 490s their rulers moved their capital from the Steppe borders to the Yellow River valley, and instituted reforms making Chinese-style dress – ‘voluminous robes and wide sashes’ – required court attire. But Steppe dress persisted. The male attire, with trousers, even became part of female fashion, notably in Tang China. Court women are depicted wearing the long skirt of the Northern Wei over a wide-sleeved robe of the Han, or in a belted, slit-sided knee-length tunic over baggy trousers, sometimes with boots and sometimes with the upturnedtoe embroidered shoes popular at this time (Figure 4.3).50 Steppe clothing was also adopted by the elite of the kingdoms of the Korean peninsula.51 But this was not the case in Nara Japan (710–794) where the traditional Chinese style of the long robe persisted, although worn over a long high-waisted skirt for women, copying the Chinese Tang style.52 In West Asia, the Byzantine court continued the Greek and Roman styles of mainly draped clothing but with various other garments joining the elite wardrobe. Trousers were among these as revealed by edicts issued by Emperor Honorius (r. 395–423) forbidding ‘barbarian’ or ‘Hun’ dress. These stipulated that, within Rome or Constantinople, ‘no person shall be allowed to appropriate to himself the use of boots and trousers. But if any man should attempt to contravene this sanction . . . the offender shall be stripped of all his resources and delivered 49

50

51

52

Kate A. Lingley, ‘Naturalizing the Exotic: On the Changing Meanings of Ethnic Dress in Medieval China’, Ars Orientalis, 38 (2020), 58. Lingley traces this form of dress from being seen as ‘foreign’ to Chinese men seeing this as ordinary dress which had lost most of its ethnic significance, while women wore traditional Chinese skirt and robe. She further argues that, by the time we see women in this dress it signifies ‘maleness’ rather than ‘foreignness’. Lingley, ‘Naturalizing the Exotic’. Kyung Ja Lee, ‘Overview of Korea: Traditional’, in Joanne B. Eicher (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 6: East Asia (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). Rebecca A. T. Stevens and Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada (eds.), The Kimono Inspiration: Art and Art-to-Wear in American (Washington, DC and San Francisco: The Textile Museum and Pomegranate, 1996), 132–6.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

93

94

susan whitfield

Figure 4.3 Women of the Tang court. Two wear high-waisted long gowns, and the other the fashionable ‘Steppe clothing’ of a tunic with side slits over baggy trousers – although with shoes with upturned toes rather than leather riding boots. The Qianling Mausoleum, Tang dynasty (618–907) tomb site located in Qian County. CPA Media Pte Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo 2B012HG.

into perpetual exile’.53 As with most sumptuary laws, this was about maintaining hierarchy and distinction. A century later a team of charioteers were described: ‘Their cloaks, trousers, and boots were . . . called the Hun style, which they imitated.’54 The prejudice continued. Centuries later, David Komnenus, 53

54

Condra, The Greenwood Encyclopedia, 129. Collected in the Theodosian Code. It also forbade the wearing of pelts, fur also being seen as barbarian (although highly valued in other Silk Road cultures). Procopius of Caesarea, ch. 7, quoted in Welters and Lillethun, Fashion History, 105.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

governor of Thessalonica, was chastised by Archbishop Eustathius (c. 1115–c. 1195/6) for his ‘braccae (trousers), newfangled shoes, and a red Georgian hat . . . ’.55 Trousers were part of the wardrobe of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs and their courtiers: al-Walid (r. 705–715), noted for his sartorial choices, was wearing a tunic woven with gold and wide trousers of damask silk on the day of his death and 2,000 pairs were included in Hā ru¯n al-Rashı̄ d’s wardrobe, cited at the start of this chapter.56

jackets, coats, and robes: sleeves, collars, lapels, and tailoring The discussion of the spread of trousers links to that of draped and tailored clothing: the Indian sari or Roman toga contrasted with the Parthian tunic or Chinese robe. During this period we see a move to more tailored and fitted clothing across the region.57 Trousers are one example, but in Gupta India (400–750) whereas the draped dhoti continued, a more tailored tunic also came into fashion for men, possibly also influenced by contacts with the Steppe, while some women started wearing skirts and blouses. The salwar kameez, a tunic worn over baggy trousers, was introduced later with Islamic rule (Figures 4.4 and 4.5).58 55

56

57

58

Ball, Byzantine Dress, 58. The mention of a Georgian hat shows that, as Ball also notes here and as already noted above (n. 34) fashion was not always driven from the centre nor from the major empires, with the fashions of the Georgians, Armenians, and Normans all influencing Byzantine court fashion. Hillebrand, La Dolce Vita, 12. The mention of ‘wide trousers’ links to Neil Price’s discussion of ‘a distinctly eastern fashion in trousers’ which was popular in Scandinavia which used ‘extravagant amounts of cloth’. Neil Price, The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (London: Allen Lane, 2020), 134. This is a broad generalization, as Golombek notes ‘The preference for draped garments seems to have spread to more eastern areas during the Islamic period . . . during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, fitted garments had a renewed popularity.’ Lisa Golombek, ‘The Draped Universe of Islam’, in Priscilla P. Soucek (ed.), Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 27. O. P. Joshi argues that these are seen in parts of India as early as the eleventh century bce (‘Continuity and Change in Hindu Women’s Dress’, in R. Barnes

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

95

96

susan whitfield

Figure 4.4 Kaftan open at neck to form lapels. The pearl roundel design can also be seen (see below). Penjikent, Sogdiana (Tajikistan), early eighth century. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo by PHAS / Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

An often discussed Silk Road fashion is that of the tailored jacket with long sleeves and a flared skirt, often called a kaftan. Kaftan is a term widely found referring to jackets in general but here I use the definition as given by Betty Hensellek – ‘a fitted bodice, attached skirting, sleeves & hallmark overlapping front panels that can form lapels’.59 As she points out, this was distinct from the traditional

59

and J. Eicher (eds.), Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 219). See also J. Dhamija, ‘India’, in J. Dhamija (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 4: South Asia and Southeast Asia (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 61–71. Betty Hensellek, ‘Sogdian Fashion’, in The Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Roads (Washington, DC: Freer/Sackler) https://sogdians.si.edu/sidebars/ sogdian-fashion/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Timothy Dawson notes that the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

Figure 4.5 Linen kaftan, seventh–ninth century, originally with fur lining. The decoration on the silk includes pearl roundels. Alanic culture, found in the Caucasus. Silk, linen, fur. 191.8 × 144.8 × 111.8 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1996. Accession Number: 1996.78.1.

riding jacket of the Steppe which has a V-neck, while the kaftan is a more tailored version with an overlapping neckline.60 Hensellek

60

term has been much abused ‘with no precise meaning whatsoever’. Timothy Dawson, ‘Oriental Costumes at the Byzantine Court: A Reassessment’, Byzantion, 76 (2006), 103. So, the V-necked jacket found in Viking clothing from the fifth century, depicted on gold foil figures alongside the more traditional tunic, is often referred to as a ‘kaftan’. Ulla Mannering, ‘The Kaftan: An Unusual Textile Encounter in the Scandinavian Late Iron Age’, in Marie-Louise Nosch,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

97

98

susan whitfield

argues that this form became distinctive from the fifth century as ‘a classic Sogdian fashion staple’.61 It then spread across Eurasia, providing the elite ‘of diverse Eurasian communities with a sartorial language that could articulate mutable social distinctions across cultures and for various social occasions. This unprecedented sartorial system allowed locals and foreigners alike to navigate the globalized and polycentric political landscape of Central Eurasia.’62 The richness and spread of this fashion is shown by sixteen complete kaftans excavated from a burial site in the northwest Caucasus, dated between 600 and 800, and made from Sogdian, Chinese, and Byzantine silk and other fabrics.63 Kaftans of sheep’s wool, cashmere, and silk have also been found at Antinoe (Antinopolis) in North Africa.64 Dating to the fifth to seventh centuries, they were decorated with tablet woven borders and silk appliqués. In Cäcilia Fluck’s words, new fabrics and garments were adopted here ‘alongside local traditions, still heir to the Roman styles’.65 Sleeves were another fashion trend – short, long, narrow, wide – all are seen at various times and places. An ermine fur

61

62

63

64

65

Zhao Feng, and Lotika Varadarajan (eds.), Global Textile Encounters (London: Oxbow, 2014), 33–6. We see both the V-necked and round overlapped necked jacket alongside each other. See also Price, The Children of Ash and Elm, 135. Also worn by Sogdian women. Dawson argues that it is also in the fifth century that the tunic becomes more tailored in West Asia and North Africa, exemplified by an example at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (90.5.901: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/444374) which he dates to the fifth century. Timothy Dawson, ‘Concerning an Unrecognised Tunic from Eastern Anatolia’, Byzantion, 73/1 (2003), 203. Betty Hensellek, ‘Fashioning Central Asia’, https://hensellekresearch.com/ portfolio/fashioning-central-eurasia/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Anna Ierusalimskaja, Die Gräberder Mošč evaja Balka: Frühmittelalterliche Fundean der Nordkaukasischen Seidenstrasse (Munich: Editio Maris, 1996). One, probably for a chief, has a green silk with pearl roundel design – discussed below – and is lined with squirrel fur. Anna Hedeagar Krag, ‘A Silk Caftan’, in Susan Whitfield (ed.), Silk Roads: Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019), 114. Florence Calament and Maximilien Durand, Antinoé à la vie, à la mode (Paris: Fage éditions, 2013), cats. 20, 29, 46; H. C. Evans and B. Ratliff (eds.), Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, 7th–9th Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), cat. 114. Cäcilia Fluck, ‘Dress Styles from Syria to Libya’, in Evans and Ratliff (eds.), Byzantium and Islam, 160–1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

coat lined with sable fur from a fourth-century bce Steppe burial is striking for its overlong (100 cm) and very narrow sleeves.66 As Santoro points out, there is a continuous history since this of extra-long sleeved clothing in Central Asia which almost certainly had the practical purpose of keeping the hands warm.67 But this feature became adopted by neighbouring cultures, where it was not necessary, as a fashion. It is seen in Parthian, Sasanian, and then Islamic Iran and North Africa, Han to Tang China, Turkic Central Asia, the Caucasus, and, argues Dawson, in Byzantine West Asia.68 The sleeves are sometimes wider than in this early example.69 Another style with early origins but which later trends across Eurasia is wearing coats over the shoulders with the sleeves hanging down unused. Shown in Persepolis worn by Medes and Persians with the sleeves seemingly closed off and with an excavated example from the Steppe site of Pazyryk, also with closed sleeves, this style was later adopted by the elite of the Northern Wei and by Byzantine rulers.70 In tenth-century China a garment designed for 66

67

68

69

70

Variously given as 11 cm or 14.5 cm at the wrist. Alexis Zakharov, ‘Antiquities of Katanda (Altai)’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, 55 (1925), 44–5 and Plate X, fig. 2. See A. Santoro, ‘Hands in Sleeves: A Note on Iranian-Central Asiatic Costume in Gandhara’, East and West, 55 (2005), 279–97 where he argues against the ritual interpretation proposed in R. Ghirshman, ‘Études iraniennes II: Un ossuaire en pierre sculptée’, Artibus Asiae, 11/3 (1948), 292–310. Dawson argues that the later named ‘skaramagion’ refers to such an overlong-sleeved tunic or coat which has been adopted from the Sasanians (‘Oriental Costumes’). Odo of Deiul (d. 1162) commented on Byzantine imperial messengers: ‘the wealthy are clad in silky garments that are short, tight-sleeved, and sewn up on all sides’. Elina Gertsman and Barbara H. Rosenwein, The Middle Ages in 50 Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 113. Very wide sleeves are found in several cultures, including Han-period China. They showed that the wearer could afford the extra cloth. This style was copied in the provinces, as shown by a first-century bce memorial arguing against this (‘those in the capital favoured wide sleeves; those of the four corners used up much cloth [in copying the style]’). Quoted in Choo, ‘Between Imitation and Mockery’, 74, n.28. For the Pazyryk example, see Sergei I. Rudenko, Frozen Tombs of Siberia: The Pazyrk Burials of Iron Age Horsemen, trans. M. W. Thompson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970). Ghirshman, ‘Un ossuaire’, suggests that the elite were required to wear these coats in the presence of

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

99

100

susan whitfield

Buddhist monks living in colder climates, known as the ‘belly wrap’, had become an item of fashion, recorded by the monk Zanning (919–1001): ‘After the garment came east, monks began to make it of colored silk and to drape it over both left and right shoulders with the sleeves left hanging . . . It had nothing to do with keeping out the cold and has become a sign of arrogance.’71

decorative motifs During this period decorative motifs on clothing were adopted, adapted, and passed on: to become ‘part of a common imagery patronized by different kingdoms and employed in different religious contexts’.72 This is a complex story and we can only here consider a couple of the most popular designs. At the start of our period the family of designs framed by diapers, lozenge, and diamonds are found on textiles throughout the region. For example, we see them on the embroidered wool design on the silk trousers of Yingpan man in the eastern Central Asian kingdom of Kroraina, dating to the second to fourth centuries and on a series of textiles discovered in North Africa, dated to the sixth to ninth centuries.73 They persist as popular patterns, adopted in the Byzantine and Abbasid empires. It is possible that this pattern developed independently in different cultures but was also transmitted between cultures, where new interpretations became fashionable, especially in respect of the designs framed by the lattice. One of the textiles found in North

71 72

73

the king, but see argument against this by Santoro, ‘Hands in Sleeves’. See also Elfriede R. Knauer, ‘Towards a History of the Sleeved Coat: A Study of the Impact of an Ancient Eastern Garment on the West’, Penn Museum Bulletin, 21/1 (1978), 18–36. Quoted in Kieschnick, The Eminent Monk, 30–1. Mariachiara Gasparini, Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interpretations through Central Asian Textile Images (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019), 2. See also Canepa, ‘Distant Displays’, 137: ‘one of the most important vocations of ornament within the context of elite tastes and display was its power to communicate political messages and define identities’. Thelma K. Thomas, ‘Silks’, in Evans and Ratliff (eds.), Byzantium and Islam, for a discussion and examples.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

Africa has a design of a circles containing a pair of facing birds either side of a tree.74 We also see facing animals within the diamond/lozenges in early Chinese textiles.75 In the first few centuries of the period under discussion, animals within a circular framing decorated with pearls or vegetation became a popular woven textile design. This is variously called the Sasanian or Sogdian roundel and it provides an excellent example of the complexities and perils of trying to trace the origins and transmissions of designs in this period with the patchy and limited data available.76 It has been discussed extensively by many scholars, but most recently and comprehensively by Matteo Compareti, who has argued that the evidence suggests that its use on textiles has its origins in sixth-century Sogdian colonies in eastern Central Asia rather than Sasanian, and that it was developed by weavers in the Tarim Basin or possibly in southwest China.77

74

75

76

77

Ibid., 150–1. Facing animals within circles are found from much earlier on other materials. The movement of designs across media has been explored elsewhere, especially in relation to the roundel design, discussed below. See Carol Bier, ‘Pattern Power: Textiles and the Transmission of Knowledge’, Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, 444 (2004), 144–53, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/444 (accessed 25 April 2023). For example, see silk from Hu kingdom Tomb 1, fourth to third century bce, Mashan, Hunan province.Dieter Kuhn, ‘Silk Weaving in Ancient China: From Geometric Figures to Patterns of Pictorial Likeness’, Chinese Science, 12 (1995), fig. 7. ‘The enigmatic pearl roundel pattern still represents one of the great problems of Sasanian art, especially in the field of textile production.’ Matteo Compareti, ‘Sasanian Textiles’, Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, 2009, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/encyclopaedia-iranica (accessed 25 April 2023). Michael Mesiter’s 1970 argument for a Chinese origin based on finds from Chinese Central Asia (‘The Pearl Roundel in Chinese Textile Design’, Ars Orientalis, 8 (1970), 255–67) has been accepted by some. A Persian origin is suggested by a design depicted in stone carvings at Tā q-e Bostā n and in stuccoes, the latter Sasanian.U. Scerrato, ‘Stoffe sasanidi’, in M. T. Lucidi (ed.), La seta e la sua via (Rome: De Luca Editori, 1994), 75–82. But it is not unequivocally found in Sasanian textiles. See Matteo Compareti, ‘The Role of the Sogdian Colonies in the Diffusion of the Pearl Roundel Designs’, in M. Compareti, P. Raffetta, and G. Scarcia (eds.), E¯rā n ud Ane¯rā n: Studies Presented to Boris Maršak on Occasion of His 70th Birthday (Venice: Cafoscarina, 2006), 149–74, for a summary of this argument and a bibliography.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

101

102

susan whitfield

Whatever the origins or routes of transmission, it is not in doubt that, from the seventh and eighth centuries, variations of this design are found across Asia. It appears on excavated and depicted clothing from Steppe empires, such as the Uyghurs, the kingdoms of the Tarim Basin, as seen in donors depicted in Cave 8 at Kizil, and Central Asia, seen on wall paintings at Afrasiab in Sogdiana. It is found in the Caucasus on Georgian and Armenian garments, in the Cappadocian region of eastern Turkey, and in Byzantine Greece.78 It then appears in Umayyad Spain and later in Italy.79 The Chinese fashion for decorated textiles is supported by eighth-century sumptuary regulations which repeatedly banned complex weaves with patterns, especially those with ‘western motifs’.80 The need to reissue such regulations suggests that they were being ignored: ‘Recurrent efforts to prohibit the weaving and use of luxury silk only highlighted the limits of imperial power to dictate sartorial desires and regulate local markets.’81 A ninth-century Chinese writer remarked that textiles without decorative patterns were not up to date.82 But depictions of Chinese in contemporary wall paintings rarely show them dressed in clothes with the pearl roundel decoration.83 By the eleventh to twelfth centuries the roundel was being transformed, with floral and vegetal patterns replacing the pearls in China and other variations elsewhere. We see several examples from twelfth- to thirteenth-century Spain, for example, including pieces made with roundels made in imitation of Baghdadproduced pieces, with gilt thread and where animals and figures

78 79

80 82

83

Ball, Byzantine Dress, 64, for examples. Gasparini, Transcending Patterns, for discussion of the Turfan weaves and later Italian manifestations. Chen, Empire of Style, 48. 81 Ibid. Zheng Gu (c. 851–910), quoted in Chen, Empire of Style, 119. Chen interprets the expression ‘keeping up with the times’ (rushi) as ‘suggesting that the time of fashion was a virtual space that could be accessed bodily . . . patterned silks were affected surfaces, capable of transporting the body-self into the time-space of fashion’. Ibid., 120. For example, in Tang period tomb paintings, see M. H. Fong, ‘T’ang Tomb Wall Paintings of the Early Eighth Century’, Oriental Art, n.s., 24/2 (1978), 185–94, or in Afrasiab wall paintings.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

are contained within the wide roundel frames which are interspersed with circular medallions with a Kufic inscription.84 The motif remained popular, as shown by a contemporary Armenian painting of King Gagik-Abas of Mars (r. 1029–64) in which he wears a robe with pearl roundels enclosing elephants and ibex.85 It has decorative bands on the upper arms containing text in Kufic script. Several Silk Road cultures used textiles as emblems of rank or honour, some with text. Examples exist from China, as in silk armbands found at Niya with Chinese characters; in the Sasanian and Byzantine empires – tablion – showing an image of the ruler;86 and in the Islamic world with the caliph’s name, the last often referred to as tiraz.87 Although many were worn as armbands, they were also sewn onto garments as trim.88 As they were adopted more widely, the script often became a design rather than text, so-called pseudo-Kufic or pseudo-Arabic.89 This persists beyond this period into European art and fashion. It also became desirable for these to be woven with gold and silver thread, thus adding to their impact. 84

85

86

87

88 89

See for example Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 33.371, discussed in Dodds (ed.), Al-Andalus, cat. 60. Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom (eds.), The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), 414, n.11; and Sirarpie Der Nersessian, L’Art arménian (Paris: Art européen publications filmées d’art et d’histoire, 1965), 108–9, fig. 75. An eighth-century example from the Byzantine Empire is in the Victoria and Albert Museum (T.794–1919). See Nazanin Hedayat Munroe, ‘Early Islamic Textiles: Inscribed Garments’, Byzantine and Islam Exhibition Blog, 2 July 2012, for a discussion of the transition from these to tiraz, www .metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/byzantium-and-islam/blog/ topical-essays/posts/inscribed-garments (accessed 25 April 2023). This term is used with a variety of interpretations by different authors, but perhaps most broadly as ‘embroidered, woven, painted or applied text on a textile or garment’. Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, Encyclopedia of Embroidery from the Islamic World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 140. See the most restricted definitions given to the term here, and also the fact that the same word is often used to refer to the workshops where they were made. Daniel Walker and Aimée Froom, Tiraz: Inscribed Textiles from Islamic Workshops (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992). For a full discussion, see Stillman, Arab Dress, 120–33. ‘The fashion of haut bourgeois imitation of the court resulted ultimately in the production of fake tiraz with pseudo-inscriptions.’ Stillman, Arab Dress, 133.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

103

104

susan whitfield

belts and bling The use of gold, silver, and gemstones for accoutrements and to adorn clothes has a long tradition. Ammianus Marcellinus, who accompanied the Roman army on fourth-century campaigns, noted that Sasanian clothes were covered with gold, gems, and pearls.90 The desire for ostentatious show of wealth was not restricted to the political elite. Pelagia of Antioch, a prostitute later venerated as a saint, was described before her conversion as ‘decked out with gold ornaments, pearls, all sorts of precious stones, resplendent in luxurious and expensive clothes . . . wore armbands, silk and anklets . . . necklaces and strings of pendants and pearls’.91 It was also widespread across cultures, including those of the Steppe where gold and jewels were valued as portable wealth. The Tillya Tepe burial contains beaten gold pieces originally sewn onto garments and extravagant crowns and belts. Belts were a practical item for Steppe peoples, used to secure the jacket but also to hold items such as daggers, whetstones, and pouches. Found in Steppe tombs from the eighth century bce and decorated with gold or bronze plaques showing animal combat, they were easily modified to reflect status and wealth: one from Tillya Tepe is of woven gold, interspersed with medallions showing a god riding a lion (Figure 4.6). The fashion spread south to the empires of Outer Eurasia and was, in many cases, integrated into the clothing world ‘in order to redefine, enhance, and strengthen’ the elites’ position.92

90

91

92

Elsie H. Peck, ‘Clothing IV: In the Sasanian Period’, Encyclopædia Iranica, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/encyclopaedia-iranica (accessed 25 April 2023). This is a translation from a Syriac text of her life from a manuscript dated to 850 (British Library, Add. 14651), the oldest extant manuscript. Translated by Sebastien P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 42. M. C. Miller, Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century BC: A Study in Cultural Receptivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 24. This refers to an earlier period but is quoted by Catrin Kost in relation to Western Han tombs (206 bce–9 ce) of the Chinese elite. Catrin Kost, ‘Heightened Receptivity: Steppe Objects and Steppe Influences in Royal Tombs of the Western Han Dynasty’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 137/2 (2017), 349.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300

Figure 4.6 Belt of woven gold, dagger, and sheath from Tillya Tepe. Photograph: Kenneth Garrett / Danita Delimont, Agent. Danita Delimont / Alamy A7XH7 M.

Belts were worn by the Kushan in Central Asia, by Parthians on the Iranian plateau, and continued into Sasanian wear. By the Tang in China, with the influence of the Northern Wei, belts were used to indicate rank and became a common gift to neighbours such as the kings of Goguryeo (37 bce–688 ce).93 The influence went both ways: Avar Steppe burials contain belts with Byzantine buckle types and patterns and Christian symbols rather than the usual animal motifs.94

conclusion By the end of the period, much of Eurasia was under the rule of the Mongol Empire. Cloth showing weaves, designs, and motifs from 93

94

Jonathan Karam Skaff, Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbours: Culture, Powers, and Connections, 580–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 164. Burials of the rulers contain elaborate gold ‘shivering’ headdresses, reminiscent of those from Tillya Tepe. Georgios Kadaras, Byzantium and the Avars, 6th–9th c. AD (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 105.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

105

106

susan whitfield

across Asia and woven with gold, to the Mongols a colour with a ‘deep and specific cosmological meaning’, became central to the textile industry.95 Such textiles started to be acquired in Europe – so-called ‘Tartar cloths’.96 These were to generate ‘an evolution in taste and fashion’ in Europe: which thus became part of the larger interconnected world of fashion.97 Fashion is often presented as a modern phenomenon but, as this chapter shows, the spread of silk across the Afro-Eurasian world and the close links between wealthy empires with parity of power ensured that fashion became an important expression of their elites’ wealth and cosmopolitanism during the first millennium and beyond. New cuts, fabrics, and designs were transmitted by willing and unwilling travellers, deliberately or inadvertently. Fashions also spread to and from the provinces and were emulated beyond the court. Whether a Khazar princess with her braided hair, a Chinese monk wearing a quilted belly wrap, or an Egyptian bride with her gowns of Central Asian silk, peoples across the Silk Roads were entangled in this world of fashion.

select bibliography Allsen, Thomas, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Ball, Jennifer, Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth- to Twelfth-Century Painting (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Burns, E. Jane, Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

95

96

97

Thomas Allsen, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 61. Anne E. Wardwell, ‘Two Silk and Gold Textiles of the Early Mongol Period’, The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 79/10 (1992), 354–78. Jacoby, ‘Silk Economics’, 234.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion on the silk roads, 500–1300 Canepa, Matthew P., ‘Distant Displays of Power: Understanding Cross-Cultural Interaction Among the Elites of Rome, Sasanian Iran and Sui-Tang China’, Ars Orientalis, 38 (2010), 121–54. Chen, BuYun, Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). Coatsworth, Elizabeth and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2008). Compareti, Matteo, ‘The Role of the Sogdian Colonies in the Diffusion of the Pearl Roundel Designs’, in Matteo Compareti, Paola Raffetta, and Gianroberto Scarcia (eds.), Ērān ud Anērān: Studies Presented to Boris Maršak on Occasion of His 70th Birthday (Venice: Cafoscarina, 2006). Fluck, Cäcilia, ‘Dress Styles from Syria to Libya’, in Helen C. Evans with Brandie Ratliff (eds.), Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, 7th–9th Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012), 160–1. Gasparini, Mariachiara, Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interpretations through Central Asian Textile Images (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019). Hensellek, Betty, ‘Sogdian Fashion’, in The Sogdians: Influencers on the Silk Roads (Washington, DC: Freer/Sackler) (https://sogdians.si .edu/sidebars/sogdian-fashion/). Jacoby, David, ‘Silk Economics and Cross-Cultural Artistic Interaction: Byzantium, the Muslim World, and the Christian West’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 58 (2004), 197–240. Kawami, Trudy S., ‘Archaeological Evidence for Textiles in PreIslamic Iran’, Iranian Studies, 23 (1989), 7–18. Lingley, Kate A., ‘Naturalizing the Exotic: On the Changing Meanings of Ethnic Dress in Medieval China’, Ars Orientalis, 38 (2020), 50–80. Nosch, Marie-Louise, Zhao Feng, and Lotika Varadarajan (eds.), Global Textile Encounters (London: Oxbow, 2014). Peck, Elsie H. ‘Clothing IV: In the Sasanian Period’, Encyclopædia Iranica, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/encyclopaedia-iranica. Stillman, Yedida Kalfon, Arab Dress: A Short History – From the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times, ed. Norman A. Stillman (Leiden: Brill, revised 2nd edition, 2003). Welters, Linda and Abby Lillethun, Fashion History: A Global View (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Wendelken, Rebecca Woodward, ‘Wefts and Worms: The Spread of Sericulture and Silk Weaving in the West before 1300’, in Robin

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

107

108

susan whitfield Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (eds.), Medieval Clothing and Textiles 10 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014), 63–4. Whitfield, Susan, Life Along the Silk Roads (Oakland: University of California Press, revised 2nd edition, 2015). Whitfield, Susan, Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.006 Published online by Cambridge University Press

5

w

DISTINGUISHING ONESELF The European Medieval Wardrobe maria giuseppina muzzarelli

A garment covers, decorates, and renders its wearer distinct. This chapter focuses on this last function of clothing: distinction. I reflect on this characteristic by analysing changes in wardrobes of men and women during the European middle ages and the early modern period. I concentrate on the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, a period in which some sort of ‘philosophy’ of distinction – based on garments and accessories – affirmed itself. Yet this chapter highlights the existence of at least four different types of distinction: it starts with social distinction, perhaps the best-known meaning of the term; it continues with a consideration of distinction as applied to the body; and follows with a consideration of geographical distinction; the final part reflects on another well-known meaning of distinction that is still with us today – dress as a form of economic distinction.1 Each of these dimensions of distinction is based on different ways of dressing: between men and women; between young and old; between civil status (maidens, brides, married women, and widows); between different faiths (especially regarding Jews and Muslims); between work, leisure, and ceremony; between 1

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Rice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984 [1979]), esp. 99–101 regarding socially hierarchic spaces and goods that marked the social positions occupied in these spaces; Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passion: A History of Sumptuary Laws (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Mary Ellen Roach and Joanne Bubolz Eicher, Dress, Adornment and Social Order (New York: John Wiley, 1965); Yuniya Kawamura, Fashionology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), esp. ch. 1.

109

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

110

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

countryfolk and urban citizens; and, of course, between rich and poor. Each of these categories includes further levels of diversification. Rich and poor, for example, comprised a variety of conditions that ranged from voluntary poverty – well represented by the new religious orders of the thirteenth century – to the self-imposed modesty in dress that intellectuals adopted as a sign of sobriety. One should not forget the ‘shameful’ poverty of the impoverished elites, nor the conjunctural poverty produced by pandemics and dearth. Different types of poverty corresponded to diverse forms of status representation through clothing. Wardrobes consist of garments and accessories that have constantly rendered diversity decipherable. Just consider the different phases of pre-modern female life: maiden, bride, wife, pregnant woman, and widow. For each of these life stages there was a coded system based on garment styles and colours and on the number and quality of accessories that were present in every geographical area of Europe and varied according to social condition. By becoming a bride, a woman became a reflection of her husband’s social position, which could be read through the length of her garment’s long back or cloak (train) and other types of accessories. Fabrics, styles, and jewellery constituted some sort of grammar connected to the language of appearances, which precisely expressed personal qualities and group belonging. This was valid in almost every country and every period in history. In fact, each period has considered social distinction not only useful, but also indispensable in sustaining political order and moral cohesion. The differences in the way people dressed revealed their social and professional position. Dress also conveyed religious meaning: the garments of the various religious orders were distinctive signs of belonging to a specific organization. In the Ottoman Empire, dress reflected an ideal of public order sanctioned by religion.2 The distinction between ‘West and East’ was also conveyed through the structure of garments: the classic distinction between the sewn 2

See the chapters by Suraiya Faroqhi and James Grehan in this volume. See also Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Introduction, or Why and How One Might Want to Study Ottoman Clothes’, in Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann (eds.), Ottoman Costumes: From Textile to Identity (Istanbul: EREN, 2004), 15–48, here 22.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

and the draped conveyed cultural, religious, and geographical differences.3

the ‘birth of european fashion’ and social distinction Each distinction reflects situations, choices, and values characteristic to a specific environment and historic period. Often, the way people dressed served to communicate, but there is a period – from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries – when the attention given to garments and accessories in Europe started to become more evident and conscious. This is a time marked by what has been called the ‘birth of European fashion’ in France and England, but also in Spain and Italy.4 The phenomenon is similar in all these countries with fashion first affecting men more than women.5 This is in spite of the later – and not always correct – characterization of fashion as a gendered concern of women alone.6 Innovation, that is the rupture with the past, consisted not so much of changes in clothing per se – even when revolutionary – as significant alterations in dress that had already been visible in the twelfth century.7 It is the juxtaposition of economic, social, and cultural elements connected to the ways people dressed that allows fashion to emerge. In the fourteenth century, intellectuals, legislators, and moralists (from Dante to the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani (c. 1280–1348), from the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer to the French chronicler Jean Vennette) were all aware of this new phenomenon. None of them could ignore the role played by clothing in the economy, in the actions of legislators, in the reflections of moralists, as well as in the 3

4

5

6

7

K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 183–90. Giorgio Riello, Back in Fashion: Western Fashion from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 17–18. Kim M. Phillips, ‘Masculinities and the Medieval English Sumptuary Laws’, Gender and History, 19/1 (2007), 22–42. Georg Simmel, ‘Zur Psychologie der Mode. Soziologische Studien’, Die Zeit. Wiener Wochenschrift für Politik, Volkswirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Kunst, 5/54 (12 October 1895), 22–4. Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Se vetir au Moyen Âge (Paris: Adam Biro, 1995), 80–1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

111

112

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

everyday choices of consumers. They were astonished by, and often demonstrated reservations towards, short and tight doublets, hoods with decorative and bulky edges, or decorated belts worn low on the hips (Figure 5.1). What drew their attention was an unprecedented showing off of the body and the non-functional use of accessories. The structure of men’s clothing was especially innovative: custommade, cut and sewn to fit the body, which highlighted body parts previously hidden or only partially exposed. From the second half of the thirteenth century, garments and accessories became the centre of economic, political, social, and moral interest: clothing was the object of a growing market; legislators and moralists knowingly judged and described garments with attention; and attire became a tool to govern and influence consumption. Wardrobes became explicitly invested with the task of facilitating communication, while treatise writers and scholars dedicated much critical attention to new styles and innovations.8 What happened then in many European countries was part of a wider shift in the relationship between the materiality of dress and society that was also visible in other parts of the world. To give an example, in Japan, during the Edo period (1603–1868), garments were deemed to reflect a precise and strict societal hierarchy; violating it was considered an attack on the social system, though violations occurred all the same.9 The same was the case in medieval and early modern Italian cities. Therefore, societies very different from each other and geographically separate, appear to have been equally inclined to trust the preservation of their social and political order to appearances and their control.10

8

9

10

Raymond van Uytven, ‘Cloth in Medieval Literature of Western Europe’, in Negley B. Harte and Kenneth G. Ponting (eds.), Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe: Essays in Memory of Professor E. M. Carus-Wilson (London: Pasold Studies in Textile History, 1983), 151–83. Katsuya Hirano, ‘Regulating Excess: The Cultural Politics of Consumption in Tokugawa Japan’, in Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 458–60. See also Donald H. Shively, ‘Sumptuary Regulation and Status in Early Tokugawa Japan’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 25 (1964–5), 123–64. Giulia Calvi, ‘Le leggi suntuarie e la storia sociale’, in Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli and Antonella Campanini (eds.), Disciplinare il lusso. La legislazione suntuaria in Italia e in Europa (Rome: Carocci, 2003), 213–30. See also Giorgio Riello’s chapter in this volume.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

Figure 5.1 Missale et horae ad usum fratrum minorum, fourteenth century. Département des Manuscrits, Latin 757, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, folio 109v.

From the second half of the thirteenth century, sumptuary laws prohibited, measured, and conceded according to specific hierarchical categories: at the top were knights, followed by doctors of the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

113

114

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

law and medicine, and then members of the various guilds distinguished in rank between major, middle, and minor. The strength of adherence to these norms was felt with different intensity in diverse periods and places, and was made manifest in what men and women wore.11

the body and its parts On the Head: Veils The head was the preferred site for the communication of status, as James Grehan notes for the Ottoman Empire.12 In the past, as today, caps, hoods, and veils indicate different meanings according to the way in which they are worn. Since ancient times the gesture performed by the groom in removing the bride’s veil has sanctioned a transition in status as a key part of the wedding ceremony. Once married, a woman certainly, but not exclusively, used the veil on special occasions. In ancient Rome, women had to show modesty to be respected, and they did so by covering their heads with veils of a refined and transparent reddish fabric.13 The Qur’ā n did not invent the imposition of the veil on women; Christianity also dictated that women cover their heads with veils, to show not just modesty, but also female submission. Yet, the veil was also required to counter the perceived male incapacity to resist the temptation that female hair represented. This explanation is put forward in a well-known passage of Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (11:3–5) and in the treatise De velandis virginis by Tertullian (155–200 ce).14 Veiling the female head connected the ancient and the medieval and early modern world, among Christians as well as Muslims.

11 12 13

14

Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress. See the chapter by James Grehan in this volume. Rosine Lambin, Le voile des femmes. Un inventaire historique, social et psychologique (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999). Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, A capo coperto. Storie di donne e di veli (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016); Nicole Pellegrin, Voile. Une histoire du Moyen Âge à Vatican II (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2017).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

In the high middle ages, kings and queens, as well as powerful and privileged men and women – such as Mathilde of Tuscany, the powerful ‘Great Countess’ of the eleventh century – are portrayed with crowns or similar headpieces (Figure 5.2). Yet, apart from these rare instances, and other equally exceptional cases connected to ecclesiastical and military spheres, our knowledge of the headpieces in common use is rather scarce. Probably, mantle edges served to cover female heads in continuity with Roman customs. Even in Lombard Italy (seventh and eighth century ce), married women covered their heads with veils secured by hairpins, whereas women who remained in their paternal home were defined in capillo (with hair, therefore without veil).15 Evidence of men and women regularly covering their heads is to be found only from the twelfth century onwards. Indeed, iconography and texts written by moralists and legislators show that, especially between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, women wore headpieces of very different type, dimension, material, and decoration. Sources confirm the compulsory nature of covering one’s head and they provide rich and diverse information regarding the production of and trade in veils, bonnets, and headpieces (Figure 5.3).16 They also provide precious information concerning the meaning attributed to covering (and not covering) one’s head, as for instance in the work of the minor friar John of Capistrano (1386–1456), who dedicated a section of his Trattato degli ornamenti specie delle donne (Treatise on Ornaments Especially of Women, c. 1434–8) to the judicial procedures against those who forcibly removed a veil from a woman’s head.17

15

16 17

Cristina La Rocca, ‘Velate e “in capillo”: donne nell’Italia longobarda’, in Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Maria Grazia Nico Ottaviani, and Gabriella Zarri (eds.), Il velo in area mediterranea fra storia e simbolo. Tardo Medioevo-prima Età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014), 69–87. Muzzarelli, A capo coperto, 157–79. Giovanni da Capestrano, Trattato degli ornamenti specie delle donne, ed. Aniceto Chiappini (Siena: Cantagalli, 1956). See also Vittorio Angeletti, ‘Veli e copricapi femminili dalle fonti documentarie giudiziarie: Perugia, secoli XIII–XV’, in Muzzarelli et al. (eds.), Il velo in area mediterranea, 367–80.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

115

116

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

Figure 5.2

Beatrice di Lorena. Vat. Lat. 4922 fl. 30v. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

The head was a privileged area of symbolic distinction, a fact confirmed by the imposition – especially in Germany and Central Europe – on Jewish men of wearing a specific yellow cap, and on Jewish women of using a veil of the same colour.18 The authorities 18

Bernhard Blumenkranz, Le juif médiéval au miroir de l’art chrétien (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1966); Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘The “Fashion Other”: Jews in the Late Middle Ages’, in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

Figure 5.3 Filippo Lippi, Profile Portrait of a Young Woman, c. 1445. Painting on wood, 49.5 × 33 cm. Staatliche Museet, Berlin. Photo by Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images.

legislated on headwear in order to render Jews distinguishable from gentiles. But distinction through one’s headwear served other purposes as well: the female head – though the argument could be extended to men’s – served to display wealth and privilege. Showy headpieces, made with precious draped fabric, supported by complex structures, decorated with ribbons or golden thread, and embroidered with pearls or even garlands encrusted with precious gems, exulted luxury and fantasy,

(eds.), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 59–61.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

117

118

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

although exposed their wearers to both theft and violence. In Italy, the adoption of women’s round headpieces called balzi in the fifteenth century reflects inspiration from the Middle East, most noticeably in their resemblance to turbans. In Europe in this period, real turbans worn by men became a recognized symbol of Islam. The hennin, a cone-shaped woman’s headpiece, was part of the late medieval fashion of Central Europe. Versions of this headpiece decorated with pearls, or larger à escoffion appear in the iconography of the Netherlands, Austria, and France, even though bonnets and caps were the most widespread headpieces in Europe between the late middle ages and the early modern period.19 Women’s caps were associated with the modest virtues of domestic life, of closer fit than bonnets which were often outlandish in size and shape. Widows and older women continued to cover their heads with dark mantles or black veils for centuries and almost everywhere, even though many women in mourning dressed in white. The head was therefore a unique ‘site’ for many particular elements of distinction to be enacted between the middle ages and the modern era.20

On the Feet At the opposite end of the body, the feet played as important a part as the head. The first distinction concerned those who owned shoes and those who walked barefoot.21 In the countryside in areas with temperate climates, the majority of people did not possess – and therefore did not wear – shoes, not even women who in other

19

20

21

Maj Ringgaard, ‘The Knitted Sugar-Loaf Hat’, in Evelyn Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 311–13. Carole Frick Collier, ‘Cappelli e copricapi nella Firenze del Rinascimento. L’emergere dell’identità sociale attraverso l’abbigliamento’, in Eugenia Paulicelli (ed.), Moda e moderno. Dal Medioevo al Rinascimento (Rome: Meltemi, 2006), 103–28; Elisabetta Gnignera, I soperchi ornamenti. Copricapi e acconciature femminili nell’Italia del Quattrocento (Siena: Protagon Editore, 2010). Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds.), Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

situations might have been expected to conceal their feet carefully. In the Roman world, men and women usually wore sandals that exposed their feet, but in the middle ages, women’s feet were hidden under long dresses and continued to be concealed until the eighteenth century. Though feet remained invisible through the centuries, shoes, especially women’s footwear, went through a series of changes and contributed to distinguishing people. The main distinction concerned the difference between functional shoes designed for walking and protecting one’s feet, and those which marked the (almost) impossibility of moving. Their existence was justified in Thorstein Veblen’s renowned theory concerning the upper classes, in which he stated that non-functional – or even useless – garments and accessories served to highlight the privilege of those who wore them, not only through their value, but also because they were incompatible with any useful activity.22 Women who wore platform footwear nearly 50 centimetres high or who wore unstable chopines certainly found walking difficult. Shoes such as these hindered their movement or made their gait rather peculiar: slow and sinuous, effects that men were supposed to appreciate.23 In China, the practice of binding the feet of female infants in order to prevent them from growing and to keep them small, with an ideal length of not more than 8 centimetres, continued for centuries. This was a form of female oppression and fetishism, which drew the attention of Western scholars, who neglected the variety and complexity of footwear used in China and in Asia more generally.24 Fashion influenced men’s perhaps more than women’s shoes.25 In the fourteenth century, the fashion was for shoes with decorative, and certainly not useful, long tips. Especially widespread in 22

23

24

25

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 80. Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 4. Paola Zamperini, ‘A Dream of Butterflies? Shoes in Chinese Culture’, in Riello and McNeil (eds.), Shoes, 196–204; Dorothy Ko, ‘The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meaning of Foot Binding’, Journal of Women’s History, 8/4 (1997), 8–27. Virtus Zallot, Con i piedi nel Medioevo. Gesti e calzature nell’arte e nell’immaginario (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2018).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

119

120

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

princely and royal courts, it lasted until the fifteenth century and influenced even armour. This fashion later gave way to shoes with short and round toes.26 Sumptuary laws intervened frequently on the matter of footwear, seeking to restrict the length of shoe tips and the height of platforms, just as they tried to control the width of sleeves and the lengths of trains. All the less privileged could afford were clogs, which were worn also by men and women of high social status to protect their soled stockings from the mud and dirt. For centuries, clogs constituted the most widespread and practical way of covering feet and thus allowing movement. Naturally, even clogs followed fashion, based on a dialogue between Europe and Asia, as testified by the existence of pointy-toed clogs of probable Turkish origin.27

On the Body Today as in the middle ages a dressed body transmits a series of messages: these include information about belonging and distinction. Between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, doublets and vests materialized a ‘revolution in the making’.28 Doublets (short and lined male jackets which displayed legs covered by tight and colourful stockings) reflected a desire by younger men to exhibit their bodies. More importantly, they showed off the skills and creativity of expert artisans. In the tenth to twelfth centuries craftsmen and producers of different goods and services organized themselves in corporations.29 Once the mechanism of communication through garments and accessories had been initiated and gained strength, there was a continuous progression and 26

27

28

29

Isabelle Parésys and Natacha Coquery (eds.), Se vetir à la cour en Europe (1400–1815) (Paris: Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2011). Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Sumptuous Shoes: Making and Wearing in Medieval Italy’, in Riello and McNeil (eds.), Shoes, 50–75, esp. 62; Charlotte Jirousek, Ottoman Dress and Design in the West: A Visual History of Cultural Exchange (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 84. Odile Blanc, Parades et parures. L’invention du corps à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). Franco Franceschi, ‘E saremo tutti ricchi’. Lavoro, mobilità sociale e conflitti nelle città dell’Italia medievale (Ospedaletto: Pacini, 2012).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

modification of the symbols of distinction, even if not with the same rhythm that fashion follows in the present. Male doublets, but also tight-bodiced female dresses which created a pronounced cleavage, testify to changes taking place in the first half of the fourteenth century, around 1330, and continuing in the years following the Black Death of 1348–51. All around Europe, one could see the adoption of new shapes in apparel that emphasized parts of both female and male bodies.30 These tight-fitting garments gave the appearance of being sewn directly onto the body. By combining different elements of dress from a set and by matching coloured fabrics and various accessories select identities could be constructed. Sumptuary legislation regarded such freedom as a peril to the maintenance of distinctions not only of gender and social hierarchy, but also of a personal nature.31 In the second half of the fourteenth century, a form of long dress called houppelande appeared in France starting a fashion for women’s fulsome garments that suggested a perpetual state of pregnancy, a desirable condition in light of the devastating number of deaths caused by the plague.32 Vitality was conveyed, with a certain degree of ingenuity, through colourful, even flashy, men’s outfits, and especially through specific elements such as codpieces (that drew attention to the male genitalia) and necklines a doccione (similar to a shower rod) much criticized by the Italian short-story writer Franco Sacchetti (1335–1400) because of its extravagance.33 Men wore belts low on the hips indicating both the embracing of fashion and a new collective participation in what we might call the ‘fashion game’.34 Fashion marked out those who 30

31

32 33

34

Paul Post, ‘La naissance du costume masculin moderne au XIVe siècle’, in Actes du 1er Congrès International d’Histoire du Costume (Milan: Centro Internazionale delle Arti e del Costume, 1955), 28–41. Martha C. Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. 208–60. Blanc, Parades et parures. Franco Sacchetti, Il Trecentonovelle, ed. Antonio Lanza (Florence: Sansoni, 1993), novel clxxviii, 400–3, esp. 401: ‘Noi ci abbiamo questa nostra usanza di queste gorgiere o doccioni da cesso che vogliamo dire, ne’ quali tegniamo la gola s’ incannata che noi non ci possiamo tenere mente a’piedi . . .’. Gil Bartholeyns, ‘L’enjeu du vêtement au Moyen Âge: de l’anthropologie ordinaire à la raison sociale (XIIIe–XIV siècles)’, in Le corps et sa parure/ The Body and Its Adornment, issue of Micrologus, 15 (2007), 219–58.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

121

122

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

were young and privileged enough to be able to afford expensive new things. It was a phenomenon destined to take root in European societies and generate criticism of what a contemporary called ‘eccentricities of dress that are neither beautiful nor honest’ (stranianze d’abito nè belle né oneste).35 Clothing gained great importance in urban life in France, Spain, Germany, and England. European sumptuary laws bear witness to this: from the second half of the thirteenth century, these norms paid attention to everything women (especially in Spain and Italy) and men (especially in England) wore in order to limit, or at least ‘measure out’ consumption, in particular, of imported precious materials. Their intent was also to make distinctions among the population by measuring the level of ostentation according to the social environment of belonging. The English sumptuary laws of the sixteenth century maintained an earlier hierarchy in regard to the use of precious fabrics and furs: dukes were allowed golden fabrics and sable furs; dukes, marquises, and counts were allowed velvets and lynx furs, and so on.36 The makers of sumptuary laws understood and wished to mould society through dress, and made them a tool of governance. Legislators wished to avoid confusion between social levels by allowing, forbidding, and calibrating according to the number of garments, or the types of cloth used and their lengths, the specific width of sleeves, and the use of fur trimmings. They reacted against the power of wealth, and through dress sought to affirm and maintain a precarious political balance. This happened because dress acted as a marker of social ‘positioning’ especially in a society characterized by inequality and by well-established hierarchical orders.37 Yet contradictions were also present: the richest and the self-important could evade the laws and follow the latest fashion 35

36

37

Cronica di Giovanni Villani, con note di Ignazio Moutier e appendice storico-geografica di Francesco Gher Dragomanni (Florence: Sansone, 1845), iv: l. xii, ch. iv, 12. Thomas Luttenberg, ‘Sempre un passo indietro rispetto alla moda: leggi suntuarie in Inghilterra dal Medioevo all’inizio del XVII secolo’, in Muzzarelli and Campanini (eds.), Disciplinare il lusso, 147. Laurel Ann Wilson, ‘Common Threads: A Reappraisal of Medieval European Sumptuary Law’, The Medieval Globe, 2/2, article 6 (2016), https://archumanities.org/series/arc/tmg/ (accessed 25 April 2023).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

by simply paying a fine. Yet exceptions, the disrespect of the law, and the rise of new fashions all contributed to the continuous enactment of sumptuary laws throughout the medieval and early modern period.38 The heyday of sumptuary laws, between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, coincided with major changes, especially in women’s fashion. Visual and documentary sources such as illuminated manuscripts and frescoes show how the figure-hugging garments worn by women in the fourteenth century gave way to heavy and elaborate high-neck mantels that required a great deal of cloth as they completely covered the body. Sixteenth-century women’s fashion was composed of figure-hugging tops worn over shaping garments (occasionally of iron) with a triangular-shaped lower extremity. A rare mid-sixteenth-century example of a woman’s steel undergarment is in the collection of the Stibbert Museum in Florence. It was worn over the smock and underneath the petticoat and might have been similar to one of those made for Eleonora di Toledo in 1549 by a Florentine cuirassier.39

Body and Geometry Part of the shift in female fashion can be attributed to the use of structures to be used under the garments, body-shaping apparatus. They are integral to a new phase in the history of Western fashion involving what one might call ‘geometry applied to dress’.40 The 38

39

40

Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Sumptuary Laws in Italy: Financial Resource and Instrument of Rule’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 167–85. See also Frédérique Lachaud, ‘Dress and Social Status in England before the Sumptuary Laws’, in Peter R. Cross and Maurice Keen (eds.), Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 106–7. Roberta Orsi Landini and Bruna Niccoli, Moda a Firenze 1540–1580. Lo stile di Eleonora di Toledo e la sua influenza (Florence: Pagliai Polistampa, 2005), 131. The Spanish farthingale reflects this body-shaping mode. See Sarah A. Bendall, ‘“Take measure of your wide and flaunting garments”: The Farthingale, Gender and the Consumption of Space in Elizabethan and Jacobean England’, Renaissance Studies, 33/5 (2019), 712–37; and Sarah A. Bendall, Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). George Vigarello, La Robe. Une histoire culturelle – Du Moyen Âge à aujourd’hui (Paris: Seuil, 2017).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

123

124

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

triangular shapes that characterized the new silhouette were the result of an endeavour to shape bodies according to artificial lines through the use of stays and underskirts. They are to be seen in Renaissance iconography and are listed in inventories and among the items that sumptuary laws unsuccessfully outlawed (Figure 5.4). They are tools through which bodies were modelled and their different parts ‘altered’ in size and proportion. From the fifteenth century, these structures become more visible and more widely applied to achieve a bell-shaped form for gowns and a triangular form for the bust. Whereas in the fifteenth century, huge headdresses unbalanced women who – wearing shoes of dizzying height – risked falling at every step, in the sixteenth century the artifice and relative sacrifice were dictated by other elements: stays and verdugals (farthingales) that imposed lines on bodies that were completely removed of their naturalness. A game of geometries hid the bodies of women, leaving only the face to be seen, and hands when not gloved. The artifice – applied systematically to female aesthetics for beauty purposes – imposed a silhouette that was paradoxically (the paradox lies in its dysfunctionality and the discomfort involved) successful over the centuries. This silhouette was based on elements that artificially alluded to nature: the bust as a stem, the face as a flower, and the skirt as a broad support.41 This effect continued to be sought after until the end of the nineteenth century with unique constancy of taste and continuity of aesthetic intervention.42 In Asia, a similar continuity can be found, though it privileged less geometrically fixed forms: instead of two triangles, a more cylindrical silhouette prevailed that was associated with voluminous and ingenious headdresses. A precise code of colours and fabrics was present in the Ottoman Empire,43 as well as numerous changes in style (and in clothing policies).44

41 43

44

Ibid., 41. 42 Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Introduction, or Why and How One Might Want to Study Ottoman Clothes’, in Faroqhi and Neumann (eds.), Ottoman Costumes, 24–9. Madeleine C. Zilfi, ‘Women, Minorities and the Changing Politics of Dress in the Ottoman Empire, 1650–1830’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 393–415.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

Figure 5.4 Master John (attributed to), Portrait of Catherine Parr, 1545. Oil on panel, 180.3 × 94 cm. National Portrait Gallery, London NPG 4451. Photo by © Historical Picture Archive / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images.

The increase in the volume through cloth and clothing and the consequent change of body shapes are characteristic innovations of the early modern period in Europe: they chronologically and culturally highlight a moment of daring inventiveness for the silhouette of the body that follows – with a gap of just

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

125

126

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

a few decades – the innovation of important Renaissance architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), the engineer of the dome of Florence cathedral. As for architecture, they present a view of ‘modernity’ that characterized fifteenth-century Europe. A second innovation – opposed but concurrent to what has been just described – was the sober and sometimes severe aesthetic forms imposed by the religious Reformation especially in Northern Europe. From the 1520s onwards, the Reformation brought about a major change in fashion as bright colours and outlandish garments were banned. This was an important difference compared with fashionable clothing at the end of the middle ages. In the second half of the fourteenth century, stripes, colours, and decorations accompanied new shapes and combinations. In the following century, this taste continued but was less excessive; the most sought after and luxurious dresses used expensive dyes and rich textiles but in more subdued ways: embroideries, ribbons, pearls, and – for the first time – lace enriched fifteenth-century dress. Rigidity and the widespread use of black are characteristic elements of the fashion of the sixteenth century; yet there are different types and qualities of black with some black robes – in particular those used by the Spanish court – being very precious and expensive.45 More generally, with the Reformation a new, though minor, aesthetic vision of dress emerged in Europe, one characterized by less valuable fabrics, duller colours, and more natural lines.46

45

46

Amedeo Quondam, Tutti i colori del nero. Moda e cultura del gentiluomo nel Rinascimento (Vicenza: Colla Editore, 2007); Michel Pastoreau, Noir. Histoire d’un couleur (Paris: Seuil, 2008); John Harvey, Des hommes en noir. Du costume masculin à travers les siècles (Paris: Abbeville, 1998), 83–116; J. L. Colomer, ‘El negro y la imagen real’, in J. L. Colomer and A. Descalzo (eds.), Vestir a la española en las cortes europeas (siglos XVI y XVII) (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2014), 77–111. Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Ulinka Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017 [2005]).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

From the Overdressed Body to the Philosophy of Restraint Between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, the fashion of the upper echelons of society altered significantly across Europe. Yet this was not the case for the population at large. There were no major departures in what was worn for instance by rural populations between the later middle ages and the early modern period. Dress remained functional, basic, and changed little over time. From the end of the sixteenth century, a series of printed works provided information on popular costume in different parts of Italy and across Europe. They attempted to describe in words and visually how people in different parts of the world dressed in different social environments, including the humblest. Such systematic gatherings of information and illustrations were something new as was the interest in the everyday dress of common people.47 This is the case of images included in the work by the Paduan publisher and typographer Pietro Bertelli who detailed the costumes of Italian women and men of the people.48 They testify to an interest also in the clothes of the non-elites in different countries as well as historical periods.49 The restraint that characterized Protestant (as well as other) areas of Europe became the predominant style of the commercial classes especially in the seventeenth-century Netherlands.50 However, the foundations of this new aesthetics of restraint went back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when ‘civil garments’ came to signify respectability and sobriety. Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) was among the first to theorize restraint: in his 47

48 49

50

Paula Hohti Erichsen, Artisans, Objects and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy: The Material Culture of the Middling Class (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Pietro Bertelli, Diversarum Nationum Habitus (Padua, 1589). Margaret F. Rosenthal, ‘Cultures of Clothing in Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39/3 (2009), 471. Isis Sturtewagen and Bruno Blondé, ‘Playing by the Rules? Dressing without Sumptuary Laws in the Low Countries from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 74– 95. See also Tzvetan Todorov, Éloge du quotidien: essai sur la peinture hollandaise du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1997).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

127

128

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

Libri di Famiglia (Family Books) he praised ‘honourable garments’, that is clothing that brought respect and that should be respected. He meant garments that were well made and proper, made of plain and pure colours, good fabrics that represented civic virtues such as order, functionality, industriousness, fortitude, and restrained pleasure.51 There seems to have been at that time an awareness of the distinction between sumptuous but dysfunctional and sometimes even grotesque clothing used on official occasions, and the practical and restrained garments used in everyday situations. They represented different social contexts and embraced different values. For centuries, privilege was conveyed through multiple layers of dress (up to six or seven considering that each layer was doubled up with precious lining in silk or leather), or the lengths and width of cloth used. Abundance, excess, and waste expressed privilege. Leon Battista Alberti inaugurated a new phase: he made Giannozzo – the personification of wisdom in his Family Books – declare that the ‘big spenders’ (larghi spenditori) who chose excessive garments immobilized and even wasted considerable resources. In doing so, they did not honour their status and not even the very garments that they wore. He concluded that one should spend without avarice on garments but at the same time exercise due parsimony (masserizia), a fine balance between meagreness and excess.52 Modesty and restraint, which had been the key concepts embraced by late medieval sumptuary law legislators, became in the late fifteenth century a system of thought.53 It should be noted that this happened in non-Protestant parts of Europe and well before modesty in fashion affirmed itself in seventeenth-century 51

52

53

Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Identità, fama e vesti (F. Barbaro, L. B. Alberti, M. Palmieri)’, in Paolo Prodi (ed.), La fiducia secondo i linguaggi del potere (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), 295–309. ‘La masserizia sta in usare e serbare le cose’ [‘thrift consists in using and preserving things’], in Leon Battista Alberti, I Libri della Famiglia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 204; Leon Battista Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, trans. and with an introduction by Renée Neu Watkins, 3 vols. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1994), iii: 34. Emanuele Lugli, The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

Northern European bourgeois societies, where industrious artisans and sober Dutch merchants distinguished themselves by their restraint, a social norm that did not seem to need even the enactment of sumptuary laws.54 Modesty – something different from mere humility or poverty – implied choosing an aesthetic and behavioural model dissimilar from the one followed by the Renaissance court.55 This was the case of Christine de Pizan (c. 1365–1430), a lady of Italian origins who spent most of her life in Paris in court circles. She was the first female professional intellectual who sustained both self and family through the sale of her own ballads and treatises and with which she was regularly represented in miniatures.56 Christine chose not to portray herself dressed in the garments of a daughter of a medical doctor and the wife of a notary – and later a widow. She adopted instead a kind of intellectual uniform: sober and functional garments, respectable but simple (Figure 5.5).57 By wearing modest garments, Christine was attempting to affirm an image of herself as a professional writer, as an autonomous female provider, and not as a daughter or wife.58 This is an innovation that demonstrates awareness of the use of instruments of communication, prominent among which were garments. All this happened well before the reassertion of modest dress, which proposed a European model of elegance and the appreciation, and ever growing knowledge of sartorial elements from far-away countries,

54

55

56

57

58

Frederik Buylaert, Wim De Clerq, and Jan Dumolyn, ‘Sumptuary Legislation, Material Culture and the Semiotics of “Vivre Noblement” in the County of Flanders (14th–16th Centuries)’, Social History, 36/1 (2011), 155–77. Silvia Negri, ‘Vêtir l’humilitè: de Bono Giamboni à Boccacce’, Philosophical Readings, 10/3 (2018), 168–75. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Un’italiana alla corte di Francia. Christine de Pizan intellettuale e donna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), esp. 55–61; Françoise Autrand, Christine de Pizan. Une femme en politique (Paris: Fayard, 2009). Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Anatomia e fisiologia di una mise. La “divisa” di Christine de Pizan’, in Patrizia Caraffi (ed.), La scrittrice e la città (Florence: Alinea Editrice, 2013), 259–69. Laura Rinaldi Dufresne, ‘Christine de Pizan’s “Treasure of the City of Ladie”: A Study of Dress and Social Hierarchy’, Women’s Art Journal, 16/1 (1995), 29–34.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

129

130

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

Figure 5.5

Christine de Pizan allo scrittoio. London, British Library, Harley ms 4431. F-4.

and most especially the Middle East.59 From the sixteenth century, cosmopolitan consumption became the distinctive and

59

Charlotte Jirousek, ‘Ottoman Influences in Western Dress’, in Faroqhi and Neumann (eds.), Ottoman Costumes, 231–51.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

paradigmatic trait of material life in many parts of the world, influencing behaviour and aesthetic forms.60

international fashion Different Countries, Same Fashion Fashion has long been, and still is, an international phenomenon, because it exists across different countries, and shortens distances between different places and cultures: it is a form of communication and a language of dialogue. Yet, this has not always been the case: ‘modernity’ in Europe went hand-in-hand with the development of an international arena for fashion, most especially for the sartorial choices of the rich and powerful. The power of fashion became apparent at the beginning of the sixteenth century when, in the two decades between c. 1520 and 1540, it became a distinctive feature of different courts in Europe. For example a series of powerful men – from Lorenzo, son of Piero de’ Medici in Florence to Henry VII of England; from Francis I of France to Emperor Charles V – wore variously decorated caps, displayed beards and moustaches, and wore robes and doublets, which – thanks to padding – showed off broad shoulders: they all manifested a uniform, commonly understood idea of magnificence (Figure 5.6). Elite men wore vivid colours that conveyed wealth and privilege; their clothes had slashes – which were an innovation – along the sleeves and doublets, from which portions of the shirt spurted out; gloves were worn or held in the hand. In this relative uniformity, how can one determine which courts created and which followed fashion? It is difficult to demonstrate which of these powerful men – or others for them – invented these elements that defined fashion. Many have argued that courts were places of fashion conception, which later spread to other parts of society, but few have stressed the difficulty of establishing who exactly

60

Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

131

132

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

Figure 5.6 Jean Clouet, Portrait of François I, King of France, c. 1525–30. Oil on panel, 97 × 74 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 3256.

created what we might call the language of fashion in the Renaissance.61 Francis I (r. 1515–47), like other powerful men of this period, drew inspiration from different sources and places to construct his unique notion of fashion. He used fashion as a tool of negotiation, often to his own advantage.62

61

62

Roberta Orsi Landini and Bruna Niccoli, Moda a Firenze 1540–1580. Lo stile di Eleonora di Toledo e la sua influenza (Florence: Pagliai Polistampa, 2005 – English and Italian edition, 2019); Roberta Orsi Landini, Moda a Firenze 1540–1580. Lo stile di Cosimo I de’ Medici (Florence: Mauro Pagliai, 2011). Marjorie Meiss-Even, ‘Portraits de roi, portraits d’habits’, in Françoi Ier. Pouvoir et image (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2015), 198–206; Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Mode al tempo di Francesco I’, in Chiara Lastraioli and Jean-Marie Le Gall (eds.), François Ier et l’Italie/ L’Italia e Francesco I (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 181–94.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

There were in this period two notions of power: one deriving from royal birth and another from fashion itself. The uniformity in the portraits of many sovereigns and influential men of the period is the result of the influence of fashion. Such fashion in the sixteenth century was Italian but accepted by all courts in Europe. It is important to underline the Europe-wide remit of fashion in this period with elements taken from different European nations. Italy had a pride of place in shaping fashion at a time in which its economic and political power was on the wane. Yet the peninsula retained its leadership in both artistic and literary milieux that influenced the position of fashion in the following centuries.63

Influences from Elsewhere Connected to the internationalization of fashion is the evergrowing spread of knowledge in Europe from the end of the middle ages, especially concerning trends and fashions that originated in far-away countries, especially in Asia, and their consequent adoption in Europe. For centuries ‘the East’ had fascinated Western societies, who viewed it with awe but also fear. This was particularly the case from the fifteenth century onwards because of long periods of tension and war, which culminated in the battle of Lepanto in 1571 between the fleets of the Ottoman Empire Muslims and the Christians. A fascination for the ‘exotic’ influenced Western fashion at the end of the middle ages when precious golden cloths, wide sleeves, and round headpieces of Ottoman origin became popular.64 Garments and accessories created in the Ottoman world left a mark on Western fashion as one can clearly see in visual sources. The Italian painter Gentile da Fabriano (c. 1370–1427), for example, presents in his works a variety of golden turbans adopted in Europe and destined in the following centuries to become emblems of an ‘Orient’ sartorially understood to be 63

64

Rosita Levi Pisetzky, ‘L’apogeo dell’eleganza milanese durante il Ducato’, in Storia di Milano, vol. viii (Milan: Fondazione Treccani, 1957), 721–76, esp. 726–7. Dress for the Body, Body for the Dress: When Islam and Western Styles Meet (Florence: Museo Stibbert, 29 June–30 September 2000), at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia. English edition of L’abito per il corpo il corpo per l’abito: Islam e Occidente a confront (Florence: Artificio, 1998).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

133

134

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

simply ‘elsewhere’ (Figure 5.7). While in Europe garments were tailored and well structured, ‘the East’ was generally conceived as an undetermined geographical area in which people wore soft, comfortable, almost identical, and functional garments.65 In the Renaissance, fashion existed in an area of trans-cultural interaction from which it borrowed extensively to create a supralocal taste that was much criticized by some as a sign of feeble national identity. Fashion had become a phenomenon with no borders. If by the time of Francis I a fully articulated definition of fashion had not yet emerged, its existence in Europe had already been noted for at least two centuries. By the end of the fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, European fashion had at its disposal a vast range of models. In the fourteenth century, for instance, for an Italian to dress himself in ‘Catalan style’ was almost a betrayal; a couple of centuries later Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) observed critically in his Book of the Courtier that in Italy there were ‘those who dress in the French manner, those in the Spanish style, those who want to look like Germans, and there are even those who wear the dress of the Turks’.66All of this was seen as bringing about a ‘confusion’ that today we would call fashion. Castiglione also complained that ‘Italy does no longer have – as it used to – a form of dress that is known as Italian’, and that due to multiple forms of dress, it was very difficult to ‘adopt the choice of the majority’ as a rule of good taste.67 Castiglione’s words show traces of a new sensibility: the courtier – but one could say the same of the modern man in general – should ‘make up his mind how he wants to look and how he wants to be perceived; dress oneself accordingly and let 65

66

67

On the influence that the Orient had on Western fashion, see Adam Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles and Culture from the 17th to the 21st Century (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). ‘chi si veste alla franzese, chi alla spagnola, chi vol parer tedesco, nè ci mancano ancor di quelli che si vestono alla foggia de’Turchi’ (‘some who dress after the French fashion, some after the Spanish, some who wish to appear German, nor is there lack of those who even dress after the style of the Turks’). Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Leonard Eckstein Opdycke (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 102. ‘Italy has not, as it was wont to have, a costume that should be recognized as Italian’. Cited in Eugenia Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2016), 101.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

Figure 5.7 Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi (L’adorazione dei Magi), 1423. Tempera on panel, 300 × 282 cm, detail. Florence, Uffizi Gallery. Antonio Quattrone / Archivio Quattrone / MONDADORI PORTFOLIO via Getty Images.

his garments help him to achieve this goal’.68 In other words, the new man should know how to shape his own aesthetic identity by 68

‘fra se stesso deliberar ciò che vol parere e di quella sorte che desidera esser estimato, della medesima vestirsi, e far che gli abiti lo aiutino ad essere tenuto per tale’. Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

135

136

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

selecting from different international fashion ideas. The pool of choices available had expanded considerably thanks to the press, which offered proper illustrated volumes regarding costumes and fashion, and produced works that described in detail garments in use in different parts of the world, both past and present.69

the world in a book of models There were many sixteenth-century attempts at methodically gathering and disseminating words and images regarding urban, national, and even extra-European fashion. Manuscript albums of costumes were produced in Europe as well as in the Ottoman Empire.70 In Europe printed costume books followed the dissemination of the printing press which broadened knowledge among consumers of nearly every field, including fashion.71 Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti antichi et moderni delle diverse parti del mondo is perhaps the best known among these works.72 It achieved – alongside other similar collections – huge success in Italy, proving how fashion was, at the end of the sixteenth century, an autonomous phenomenon that dictated tendencies, behaviours, consumption, and tastes through knowledge codification and dissemination.73 These collections presented women 69

70

71

72

73

Giulia Calvi, ‘Cultures of Space: Costume Books, Maps, and Clothing between Europe and Japan (Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries)’, I Tatti Studies, 20/2 (2017), 331–63; Giorgio Riello, ‘Fashion in the Four Parts of the World’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 41–64. Leslie Meral Schick, ‘The Place of Dress in Pre-Modern Costume Albums’, in Faroqhi and Neumann (eds.), Ottoman Costumes, 93–101. Giorgio Riello, ‘The World in a Book: The Creation of the Global in Sixteenth-Century European Costume Books’, Past & Present, 242, Supplement 14 (2019), 281–317. Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni delle diverse parti del mondo (Venezia: Damian Zenaro, 1590); Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo (Venezia: Bernardo Sessa, 1598). See Eugenia Paulicelli, ‘Mapping the World: The Political Geography of Dress in Cesare Vecellio’s Costume Books’, The Italianist, 28 (2008), 24–53. Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London: Allen Lane, 2016).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

and men – full frontal or in profile – of different ages and social levels, from different areas within one country as well as from different countries, empires, and areas of the world. These books portrayed them in different moments and occasions thus presenting a rich and diverse range of styles and tastes. Nevertheless, these collections aimed to describe, categorize, and crystallize realities that instead were fluid and subject to constant change. Their authors described garments that were in continuous evolution, and they were aware of this fact.74 The transience of fashion is revealed in the front cover of Hans Weigel’s Trachtenbuch of 1577.75 It preceded Vecellio by two decades and inspired the views that later work presented. Its frontispiece included personifications of Africa, the Americas, and Asia dressed in local fabrics (not so much in the case of the Americas). Meanwhile, Europe is represented by a naked man holding a bolt of cloth under his right arm and a pair of scissors in his left hand. The portrait of the naked European conveys a discourse: Europe did not possess a typical attire but constructed for itself a notion of fashion through its everchanging dress (Figure 5.8).76 Vecellio did not consider court fashion much in this book as his interest was focused on a world geography of dress. Yet, the sixteenth century is both the century of fashion (It. moda) and of modernity in Europe: both concepts found a tool of expression in printed books that conveyed through word and image local specificities, geographic diversity, and personal, social, and economic differences. Dress became a tool through which to read the world, not a connected whole, but as an ensemble of specificities, a map of

74

75

76

As Vecellio stated, ‘gli habiti donneschi sono molto soggetti alla mutatione et variabili più che le forme della luna’. See Carlo Marco Belfanti, ‘Mobilità sociale e opportunità di mercato alle origini del cambiamento’, in Paulicelli (ed.), Moda e moderno, 43. Hans Weigel, Habitus praecipuorum populorum, tam virorum quam foeminarum Singulari arte depicti. Trachtenbuch (Nuremberg, 1577). Rublack, Dressing Up, 146–61. See also Peter Stallybrass, ‘Admiranda Narratio: A European Best Seller’, in Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 9–30.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

137

138

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

Figure 5.8 Hans Wigel (attributed to), Habitus praecipuorum populorum, tam virorum quam foeminarum Singulari arte depicti. Trachtenbuch, Nuremberg, 1577. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional. Photo by DeAgostini / Getty Images.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

diversity conveyed through appearances. This was not a new phenomenon: the ability to use dress as a tool to read the world had been present since antiquity, but in the sixteenth century it became fully apparent as an instrument of identification as much as of identity-making. What was shown in costume books was a fleeting reality, especially in the upper echelons of society where dress changed regularly.77 One can conclude that between the end of the middle ages and the Renaissance a variety of different forms of dress existed in Europe that were specific to certain localities and social and cultural contexts. It is, however, difficult to pinpoint the existence of distinct national fashions: local production, courts and urban contexts, and specific political circumstances produced fashion; but one has also to note that these were not impermeable to external factors. The novelty of Renaissance Europe is that fashion – in its varied forms – emerges as a transnational force. It thrived on imitation, on combination, on ‘contagion’ and borrowing. It became mutable, excessive, even scandalous, especially for those who saw the value of dress in its immutability that would guarantee political stability and moral appropriateness. The association between fashion and politics was not new in this period as specific colours, garments, and accessories had long been used as markers for different political parties. Yet by the end of the sixteenth century, powerful men (and often also women) created international fashion and at the same time their power and image were shaped by fashion.

the economic value Beautiful garments were expensive, even more so if they were long, wide, embroidered, and further decorated. At a first glance they identified those who had large resources at their disposal. Everybody recognized the high economic value of the garments that are depicted in portraits, precisely listed in dowry lists, and

77

The dress of the lower orders in Europe (as well as of non-European populations) was instead misrepresented as stable and unaffected by fashion. Piponnier and Mane, Se vetir au Moyen Âge, 51–69.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

139

140

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

carefully governed by sumptuary laws. This highlights the choices of those who willingly decided to dress with moderation, distancing themselves from a value system based on the quantity of garments worn and the cost of fabrics and decorations. The importance that clothing and accessories played in the economy of a city and the weight they placed on the finances of a family is immediately understandable if we think that cloth production was at the core of medieval economies. Moreover spinning, weaving, and finishing – not to say the production of raw wool and silk – were key activities for entire families. Value increased even more with the work of seamstresses and tailors who produced the garments. It is estimated that possibly 20 per cent of the economic activities of the city of Pisa in the fifteenth century concerned the production of clothing. Cadastral records for Pisa in 1428–9 reveal at least 151 different professional categories in the city, out of which almost thirty related to the production and distribution of clothing and ornaments including producers of bags, shoemakers and makers of pianelle (platform shoes), hemp workers, trimmers, tanners, leatherworkers, doublet makers, haberdashers, goldsmiths, fabric merchants, second-hand dealers, rag merchants, purse makers, silk workers, textile and linen workers, etc.78 Even though the list is long, it is not comprehensive as it does not include the many men, women, and children who cut out cloaks, sewed hose, embellished belts, and produced hats and doublets. On many occasions, preachers defined the economic resources invested in garments and accessories as ‘dead money’. Similarly, the merchant and writer Paolo da Certaldo (1320–70) in his Book of Good Manners criticized the fact that already in the fourteenth century many ‘kept at home dead money, and spoiled in garments and ornaments capitals that would have been otherwise better employed in trade’.79 Da Certaldo and others forgot, however, 78

79

Bruno Casini, Aspetti della vita economica e sociale di Pisa dal catasto del 1428–1429 (Pisa: Biblioteca del Bollettino storico pisano, 1965), esp. 94–100. ‘tenere ne la casa morti i denari sciupando in vesti ed ornamenti capitali che sarebbe stato meglio impiegare nella mercantia’. Paolo da Certaldo, ‘Libro di buoni costumi’, in Vittore Branca (ed.), Mercanti scrittori (Milan: Rusconi, 1986), 85; Paolo da Certaldo, ‘Book of Good Practices’, in Vittore Branca (ed.), Merchant Writers of the Italian Renaissance, trans. Murtha Baca (New York: Marsilio, 1999), 41–97.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

that fashion helped to ‘move money’: it gave work to many artisans and merchants, and fostered continuous innovation to attract new customers who flocked to city shops. Well before the fifteenth century – a century that is recognized as a time of intense circulation of new fashions80 – what we might call the ‘fashion sector’ was already engaged in the production and trade of new as well secondhand garments.81 Producers made regular use of the female workforce, though rarely officially. The textile sector was the one with the highest female participation. Women worked in an official capacity in silk and gold spinning, and in the making of veils and headdresses, activities for which there are continuous mentions of women and their effective parity to men. Already in thirteenth-century Genoa, for instance, gold spinning was an exclusively female activity; in thirteenth-century Lucca as in Venice a century later, numerous female weavers worked in the production of light silks.82 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, in Florence, women constituted 62 per cent of weavers and 40 per cent of all workers in woolmanufacturing.83 Recent studies have contributed to reinterpret female work, so important in the production of fashion objects such as veils and bonnets.84 From an economic point of view, fashion promoted clear differences not only between people, but also between cities with 80

81

82

83

84

Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). Alessia Meneghin, The Social Fabric of Fifteenth-Century Florence: Identities and Change in the World of Second-Hand Dealers (London: Routledge, 2019). Luca Molà, ‘Le donne nell’industria serica veneziana del Rinascimento’, in Luca Molà, Reinhold C. Mueller, and Claudio Zanier (eds.), La seta in Italia dal Medioevo al Seicento. Dal baco al drappo (Venice: Marsilio, 2000), 423– 59; Luca Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Anna Bellavitis, Il lavoro delle donne nelle città dell’Europa moderna (Rome: Viella, 2016), 19. Maria Paola Zanoboni, Donne al lavoro nell’Italia e nell’Europa medievali (secoli XIII–XV) (Milan: Jouvance, 2016). For the early modern period more generally, see Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); and Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France (1675–1791) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2001).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

141

142

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

specific urban centres emerging as producers of particular types of good such as silk, wool, or golden thread. The production of garments played an important role in urban economies as well as in family finances. One can deduce the cost of specific items of clothing by the amount of fabric necessary for their production. For example, 24 arms (nearly 20 metres) of fabric were needed to produce a complete outfit composed of tunic, undershirt (guarnacca), and mantle, as indicated in the 1309–10 sumptuary laws for the city of Siena.85 Good-quality fabric could cost from 3 to 10 lire an arm (1 to 3 florins) and sometimes even more. Therefore, the cloth necessary for a complete outfit would cost no less than 30 to 40 florins, though one could spend considerably more by using valuable fabrics such as crimson velvet embroidered with gold. In the second half of the fifteenth century, Florentine crimson velvet cost from 3½ to 7 florins per arm, with varieties embroidered with gold costing as much as 20 florins per arm. As a tailor needed 13–14 arms of fabric to produce a garment, the expense could amount to 60–70 florins without accounting for the cost of the many decorations completing an outfit. In the mid-fifteenth century, the cost of a hundred peacock feathers to decorate a single headpiece was 60 florins. This was as much as the Florentine painter Neri di Bicci (1419–91) earned in six months painting the church of San Pancrazio in Florence or the same as a teacher of grammar or a skilled weaver would earn in a year.86 These additions and embellishments not only increased the cost of garments, but also gave work to a range of artisans beyond the necessary work of tailors.87 Artisanal labour was the element that influenced the least part of 85

86

87

Maria Assunta Ceppari Ridolfi, Enzo Mecacci, and Patrizia Turrini (eds.), La legislazione suntuaria dal Medioevo all’Età moderna nello spazio di Siena e Grosseto (Siena: Accademia degli Intronati, 2019), documents in attached CD, Siena, ‘statuto in volgare 1309–1310’, document no. 153. Jane Bridgeman, ‘“Pagare le pompe”: Why Quattrocento Sumptuary Laws Did Not Work’, in Letizia Panizza (ed.), Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2000), 209–26, esp. 217. Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and Fine Clothing (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), esp. 13–31; for an example from elsewhere in Europe, see Amy Erickson, ‘Esther Sleepe, Fan-Maker, and Her Family’, EighteenthCentury Life, 42/2 (2018), 15–37.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

the total value of clothing. Even though producing a complex garment or an elaborate headdress required substantial time and expertise, tailors were often badly paid and received little recognition for their work (Figure 5.9). Unlike later ‘fashion creators’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, late medieval and early modern tailors were considered mere makers rather than inventors or innovators, which was also the case for women artisans in the clothing trades.88 Precious textiles and other luxury objects were much valued socially because of their innate material worth and therefore their capacity to display wealth and privilege.89 The wearing of headpieces with a hundred feathers or with three hundred pearls (called in Italian Terzolla) was a clear way for those with substantial resources to distinguish themselves. Often these were not the same individuals to whom the sumptuary laws conceded the right to wear garments and accessories of high monetary value. These laws were not only tools to contain imports, but also to legitimate power: the nobility in power was able to control the sartorial and aesthetic ambitions of the rich bourgeoisie.90 Vice versa: in places where the bourgeoisie was in power these edicts might be tools to limit the ambitions of the nobility.91 Sumptuary laws intervened also to attempt to control expenses on clothing as at times they could be so large as to compromise family finances making it difficult to provide appropriate dowries for daughters. Men’s garments were no less expensive but received less attention 88

89

90

91

Elisa Tosi Brandi, L’arte del sarto nel Medioevo. Quando la moda diventa un mestiere (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2017), esp. 95–162 that presents useful tables concerning the value of fabrics. Richard A. Goldthwaite, ‘The Economy of Renaissance Italy: The Preconditions of Luxury Consumptions’, I Tatti Studies, 2 (1987), 15–39; Francesco Guidi Bruscoli, ‘Florence, Nuremberg and Beyond: Italian Silks in Central Europe during the Renaissance’, in Bart Lambert and Katherine Anne Wilson (eds.), Europe’s Rich Fabric: The Consumption, Commercialisation, and Production of Luxury Textiles in Italy, the Low Countries and Neighbouring Territories (Fourteenth–Sixteenth Centuries) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2016), 107–29. See also Dagmar Schaefer, Giorgio Riello, and Luca Molà (eds.), Threads of Global Desire: Silk in the Pre-Modern World (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018). Franco Franceschi, ‘La normativa suntuaria nella storia economica’, in Muzzarelli and Campanini (eds.), Disciplinare il lusso, 163–78. Hunt, Governance of Consuming Passion.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

143

144

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

Figure 5.9 Tacuinum Sanitatis, Medieval Health Handbook, dated before 1400, Tailor. Miniature, fol. 105 r. Photo by Prisma / UIG / Getty Images.

from legislators than women’s. Whoever is interested in the history of consumption can find in sumptuary laws precious information to cross-reference with prices and the value of single garments.92 In the mid-fifteenth century, a male garment in crimson velvet cost 25 ducats – as much as a piece of land measuring 3 92

Susan Mosher Stuart, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe

tornature (6,241 square metres) – and a complete male outfit to be used on important occasions cost 50–60 ducats, to which one had to add the cost of ornaments and accessories. Limitations were set: in the city of Bologna the maximum expenditure allowed for a bride (‘supra sponsam’) was 150 ducats, but only if the lady had received a dowry of 1,000 ‘lire bolognesi’ (almost 300 ducats).93 Garments and accessories not only sustained production and trade on a large scale but also found strategic meaning in the economy of families, where they were used to store capital. They generated money if lent or pawned and served as substitutes for money; they were also traded objects and gifts.94 Garments distinguished people by their geographical origin and social belonging, but also by their ability to choose or renounce material expenditure. They reflected the possibility of cherishing the ‘most gentle cloth’ (più gentigli panni) and conveyed power or affection.95 A garment could be recognized as a sign of a man’s benevolence towards his own wife.96 This provides another distinctive meaning related to intentions and sensibility.

conclusion Wardrobes are a rich reservoir of information: they reveal elements of production, of commerce and economic value; yet they are also a source of reflection on personal tastes, on choice and necessity.

93

94

95

96

Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Le spese per abbigliamento di un collega medievale, il maestro dello studio bolognese Giovanni Gaspare da Sala (2° metà XV sec.)’, Congress hosted in Valencia, 10–11 May 2018, in Between the Market and the Household: Consumption and Material Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Times (forthcoming). Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Avner Offer, ‘Between the Gift and the Market: The Economy of Regard’, Economic History Review, 50/4 (1997), 450–76; Brigitte Buettner, ‘Past Presents: New Year’s Gifts at the Valois Courts, c. 1400’, Art Bulletin, 83 (2001), 598–625. Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena, 1427, ed. Carlo Delcorno, 2 vols. (Milan: Rusconi, 1989), ii: Preach xxxvii: ‘Come ogni cosa di questo mondo è vanità’, 1068–98, esp. 1075. La legislazione suntuaria. Secoli XIII–XVI. Emilia-Romagna, ed. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli (Rome: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Direzione generale per gli Archivi, 2002): Bologna 1401, January, Registro della bollatura delle vesti, 147 record no. 202.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

145

146

maria giuseppina muzzarelli

This chapter has argued that wardrobes speak the language of politics, or hierarchy and materialized distinction both for individuals and groups. Fashion governs all of these topics as it is the endpoint of an analysis that in this chapter has been structured around different areas of the (gendered) body. I have used here the semiotic idea of communication though dress. The materiality of dress allows a person to be recognized and relate to other people. I have also consciously sidelined the concept of identity, often invoked when distinction is considered. I have preferred instead to show the many facets that distinction produces, not all of them easily captured by identity. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to talk about the ‘characterization’ produced by dress, a more fluid and changeable idea of the relationship between dress and distinction. Yet distinction is not enough: one has also to consider processes of hierarchization. Appearance acts differently across the imaginary ladder of hierarchy as well as across the material one of the body and its parts. It is also important in distinctions that are not hierarchical but horizontal: distinction as a form of distancing from others, for religious and cultural reasons, that are visually and materially marked as different. Yet the result is not necessarily rejection and refusal; dress can act as a form of knowledge building and acceptance.

select bibliography Blanc, Odile, Parades et parures. L’invention du corps à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). Bridgeman, Jane, ‘“Pagare le pompe”: Why Quattrocento Sumptuary Laws Did Not Work’, in Letizia Panizza (ed.), Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2000), 209–26. Erichsen, Paula Hohti, Artisans, Objects and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy: The Material Culture of the Middling Class (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Frick, Carole Collier, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and Fine Clothing (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the european medieval wardrobe Goldthwaite, Richard A., ‘The Economy of Renaissance Italy: The Preconditions of Luxury Consumptions’, I Tatti Studies, 2 (1987), 15–39. Hunt, Alan, Governance of the Consuming Passion: A History of Sumptuary Laws (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). Lemire, Beverly, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Muzzarelli, Maria Giuseppina, ‘Sumptuary Laws in Italy: Financial Resource and Instrument of Rule’, in Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 167–85. Parésys, Isabelle and Natacha Coquery (eds.), Se vetir à la cour en Europe (1400–1815) (Paris: Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2011). Piponnier, Françoise and Perrine Mane, Se vetir au Moyen Âge (Paris: Adam Biro, 1995). Riello, Giorgio, Back in Fashion: Western Fashion from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020). Rosenthal, Margaret F., ‘Cultures of Clothing in Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39/3 (2009), 459–81. Rublack, Ulinka, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Stuart, Susan Mosher, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Welch, Evelyn, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

147

6

w

THE MATERIAL REGULATION OF FASHION Sumptuary Laws in the Early Modern World giorgio riello In early fourteenth-century Egypt a new fashion spread: women began wearing qamı̄ ş (loose robes) with sleeves up to three ells wide that could cost as much as several months of a worker’s salary. In 1350–1 the vizier ordered that such sleeves should be cut and that these garments should no longer be produced. It is said that images of women who had been executed for wearing the forbidden garment were posted on the ramparts of Cairo as a warning. Yet a generation later, in the 1390s, wide sleeves were back in fashion and the new vizier forbade them once again as visible signs of decadence.1 This fashion spread to Europe where ladies in the Burgundian court also wore garments with extremely wide sleeves. Across the Mediterranean in the city of Venice, a law was issued in 1400 forbidding the distinctive bell-shaped sleeves for both men and women as well as the wearing of high collars that characterized what in Europe was named a ‘Gothic’ style (Figure 6.1).2 Legislators in Venice were more lenient than in Cairo, and tailors responded by lining the new tighter sleeves with fur, thus hastening a further intervention by the Venetian law three years later to forbid fur linings.3 Both in Cairo and Venice, what local rulers and officials had to contend with was the vagary of fashion and the consuming 1

2

3

Yedida Kalfon Stillman, Arab Dress: A Short History from the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times, ed. Norman Stillman (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2000), 77. Stella Mary Newton, The Dress of the Venetians, 1495–1525 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988), 51. Joseph P. Byrne, The World of Renaissance Italy: A Daily Life Encyclopaedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2017), 272.

148

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

Figure 6.1 Courtly dance fresco from the ‘jousting hall’, Castel Roncolo, Bolzano, Italy. End of the fourteenth century. Antony SOUTER / Alamy Stock Photo CYBH7 K.

behaviour of their subjects and citizens that they saw as profoundly troubling. Their edicts attempted to convince people to give up these new ‘habits’ deemed to be wasteful in their use of costly imported fabrics. They thought that wide sleeves, precious decorations, pointed shoes, and other luxuries squandered the wealth of the nation and encouraged behaviour that challenged decorum and the dictates of religion. Both in Cairo and Venice legislators enacted sumptuary laws aimed at governing expenditure on dress as well as ceremonies such as weddings, banquets, and funerals. In the period from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries such laws were frequently issued in many parts of the world. This chapter argues that they should be interpreted as measures – often ineffective and selectively enforced – of what I call a ‘material regulation’: the ways in which social units were governed through the efficient use of resources and their material and consumer practices. Central to what one author has called the ‘governance of the consuming passions’ was the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

149

150

giorgio riello

state.4 Either empires, republics, or monarchical proto-nations, pre-modern states had an interest in shaping the material practices of their subjects – nobles and citizens first, but servants, slaves, and other subaltern categories as well. Pre-modern modes of governance shaped behaviour, restrained bodies, and moulded social practices through material means: objects were not simple inert props of consumption, but operated in a world in which they were both scarce and often expensive, and had symbolic and representational value. Abstract laws and principles on how a society should work and how individuals should behave were ‘reified’ through detailed regulations that mobilized objects as weapons of rulership. In such a context, it is not surprising that dress was at the centre of attention of legislators: often flaunted on social occasions and eminently visible in public spaces, dress more than other material goods was a subject of discussion, of disagreement and of great concern. Cloth was expensive and its making was one of the key economic activities of pre-modern economies. Fabric (Fr.: tissue; It.: tessuto) today as in the past is a metonymy of society’s cohesiveness. Legislators took care of the fabric of society by controlling the material fabric that constituted its economy and social relations. They did so through a series of extremely detailed rules about what one could or could not wear, how much cloth could be consumed, the value of accessories and the maximum expenditure on trimmings, fur, gold and silver, and other luxuries. This chapter begins by providing a broad and global panorama of sumptuary laws. Far from being a prerogative of Europe, they were present in areas as different as Japan, China, and the Americas.5 The main part of the chapter deals with two issues: first the ways in which sumptuary laws reflected on the material world that they aimed to shape and govern: body and dress form here a material entity that needs to be considered together to explain innovation (fashion) and excess (luxury). Second, it investigates the ways in 4

5

Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

which the ‘material regulation’ of sumptuary laws related to the political economy of medieval and early modern states. The remit considered is much wider than simple economic control and includes consideration of the ‘commonwealth’ – the harmonious working of a society. States most commonly used sumptuary laws as cautionary measures though infrequently they actually enacted the letter of the law. This was especially the case in times of perceived crisis when the balance between the power of the state and the action of its subjects was considered unstable. The chapter concludes by arguing that over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and most especially in Europe, this ‘material regulation’ gave way to a new kind of ‘immaterial’ system. States were no longer interested in governing materiality – or perhaps were unable to – and developed instead a new language of governance that was abstract: material goods became typologies, and instead of controlling the social behaviour of citizens, legislators focused on the application of abstract principles.

why a law? sumptuary regulations in a global context Since the late nineteenth century, hundreds of publications have considered why and how the regulation of dress was both possible and indeed desirable in the pre-modern era. Italian sumptuary laws have received a great deal of attention partly because of the number of such laws passed by the small and large city-states of the peninsula from 1150 onwards.6 Several other publications describe similarly complex legislation in most early modern European states.7 In recent years historians have pointed to the fact that fashion was not 6

7

For Italy, see in particular Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy’, in John Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 69–99; Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Le regole del lusso: apparenze e vita quotidiana dal Medioevo all’età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2020). Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli and Antonella Campanini (eds.), Disciplinare il lusso: la legislazione suntuaria in Italia e in Europa tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Rome: Carocci, 2003).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

151

152

giorgio riello

the sole prerogative of Europe, and that sumptuary laws were to be found in many pre-modern empires such as Tang and Ming China, the Ottoman Empire, the pre-Columbian Aztec Empire, as well as Japan.8 This ‘globalization’ of the study of sumptuary laws can be seen as a salutary act as it relativizes some of the findings produced by research on Europe.9 However, the wider the angle of research, the more complex it becomes to define what such regulation might entail, the contours of legislation, the agents who enacted it, and whom it attempted to control. The minimum common denominator of sumptuary laws is a prohibition: the laws stated who could wear what and, in doing so, they limited use. Prohibitions could be for everyone, but most often they came as a gradient of permission depending on social standing in society.10 Sumptuary laws were rarely formulated as obligations: they did not impose specific types of dress. Instances of this kind of dictate are common as in the case of the Western attire imposed by Peter the Great of Russia on his subjects or the dress reforms in places as different as Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Madagascar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When a specific form of attire is imposed (rather than forbidden), it is called a ‘clothing law’.11 A second problem is that of origin. Most accounts of sumptuary laws focus on the later middle ages and the early modern period and start with the first Western sumptuary regulation enacted in the 8

9

10

11

Publications on Japanese sumptuary laws had already appeared in English in the 1950s and 1960s: Donald Shively, ‘Bakufu versus Kabuki’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 18 (1955), 326–56; Donald Shively, ‘Sumptuary Regulation and Status in Early Tokugawa Japan’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 25 (1964–5), 123–64. On the Aztec Empire: Patricia Anawalt, ‘Aztec Sumptuary Laws’, Archaeology, 33/1 (1980), 33–43. On the Ottoman Empire: Madeline C. Zilfi, ‘Whose Laws? Gendering the Ottoman Sumptuary Laws’, in Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann (eds.), Ottoman Costumes: From Textile to Identity (Istanbul: EREN, 2004), 125–42. On Tang China: BuYun Chen, Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), 47–76. Ulinka Rublack and Giorgio Riello, ‘Introduction’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 1–33. Giorgio Riello, ‘Fashion in the Four Parts of the World: Time, Space and Early Modern Global Change’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in Global History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 54–8. Donald Quataert, ‘Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 29 (1997), 403–25.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

Italian city of Genoa in 1157. Over the following centuries thousands of laws, edicts, and regulations followed. Alan Hunt suggests that such regulations are a marker of economic dynamism and it is not by chance that they were frequent and abundant in many of the city-states of medieval Italy. They became more prominent in Germany (for which more than 3,500 texts and laws exist), as well as in newly formed states such as France, Spain, Portugal, and England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the economies of these countries expanded and diversified.12 Yet, sumptuary laws were in no sense a new phenomenon as they existed in ancient Rome as well as in ancient China. In ancient Rome the Lex Oppia of 215 bce banned women from wearing multi-coloured clothing and more than an ounce of gold in jewellery, though it was the regulation of banquets and food, and the use of carriages and horses that were at the core of these laws.13 In ancient China the length and elaborateness of mourning rites as well as the ornamentation of graves and funerals were deemed worthy of regulation.14 In both Rome and China the remit of sumptuary regulation was much wider than dress as what was at stake was the material wealth of individuals. The lens of global history reveals a composite picture in which sumptuary laws fulfilled diverse functions at different times and in different places. The explanation put forward in the study of European sumptuary regulation was what Ulinka Rublack deftly called a dream of ‘sartorial inertia’.15 Dress was a signifier of social standing, and in a society profoundly hierarchical, its material form became a means to differentiate classes of people and put them in relation to each other. What was not allowed to the artisan, was allowed in moderation to the professional classes such as doctors and lawyers, and often without limits to nobles and the 12 13

14

15

Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, 28–33. Daniel J. Gargola, The Shape of the Roman Order: The Republic and Its Spaces (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 194. See also Valentina Arena, ‘Roman Sumptuary Legislation: Three Concepts of Liberty’, European Journal of Political Theory, 10/4 (2011), 463–89. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991), 148. Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 266.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

153

154

giorgio riello

social elites.16 This was the case, for instance, of silk, not just richly patterned silk cloth, but also cheaper – and therefore more affordable – silk ribbons, decorations, and trimmings. Yet the extent – one might say the depth of the law – varied markedly. Over time in Europe sumptuary laws became increasingly comprehensive in an attempt to capture the entire width of society from the most menial individual to a kingdom’s ruler. By comparison, in China sumptuary laws focused on the dress of the social elites. Here what was important to the governance of the empire was not the dress of the hundreds of millions of its subjects but the differentiation according to strict court and administrative rank of its elites. Similarly, while European laws were frequently updated, those of China were infrequently repeated. In England, for instance, six statutes on sumptuary regulation were issued between 1337 and 1509.17 In China several centuries passed without any new regulation being enacted under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).18 These comparisons might appear outlandish as they overlook the institutional, political, and cultural differences between pre-modern Europe and Ming China. Yet they also alert us to the fact that dress had differing significance across the world. This is best exemplified by the sumptuary laws enacted in Spanish America. The Spanish Crown had issued complex laws over the course of the sixteenth century, and by the early seventeenth century it intervened with sumptuary laws aimed at all of its imperial possessions from the West Indies to the Philippines.19 They followed the mother country’s examples though at the same time they diverged significantly from Spain. Two Recopolacións of 1641 and 1680 respectively systematized a corpus of regulations developed over the previous century. 16

17

18

19

Paula Hohti Erichsen, Artisans, Objects and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy: The Material Culture of the Middling Class (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), esp. ch. 3. Kim M. Phillips, ‘Masculinities and the Medieval English Sumptuary Laws’, Gender and History, 19/1 (2007), 23. BuYun Chen, ‘Wearing the Hat of Loyalty: Imperial Power and Dress Reform in Ming Dynasty China’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 423. Osvaldo F. Pardo, ‘How to Punish Indians: Law and Cultural Change in Early Colonial Mexico’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48/1 (2006), 102.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

In line with European laws, they established that the weaving of silk was forbidden not only to barbers, cape makers, carpenters, cloth cutters, ironworkers, tailors, and weavers, but also to tradesmen of the lower orders.20 Yet, the simple entitlements of the social and professional classes were only marginal elements in the structure and purpose of the laws across the Spanish Empire. Here race – rather than class – was a structuring criterion as can be evinced in many casta paintings representing sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Spanish colonial society.21 So, in sixteenth-century Mexico women of colour were allowed to wear gold, pearls, silk, and other luxurious goods only if they were married to a Spaniard (Figure 6.2). Similarly, they could wear Indian dress only if married to an Indian. There were also limits to these permutations and the acquisition of rights through marriage: men would not acquire the rights of their wives and all Indian women were forbidden to wear Spanish dress.22 Spanish America differed from the mother country for its unique mixing of people: in the city of Lima in the seventeenth century, sumptuary laws specifically targeted ‘negroes, mulattos and zambos’ who could not wear a sword or other weapons, and black and mulatto women who were forbidden to wear woollen and silk cloth as well as silver or gold lace.23 Across colonial societies, the sartorial position of slaves was also the subject of much discussion and legislation. Even the

20

21

22

23

Abby Sue Fisher, ‘Trade Textiles: Asia and New Spain’, in Donna Pierce and Ronald Otsuka (eds.), Asia and Spanish America: Trans-Pacific Artistic and Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850 (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2009), 185–7. On casta paintings, see Ilona Katzev, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004); Rebecca Earle, ‘The Pleasures of Taxonomy: Casta Paintings, Classification, and Colonialism’, William and Mary Quarterly, 73/3 (2016), 427–66. Rebecca Earle, ‘“Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!”: Race, Clothing and Identity in the American (17th–19th Centuries)’, History Workshop Journal, 52 (2001), 187–8; Araceli Tinajero, ‘Far Eastern Influences in Latin American Fashions’, in Regina A. Root (ed.), The Latin America Fashion Reader (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 68–9. Rebecca Earle, ‘Luxury, Clothing and Race in Colonial Spanish America’, in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 223. Zambo is a person of mixed African and Amerindian ancestry. Today the term is derogatory.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

155

156

giorgio riello

Figure 6.2 Miguel Cabrera, Pintura de Castas, 4. De español y negra, mulata, c. 1763. Oil on canvas, 148.0 × 117.5 cm. Museo Historia Mexicana Monterrey. Collection of Lydia Sada de González. The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo MMWYJK.

Dutch who had vehemently opposed sumptuary regulation at home, keenly enacted an ordinance in 1786 detailing that in the colonies gold and silver and precious stones, silk, lace and other costly fabrics were all prohibited to slaves.24 In French Saint-Domingue while the so-called Code Noir of 1685 established minimum quantities of clothing to be provided to slaves 24

Neville A. T. Hall, Slave Societies in the Danish West Indies: St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix (Jamaica: University Press of the West Indies, 1992), 116.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

by their owners, by the 1720s sumptuary laws were issued regulating the dress of freed slaves as well as valets, servants, and field slaves. The passing of these laws is symptomatic of a shift in colonial culture and possibly of higher standards of living for freed slaves. Yet they also highlighted a tension in slave societies caused not only by the blurring of visible and material boundaries between freed and non-freed blacks but also between different ranks of enslaved people.25 This is well captured in the many paintings by the Italian artist Agostino Brunias (1728–96) showing idealized scenes in Dominica. Notwithstanding the pictorial convention and the bucolic scenes, his paintings show the diversity of fabrics available and the importance of fashion among local free and unfree populations (Figure 6.3). The presence of sumptuary codes in colonial contexts is a relatively new area of enquiry that has emerged thanks to a re-evaluation of consumption in Europe’s maritime empires. Travellers’ accounts, diaries, inventories, and contemporary histories all point to the high levels of consumption especially among Europeans in the outposts of empire. Conspicuous consumption and luxury were matters of great concern in the home countries as it was perceived that the overseas imperial project was undermined by levels of profligacy unknown at home. This was not just the case of the Americas: in the early eighteenth century, the viceroy of Portuguese India, Vasco Fernandes César de Meneses, complained about the luxury to be seen everywhere in Goa. Beautiful palanquins were used to transport Portuguese men and their wives around the city; scores of servants were employed to provide shade with umbrellas made of precious velvet and damask; and huge expenditure on funerals was not infrequent (Figure 6.4).26

25

26

Chaela Pastore, ‘Consumer Choices and Colonial Identity in Saint-Domingue’, French Colonial History, 2 (2002), 77–92. Nandini Chaturvedula, ‘On the Precipice of Ruin: Consumption, Sumptuary Laws, and Decadence in Early Modern Portuguese India’, Journal of World History, 26/2 (2016), 355–7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

157

158

giorgio riello

Figure 6.3 Agostino Brunias, Market Day, in Roseau, Dominica, c. 1780. Oil on canvas, 35.6 × 46.4 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection B1981.25.77.

From Portuguese Asia, to Dutch Batavia and Spanish Latin America, the regulation of dress in areas of the world controlled by European maritime powers became pervasive especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at the very time when similar laws were either disappearing or were increasingly ignored in Europe. The last English sumptuary law was repealed in 1603, yet by the late seventeenth century legislators in colonial Virginia and Massachusetts were keen to legislate on the kinds of colours, styles, and fabrics that could be worn on the basis of their wearers’ financial and social position. Lace, silk, hoods, scarves, and ribbons, for instance, were mentioned in sumptuary codes and forbidden for colonists with estates under £200.27 The American case 27

Linzy A. Brekke, ‘The “Scourge of Fashion”: Political Economy and the Politics of Consumption in the Early Republic’, Early American Studies, 3/ 1 (2005), 114.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

Figure 6.4 Portuguese nobleman in India accompanied by servants. Illustration from Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s Itinerario (Amsterdam, 1594–5). Etching and engraving. The History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo J8EXJ1.

turned out to be a false start: while a concern remained about the danger of overconsumption among colonists, British America did not have to contend with the complex ethnic stratification of its Spanish counterpart. The conspicuous consumption of goods imported from the mother country was perceived as a lesser evil by colonial administrations. The relative absence of sumptuary laws in North America, in contrast with their full implementation in Latin America, shows the importance of context and the fact that specific areas of the world never developed a fully articulated sumptuary system. This was the case of the Mughal and Safavid empires in Asia (in opposition to the Ottoman Empire). In Europe, in the territories of the present-day Low Countries the only attempt made at introducing a sumptuary ordinance was in 1497 when it was established that no one could wear

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

159

160

giorgio riello

velvet except barons and wives of knights.28 This, however, was very much a law protecting the local cloth industry. The States of Holland in the following century issued plakkaat (written warning) that listed the disadvantages of wearing conspicuous dress, but did not proceed to banning it, simply taxing it instead.29

the material regulation of people The examples provided so far reveal that the material regulation of the pre-modern world is in no sense to be conceived just as a conceptual category: it was defined instead through the identification of behavioural rules and their relation to a well-defined system of material artefacts. Sumptuary laws created a complex web between things, people, and their actions, controlled and regulated by a puppet-master state. As the body politic of the state sought to govern itself, so it required a discipline of the physical bodies of its subjects and citizens. This is in no sense a Foucauldian use of power as pre-modern states were unable to impose constant and continuous authority. Power was exercised instead in more subtle ways and most especially through the control of the meanings that material artefacts could attribute to bodies. Terence Turner observes that ‘the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well’.30 It is the social self that pre-modern states had the ambition to shape. In 1462, for instance, Doge Cristoforo Moro admonished that ‘let it not that women have long tails in their dress, that they trail on the floor, as this is a diabolical thing’.31 28

29

30

31

Frederik Buylaert, Wim De Clercq, and Jan Dumolyn, ‘Sumptuary Legislation, Material Culture and the Semiotics of “vivre noblemen” in the County of Flanders (14th– 16th Centuries)’, Social History, 36/4 (2011), 401–2. Robert Ross, ‘Sumptuary Laws in Europe, the Netherlands, and the Dutch Colonies’, in Nigel Worden (ed.), Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World (Cape Town: Rodenbosch, 2007), 385. Terence Turner, ‘The Social Skin’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2/ 2 (2012 [1980]), 486. ‘Ne mulieres tam longas caudas in vestimentis habeant, et per terram trahant, quae res diabolica est’. Cited in P. G. Molmenti, Storia di Venezia nella vita privata dalle origini alla caduta della Repubblica (Turin: Roux et Favale, 1880), 268.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

Like him, late medieval preachers such as the contemporary Italian Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola admonished Godfearing women by saying that ‘the cow [vacca, slang for whore in Italian] is a stupid and large animal, a piece of meat with eyes. Women, make it sure that your daughters are not cows [whores]; make it sure that they cover their breasts; and make it sure they do not wear trains like cows’ tails . . . but that they behave like good honest women.’32 This zoomorphism left no doubt that the acquisition of ‘tails’ was both physically and morally dysmorphic.33 Moro and Savonarola’s words are not surprising: Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass remind us that in the pre-modern world, social and even gender identities were not performed through dress but were created by dress: the superficial – the ‘skin’ in Turner’s parlance – was as profound and ontological as one’s soul and civic identity.34 Legislators did not fail to see a profound relationship between dress and higher moral and civic principles. Chopines (pianelle) were high-platform shoes (made of cork or wood and covered in fabric) popular in Europe especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 1438 the Major Council of the city of Venice passed legislation forbidding the wearing of such tall shoes. The law lamented this ‘despicable’ fashion of pianelle that were both ‘deformed’ and deforming the body of their wearers: in a rare instance for sumptuary laws, an image of these abnormal objects was drawn (Figure 6.5).35 It was thought that pianelle caused pregnant women to fall and abort, with great harm to ‘both their bodies and their souls’.36 The natural state of bodies was 32

33

34

35

36

Cited in Giorgio Riello, Back in Fashion: A History of Western Fashion since the Middle Ages (London: Yale University Press, 2020), 35. Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and Fine Clothing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 190. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Doretta Davanzo Poli, Abiti antichi e moderni dei veneziani (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2002), 57. Cited in Andrea Vianello, ‘Courtly Lady or Courtesan? Cultural Meaning and Venetian Chopines in Early Modern Venice’, in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds.), Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 133.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

161

162

giorgio riello

Figure 6.5 Venetian courtesan, from Pietro Bertelli’s Diversarum nationum habitus, 1592. Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo E8FA87.

a preoccupation both of religious men and legislators that included the use of rigid hoops and stays, complex headdresses and tight outfits.37 Giovanni da Capestrano, the fifteenthcentury author of the treatise De usu cuiuscumque ornatus (The Use of Any Kind of Ornament – dealing especially with women’s ornaments), thought it a capital sin to use the hair of another person with the only exception being the use of tow for 37

Owen Hughes, ‘Regulating Women’s Fashion’, in Christiane Klapish-Zuber (ed.), Silences of the Middle Ages, Volume 2: A History of Women in the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 150.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

hiding baldness. In the city of Foligno in 1426 it was forbidden to wear hoods and other coverings as well as ‘any head of hair that is not live, natural and from one’s head’.38 The controlling of bodies translated into full prohibitions, but most commonly proceeded through detailed measured-out indications of the number of dresses a lady could own, the lengths of fabrics used, and the specific types and qualities of the cloth allowed. The intrinsic value of things (often expressed in currency) was to match the worth of people who used them. Across space and time, specific types of goods seem to have been key to the sumptuary project. This is the case of gold, as jewellery but also in the form of gold buttons, trimmings, and other embellishments, as well as gold as the material used in the most costly types of silks: the cloth of gold, and gold-thread velvets and lampas. The resplendence of gold – as well as the use of silver and precious stones – was already a topic of regulation in early Castilian sumptuary laws of the thirteenth century.39 Two centuries later, the power of gold was clearly expressed by the artist Benozzo Gozzoli who frescoed the chapel of the rich and powerful Florentine family of the Medici with scenes of the arrival of the magi. Coming from the East, the magi are presented as wearing resplendent cloth of gold and silver. The young King Caspar (Figure 6.6) has been identified by some art historians as representing the ten-year-old Lorenzo Il Magnifico (1449–92), the Medici dynasty’s future. Gold in this case is not just an attribute of wealth and power, but also the material embodiment of one of Florence’s most important productive sectors: the production of Europe’s most sought-after cloth of gold.40 Extant cloth of gold and ‘pomegranate’ velvets similar to those represented in the Medici’s 38

39

40

‘aliquam compositionem capillorum qui non essent inanti, vivi et naturales proprii capitis’. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Ma cosa avevano in testa? Copricapi femminili proibiti e consentiti fra Medioevo ed Età moderna’, in Claudio Pancino and Renato G. Mazzolini (eds.), Un bazar di storie. A Giuseppe Olmi per il sessantesimo genetliaco (Trento: Università degli studi di Trento, 2006), 13–14. Clara Estow, ‘The Politics of Gold in Fourteenth-Century Castile’, Mediterranean Studies, 8 (1999), 136. Katalin Prajda, ‘Goldsmiths, Goldbeaters and Other Gold Workers in Early Renaissance Florence’, in Eva Jullien and Michael Pauly (eds.), Craftsmen and Guilds in Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016), 195–220.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

163

164

giorgio riello

Figure 6.6 King Caspar (possibly Lorenzo Il Magnifico as a boy), east wall of the frescoes in the Chapel of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1459–60. Palazzo Medici-Ricciardi, Florence, Italy.

chapel still convey the chromatic richness produced by the use of gold and silver threads (Figures 6.7(a) and (b)). Cloth of gold was singled out as one of the fabrics whose use was generally prohibited by the 1530 ordinances issued by Emperor

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

Charles V in an attempt to reduce the expense on imported goods into the empire.41 The importance of gold to indicate status can also be seen in the 1574 Scottish statute that precluded any woman under the rank of countess to wear: ‘Cloth of gold, cloth of silver, tinselled satin, satin branched with silver or gold, satin striped with silver or gold, taffetas branched with silver or gold, taffetas with gold or silver grounds, tinselled taffetas tufted or plain, tinselled cypresses, Cypresses flourished with silver or gold, gold or silver camlets, networks wrought with silver or gold’.42 Across Eurasia in seventeenth-century Batavia, gold was not forbidden, but Dutch colonists were warned against wearing costly clothing and gold and silver ornaments.43 We see a tension not just between virtue versus expenditure, but also between public probity and personal dissolution. In Russia the use of gold and silver was restricted explicitly with the aim of supporting the need for specie.44 From the point of view of the state, gold found better use in the economy or in treasuries rather than on the bodies of its subjects. Gold’s omnipresence in sumptuary laws, not just in Europe but also in China, Japan, India, Russia, and the colonial Americas and Asia is indicative of a concern on the part of states and governments with what they thought was conspicuous consumption. The debate over the definition of luxury in pre-modern societies is vast but one can generalize by saying that luxury was perceived as negative.45 It was not just morally repulsive but also economically and socially

41

42

43

44

45

Ulinka Rublack, ‘The Right to Dress: Sartorial Politics in Germany, c. 1300– 1750’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 48. Maria Hayward, ‘“Outlandish Superfluities”: Luxury and Clothing in Scottish and English Sumptuary Law from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 104–5. Adam Clulow, ‘Splendour and Magnificence: Diplomacy and Sumptuary Codes in Early Modern Batavia’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 315. Matthew P. Romaniello, ‘Grandeur and Show: Clothing, Commerce and the Capital in Early Modern Russia’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 391–2. Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello, Luxury: A Rich History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch. 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

165

166

giorgio riello

Figure 6.7(a) Hanging of velvet, silk, and metal thread, late fifteenth to mid-seventeenth century, Italian, probably Florence. 318.8 × 172.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 67.55.101. Bequest of Susan Dwight Bliss, 1966.

nefarious. However, sumptuary laws recognized that one person’s luxury was someone else’s necessity. It therefore imposed gradients of luxury not just as a concession to social status but also as an acknowledgement that the ‘social self’ had to ‘dress the part’. Sumptuary laws invoke the common good in their limitations, but paradoxically such ‘commonwealth’ rested on a principle of inequality of individuals. In 1602, for instance, Philip III issued a sumptuary law to address ‘the great excesses and excessive expenses that have prevailed in our kingdoms’ in both male and female dress. The

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

Figure 6.7(b) Silk panel. Silk, plain weave variation with twill interlacings of secondary binding warps and gilt-metal-strip-wrapped silk supplementary facing wefts forming weft loop pile in areas and supplementary pile warps forming cut pile-on-pile voided velvet. Late fifteenth century. Italy, Florence or Venice. 130.8 × 61.5 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago 1948.143b. Gift of Mrs Chauncey McCormick and Mrs Richard Ely Danielson. Photo by Sepia Times / Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

decree prohibited all people, regardless of ‘gender, class, quality, and condition’ from wearing items of clothing decorated in any fashion with gold, silver, pearls, seed pearls, and stones. However, less than a decade later the law had to be amended to allow for more flexibility as to whom it applied to, especially in the use of pearls

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

167

168

giorgio riello

(Figure 6.8).46 Luxury was not an abstract principle but a practice: Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli in her analysis of Italian sumptuary laws observes how the regulation of luxury was a matter of controlling people from ‘head to toe’: not only their outfits and the materials they were made of, but also accessories such as veils, headwear, shoes, and trimmings, as well as jewellery, feathers, and crowns.47 Legislators struggled to govern this material world because of its complexity, variety, and, most importantly, change over time. Sumptuary laws are intricate not just in their form but also in their content: they list garments, accessories, and their materials and worth in overwhelming detail. In all probability, legislators had to resort to the help of skilled craftsmen, tailors, cloth merchants, and jewellers to draw precise specifications of the types and quality of fabrics, the dyestuff used, the silver and gold metal allowed, as well as the value of all objects listed.48 Consumers and producers found ways to circumvent the law: in seventeenthcentury Japan, for instance, it was reported that ‘in order to keep within the prescribed [maximum] price, some [merchants] declare only the cost of the gold-thread [for embroidery], or the fold leaf appliqué . . . having provided separately the actual material for the robe’.49 Subsequent laws would rectify these types of circumventions. Sumptuary laws present a panoptical view that they thought could materially secure society. The letter of the law could only be an enemy to fashion: a force of change that was disorderly and confusing in relation to a clear sartorial delineation of society. Their updating – more or less frequently depending on local circumstances – was not uncommon.50 On rare occasions it is possible to map a direct correlation between 46

47 48

49

50

Molly A. Warsh, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492– 1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 164. Muzzarelli, Le regole del lusso, ch. 2. Catherine Kovesi Killerby, ‘Practical Problems in the Enforcement of Italian Sumptuary Law, 1200–1500’, in Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (eds.), Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 112. Cited in Alan Kennedy, Japanese Costume: History and Tradition (Paris: Adam Biro, 1990), 18. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Reconciling the Privilege of a Few with the Common Good: Sumptuary Laws in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

Figure 6.8 Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Portrait of Doña Ana de Velasco y Girón, duchess of Bragança, 1603. Collection of Alicia KoplowitzGrupo Omega Capital. Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images.

innovation, fashion, and sumptuary response.51 In the thirteenth century – at the same time as they made an entrance into European fashion – corals, amber, crystal, and gold and silver buttons were all new materials that legislators forbade. The importance of the new – often imported – items was fully appreciated by legislators. In the Tuscan city of Pistoia, for

51

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39/3 (2009), 597–617; Muzzarelli, Le regole del lusso, ch. 1. Evelyn Welch, ‘Introduction’, in Evelyn Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 8–9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

169

170

giorgio riello

instance, a 1332 sumptuary law forbade not just gold and silver, but also newly imported materials such as enamel, pearls, mother-of-pearl, coral, and amber.52 The new and the fashionable were strictly linked to the material: in Ming China as well as in Japan or in Europe what was regulated in minute detail in law was the type of fabric rather than the cut of the cloth.53 In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan, for instance, sumptuary laws indicated that overdressing was about overuse of cloth in garments cut too amply and that the grammar of fashion rested on the wearing of foreign and therefore expensive cloth.54 One area of great importance was colour: red, white, and deep hues for instance were universally forbidden to peasants and workers, the two largest classes in pre-modern societies. This prohibition was found in Europe as Michel Pastoureau has observed in his studies of individual colours, as well as in many parts of Asia.55 In Ming China, for instance, dark blue, green, and scarlet were only for the upper classes, with paler shades of blue, lilac, and peach for the lower classes.56 This chromatic differentiation of society was a topic of much friction as common people relished the idea of wearing colourful garments and accessories. It was not just a matter of fashion: in 1288 the Italian city of Bologna forbade anyone to be buried in scarlet cloth, with the exception of doctors and knights, their wives, daughters, fathers and mothers.57 In death, the rare and precious scarlet cloth was reserved for a minority. Yet a distinction remained between

52 53 54

55

56

57

Muzzarelli, Le regole del lusso, 105–6. Clunas, Superfluous Things, 150. Timon Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700– 1820 (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 114–16. See Michel Pastoureau’s books on Black (2008), Green (2014), Red (2016), Blue (2018), and Yellow (2019), all published by Yale University Press. See also Michel Pastoureau, The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003). Sarah Dauncey, ‘Illusions of Grandeur: Perceptions of Status and Wealth in Late-Ming Female Clothing and Ornamentation’, East Asian History, 25–26 (2003), 47. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘I cavalieri nelle legislazioni suntuarie: casi’, in Franco Cardini, Isabella Gagliardi, and Giuseppe Ligato (eds.), Cavalieri e città (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 2009), 109.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

those who had access to expensive imported dyes such as kermes, indigo, and from the sixteenth century cochineal, and those who had to content themselves with more fugitive dyes such as woad, madder, saffron, weald, and turmeric, what in French is called ‘petit teint’.58 The arrival of new dyeing substances to Europe and most especially cochineal from the New World after 1540 was a major innovation that challenged sumptuary regulations intended to restrict their use. Such new dye challenged also other regulations as for instance applied by silk guilds to manufacturing. While a solid green silk selvage on a red velvet had been used in the sixteenth century to indicate the use of kermes as a colourant, extant examples show that a green selvage with a silver thread down the centre was imposed to indicate that cochineal was used (Figure 6.9).59 Even if the introduction of new materials, types of cloth, dyes, and objects were problematic for the rigid world of sumptuary laws, it would be a mistake to think that the law always fought against fashion. In sixteenth-century Florence, for instance, Cosimo I changed the yardage allowed for men’s short cloaks from 3 braccia (c. 1.75 m) in 1562 to 4 braccia (2.3 m) in 1568. Similarly, a woman’s overgown had a limit of 25 braccia in 1562 and 27 in 1568. This was done in all probability to accommodate the new fashion for bands of contrasting colours that were applied to garments and cloaks.60 The updating of the law had therefore to consider the ‘material context’ of the society that it governed in order not to become prematurely obsolete.

58

59

60

Vittoria Ceriani and Cesare della Pietà, Dal baco alla seta: tecniche, applicazioni e prospetti della bachicoltura (Milan: Ottoviani, 1984), 185. Luca Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 129; Elena Phipps and Nobuko Shibayama, ‘Tracing Cochineal Through the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum’, in Textile Society of America Symposium, Proceedings Textile Society of America, DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska – Lincoln, 2010, https:// digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=tsaconf (accessed 25 April 2023). Elizabeth Currie, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 19.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

171

172

giorgio riello

Figure 6.9 Fragment of red silk velvet, Italy, sixteenth century showing a green selvage with a silver thread indicating that cochineal was used. 35.6 × 26.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2002.494.469. Gift of Nanette B. Kelekian, in honour of Olga Raggio, 2002. Agefotostock / Alamy Stock Photo KNJE2E.

the material regulation of society I have so far argued that the materiality that was so central to the sumptuary project was not passive. Material things allowed for what today we would call ‘social engineering’. While the type of society that they strived to achieve was mostly hierarchical, it was also flexible enough to reshape itself over time through materiality. Material objects allowed the balancing of the interests of the state (politics and policies), ideologies (of the church and government), economic forces (in manufacturing and commerce), and what today we would call ‘the self’ (socio-cultural affiliations and identities of individuals, families, and other social structures). I argue here that sumptuary laws show that the balancing act of these different forces was achieved in pre-modern societies through material means: it

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

was believed that the correct management of material possessions could produce a harmonious society. A multifarious material world presented a challenge for established hierarchies. This is what Beverly Lemire has defined in the collision between a ‘fashion system’ based on choice and a ‘licence system’ based instead on control and permission on the part of the state.61 In 1551 thirteen local gentlemen wrote to the Duke of Mantua concerning the recent sumptuary law enacted in the city. They complained that the law did not give sufficient thought to social difference: ‘it seems strange to us that the reputation that some of us have acquired through the virtue of our ancestors and preserved with much effort and expense for the service of this excellent dynasty [the Gonzaga], is today so much vilified, as shown in the fact that in distinguishing people, we are placed next to the lowest and meanest people of this city’.62 They argued that social distinction had to be supported by visual and material differentiation. They signalled their displeasure in the fact that sumptuary laws did not go far enough to protect their interests, a sign that one cannot generalize with the theory of a widespread discontent with sumptuary laws. The Mantua gentlemen were interested in the ways in which sumptuary laws could actively reshape hierarchies by imposing visual and material distinction. Yet modulating material access was a tricky business as it was not just about ‘stabilizing’ an existing social system. Status was in the medieval and early modern periods a composite and flexible construct that identified people. It was also part and parcel of the everyday performativity of guilds, political life, and civic rituals. So sumptuary laws were not simply acting on a blank slate but had to contend with people’s sense of self-identity and their standing in the community. The law served 61

62

Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 91, 95. ‘Et ci pare strano che la reputazione dei alcuni di noi acquistata colla virtù de’ nostri antecessori et conservata per noi con tanto sudore et spesa in servigio di questa illustrissima casa, debba hora essere così vilipesa, ch’havendosi a far discernenza di persone, dobbiamo essere nuoi posti a rubbio con gli più infimi et vili di questa città’. Cited in Carlo Marco Belfanti, Civiltà della moda (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008), 25.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

173

174

giorgio riello

as much to fix as to reclassify society through the material means of dress.63 In this context, sumptuary laws were part of a wider system of regulation that included standards of production, guilds’ rules, and taxation. All of them took social and professional gradation as guiding principles, though with substantial differences across places. Italian laws, for instance, were not very precise in their formulation of social structure, often allowing or forbidding according to large social groups (or even an entire population as in the case of Venice). Very few exceptions were made by the law.64 This was not the case in Spanish, French, German, and English laws that instead articulated social hierarchies through very fine material differences. In medieval French laws, for instance, up to thirty-two different levels in society were acknowledged.65 Yet there was no simple trajectory towards a more nuanced social system. By the late sixteenth century, French sumptuary laws no longer distinguished different social ranks with ‘cloth of gold or silver, spangle, borders, embroidery, haberdashery, buttons, padding, strings, cordons, quills, velvets, satin or taffetas that are crossed, embroidered, covered or worked in gold or silver’ forbidden to all regardless of their rank.66 The relationship between status, social hierarchies, and material control was made even more complex by the fact that over time sumptuary laws reacted to major social changes. In Europe, as in many parts of Asia, the growing economic power of the bourgeoisie and most especially the merchant classes became increasingly visible. In seventeenth-century Japan sumptuary laws specifically targeted merchants and urban artisans (the class of cho¯nin, literally ‘townspeople’). They were the nouveaux riches that established samurai classes were trying to keep in check with the help of the central state authority (Figure 6.10).67 Sumptuary laws were a way to level off 63 64

65

66

67

Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, 149. Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 86–8. Neithard Bulst, ‘La legislazione suntuaria in Francia (secoli XIII–XVIII)’, in Muzzarelli and Campanini (eds.), Disciplinare il lusso, 121–36. Pascal Bastien, ‘“Aux trésors dissipez l’on cognoist le malfaic”: Hiérarchie sociale et transgression des ordonnances somptuaires en France, 1543–1606’, Renaissance and Reformation, 23/4 (1999), 35. Kennedy, Japanese Costume, 17–18.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

the widening economic gap between merchant classes and the traditional elites composed of the families of samurai and hatamoto (the retainers of the shogun) whose income was falling, making it increasingly difficult for them to keep up appearances.68 It was not uncommon for the newly impoverished political elites in many European states to argue for sumptuary restrictions for everyone independent from their social status: if they could not afford luxury and the latest fashions, so the law should restrict them for everyone, including rich bankers and merchants. This way of thinking might indeed have contributed to the repeal of sumptuary laws, at least in the parliamentary system of England where no law was enacted after 1604. Sumptuary bills were discussed in Parliament at least on four different occasions in the 1610s and 1620s but with little success. One of the reasons might be that unlike previous laws attacking the conspicuous consumption of newcomers, new law proposals aimed at curbing the expenditure of the aristocratic elites who – it was argued – ruined themselves to follow court fashion. The result was that established powers preferred to dispense with sumptuary legislation altogether rather than see themselves subjected to it.69 At the top of the social hierarchy, sumptuary regulations could also be used to legitimize power. As one historian put it: ‘kings issued waves of sumptuary legislation, instructing their subjects to do as they said, not as they did’.70 Elites and rulers not only imposed a monopoly on resources but also on signifiers of rule. Although never particularly effective, Chinese Tang rulers implemented sumptuary laws on silk textiles by issuing edicts restraining their production and trade and reserving them for official use.71 Over the following dynasties and still in the mid-Ming 68 69

70

71

Shively, ‘Sumptuary Regulation’, 123. David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 54. A similar problem was also observed in Italy where it was noted that noblemen would ruin themselves financially in order to fulfil the sartorial expectation set by the law. Carlo Marco Belfanti, ‘The Civilization of Fashion: At the Origins of a Western Social Institution’, Journal of Social History, 43/2 (2009), 266. Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, ‘Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-Century Spain’, Renaissance Quarterly, 61/2 (2008), 482. Xinru Liu, ‘Silks and Religions in Eurasia, c. A.D. 600–1200’, Journal of World History, 6/1 (1995), 29. See also Christian de Pee, ‘Purchase on

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

175

176

giorgio riello

Figure 6.10 Torii Kiyonaga (1752–1815), ‘The Sixth Month’ (Kazemachizuki), from the series ‘Fashionable Monthly Visits to Sacred Places in the Four Seasons (Furyu shiki no tsuki mode)’, c. 1784. Colour woodblock print. 25.0 × 18.4 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr and Mrs James A. Michener, 1958.137. Agefotostock / Alamy Stock Photo 2BWRA32.

period at the end of the sixteenth century, Chinese laws were mostly interested in regulating the sartorial practices of emperor, Power: Imperial Space and Commercial Space in Song-Dynasty Kaifeng, 960– 1127’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 53/1–2 (2010), 149–84.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

empress, princes of the blood, and state officials.72 Similarly in Asante in present-day Nigeria, several types of cloths could only be worn by the king or by high-status courtiers.73 Concessions to specific social groups thus became part of a system of allegiance. In the early fourteenth century, the Sultan of Delhi ordered that ‘nobody can dress and ride with saddles covered or embroidered with gold except he upon whom the Sultan bestowed them’.74 These examples show how much fashion and dress are entwined with power and politics.75 They also hint to the fact that rather than placating the tension between social classes and power groups, sumptuary laws could be read as magnifying it, exposing the myriad ways in which economic power crisscrossed and at times clashed with political authority. Access to fashionable goods and sufficient wealth for luxuries were only the conditions of a broader phenomenon: the fact is, that in the course of the early modern period, people started to think of themselves in terms of what they possessed and consumed as well as who they were.76 The use of material possessions by perceived social climbers inflamed religious preachers and legislators who condemned what historian Eugenia Paulicelli has called ‘class-based cross-dressing’.77 An international comparison of sumptuary laws is informative as it shows there was no common denominator as to the potential offender: in Europe, for instance, the legislators in Scotland, the German states, and the Habsburg Empire controlled the dress of both genders. Yet those of Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and England focused on the dress of men. By contrast, those of Switzerland, the

72 73 74

75

76

77

Clunas, Superfluous Things, 148. Robert Ross, Clothing: A Global History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 15. Cited in Joginder K. Chawla, India’s Overland Trade with Central Asia and Persia (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1996), 87. For a panoramic, see Lemire and Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies, esp. ‘Introduction’. Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). See also Carlo Marco Belfanti and Fabio Giusberti, ‘Clothing and Social Inequality in Early Modern Europe: Introductory Remarks’, Continuity and Change, 15/ 3 (2000), 361. Eugenia Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2014), 30.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

177

178

giorgio riello

Italian state, as well as the Ottoman Empire concentrated on women.78 The dream of a material control of society was partial at best. The detailed texts of the laws might suggest a degree of effectiveness that they rarely achieved. Their constant reissuing was an admission that they were often contravened: ‘the prince’s laws [are] manifestly disobeyed, to the great peril of the realm’, complained Bishop John Jewel’s homily against a ‘foul and chargeable excess’ of apparel in late sixteenth-century England. He concluded that no action taken ‘by our princes, and oft repeated with the penalties, can bridle this detestable abuse’.79 He was writing in the years following a first attempt at policing dress, especially in London.80 In 1562 it was established that functionaries, armed with ‘breviats’ (summaries of the laws), should visit tailors to see whether they were producing forbidden items. Four years later inspectors were tasked to stand from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. to control each person who entered the gates of the City of London.81 This followed the examples of several other cities in Europe where special magistrates were appointed to enact the sumptuary legislation. Such magistrates were found in the Provveditori sopra le Pompe of Venice, the Reformations-Kammer of Zurich, and the Reformations-Geordnete of Basel. The presence of courts and police forces tells us little about the actual implementation of the law. Rare instances show that the application of sumptuary laws was patchy: it mostly followed the issuing of a new law but the sartorial zealousness fizzled out in just a few years or even months. In Florence, following a 1637 legislation, 255 people were found in breach of the law, 215 of whom were women.82 When apprehended in public spaces 78

79 80

81

82

Ulinka Rublack and Giorgio Riello, ‘Introduction’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 26. An Homily against Excess of Apparel (London, 1833 [1571]), 1. Kim M. Phillips, ‘Masculinities and the Medieval English Sumptuary Laws’, Gender and History, 19/1 (2007), 23. Thomas Lüttenberg, ‘Sempre un passo indietro rispetto alla moda: leggi suntuarie in Inghilterra dal Medioevo all’inizio del XVII secolo’, in Muzzzarelli and Campanini (eds.), Disciplinare il lusso, 154. Giulia Calvi, ‘Le leggi suntuarie e la storia sociale’, in Muzzzarelli and Campanini (eds.), Disciplinare il lusso, 222.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

wearing forbidden items, they had to report a few days later to identify their seized clothing. If found in breach of the law, they had to pay a fine. In the Italian city of Padua the magistrates in charge often stood on bridges or in front of churches and targeted women wearing pearls, jewellery, trimmings, and slashed garments fashionable in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.83 Elsewhere in the world there are no examples of specific judiciary in charge of sumptuary proceedings. Yet, the consequences of disrespecting the law could be more severe than in Europe: in Edo Japan, the laws were applied in special cases as can be seen, for instance, in the targeting of a wealthy merchant called Rokubei Ishikawa, whose wife in 1682 was accused by the Shogun Tsunayoshi Tokugawa of wearing magnificent dresses and thus flaunting the sumptuary laws. For that reason the couple was banished and their wealth confiscated.84 A regime of material regulation was difficult and expensive to implement. This has led historians to consider the sumptuary legislation more as a cautionary measure and a deterrent than an effective tool used by governments. It was not uncommon for instance to reprimand lawbreakers. In 1662 the court of the city of Wildberg in Baden-Württemberg reprimanded the son of a local weaver ‘on account of very wide trousers, which fashion it is unfitting for him to wear’. He was fined fifteen Kreuzer (about two weeks’ earnings for a male servant), but also warned that ‘if he should again put on such trousers of this fashion, they shall, by virtue of the Princely Command, be confiscated’.85 Fines could also be reduced by promptly paying within a few days, as part of a negotiation that at times saw a connivance between law enforcers and alleged lawbreakers.

83

84

85

Luca Molà and Giorgio Riello, ‘Against the Law: Sumptuary Prosecutions in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Padova’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 210–39. Katsuya Hirano, ‘Regulating Excess: The Cultural Politics of Consumption in Tokugawa Japan’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 436–7. Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘Consumption, Social Capital, and the “Industrious Revolution” in Early Modern Germany’, Journal of Economic History, 70/2 (2010), 308.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

179

180

giorgio riello

Cases of direct opposition to the law are as rare as they are revealing of the limits of the material control claimed by state authorities. One such case is the oration penned in 1453 by Nicolosa Sanuti, the daughter of a notary, in response to sumptuary legislation enacted by Cardinal Bessarione in her home city of Bologna in northern Italy. Her text, in Latin, argued that it was not in the interest of women to observe and comply with the law: ‘State offices are not allowed to women, nor do they strive for priesthoods, triumphs, and the spoils of war, for these are the customary prizes of men. But ornaments and decoration, the token of our virtues – these while the power is left us, we shall not allow to be stolen from us. Amen.’86 Women, she argued, were already constrained in their role and not able to participate in public life, and dress was one of what today we would call a ‘means of expression’. In Sanuti’s text one can see a full expression of individual and group choice against the dictates and interests of the state on the subject of sartorial consumption. Unique as the voice of a fifteenth-century woman is, over the following centuries several more protests against sumptuary laws were voiced.87

from the material to the immaterial regulation of fashion To think of fashion as freedom or a form of democracy as argued by Gilles Lipovetsky is misleading.88 Today – at least in the West – there is no state that can impose restrictions on what one can or cannot wear. States have retained their direct action by imposing rules of decency and banning public nakedness; yet no state imposes direct restrictions on the goods we consume or the clothing that we wear. There are occasional areas in which dress codes are 86

87

88

Catherine Kovesi Killerby, ‘“Heralds of a Well-instructed mind”: Nicolosa Sanuti’s Defence of Women and Their Clothes’, Renaissance Studies, 13/3 (1999), 282. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Le leggi suntuarie’, in Carlo Marco Belfanti and Fabio Giusberti (eds.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 19. La moda (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 215; Catherine Kovesi, ‘Defending the Right to Dress: Two Sumptuary Law Protests in Sixteenth-Century Milan’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 186–209. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

imposed by private organizations: companies might not allow the wearing of high heels, jewellery, or non-approved items of clothing; nightclubs might ban sportswear; schools impose uniforms. Their aim is mostly to create homogeneity and ensure material standards that they deem congruous with their mission statement and principles.89 Yet, it is incorrect to think that fashion acts in a vacuum of regulation. While social rules have replaced legal impositions, numerous measures enacted by states still influence what one wears and the very notion of fashion. Cloth and garments (part of what today is defined as the fabric and apparel sector) are among the most widely traded commodities in the world subject to significant duty impositions, quotas, and more rarely import bans. Their economic importance has been the subject of ‘trade wars’ between the United States of America and China in recent years. Significant internal taxation is also raised via value-added tax with particularly high impositions on luxury goods. There are also regulations for workers in the manufacturing of garments, standards and certification of safety and quality, laws on unfair competition, on promotions and discounts as well as on consumer protection.90 The present is a useful contrast in relation to the pre-modern world as it presents by and large an invisible world regulation that is not fully acknowledged by consumers. The most striking difference between the two is that in the present there is no attempt at regulating the actions and behaviours of people thus ensuring an apparent freedom of choice. Yet the argument here is that we should not see this shift as a transition from the regulated to the unregulated. I prefer instead to see it as a transition from the ‘material regulation’ of sumptuary laws to an ‘immaterial regulation’ of large conceptual categories (Table 6.1). The state remains an important actor in shaping fashion; in fact today it is more proactive than in the early modern period: producers, traders, and retailers must now respond to a series of rules, as within global chains of production regulation is imposed ‘upstream’ (on companies and businesses) more than downstream (on consumers). This makes rules easier to impose and uphold. The economic benefit of 89 90

Riello, Back in Fashion, 28. McNeil and Riello, Luxury: A Rich History, 261–5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

181

182

giorgio riello Table 6.1

Pre-modern ‘material regulation’ and present-day ‘immaterial regulation’

Pre-modern ‘material regulation’

Present-day ‘immaterial regulation’

What: People and Things - Objects - Regulate people’s actions

- Abstract categories - Regulate flows of commodities

Who: Consumers and the State - Consumers - Passive state

- Traders - Active state

Why: Governance - Downstream - Moral

- Upstream - ‘A-moral’; economic

How: The Laws - Local - Selective prohibitions; prosecutions; tax

- National and universal - Bans, duties, and tax

the state (and by extension of the collectivity) is taken to be central in present regulations, having lost the moral connotations that characterized pre-modern sumptuary laws. Finally, today the law is national (or even international) and universal as it applies to everyone, independently from their income, social status, or profession. As already observed, the main means of regulation are today economic and most especially rely on taxes and duties. Today there is no discriminant in people’s choices; yet to interpret this as a form of democracy is incorrect: today like in the premodern period it is the lower-income classes and the precariat that are most affected by regulation, even in their fashion choices. There is a risk of overemphasizing the distinctive features of ‘modernity’ by juxtaposing them with the pre-modern sumptuary world. Recent interpretations of sumptuary laws emphasize an overlap with contemporary means of regulation, in particular for some of the features that they share with taxation and duties. By the late fourteenth century, in Florence the statutory penalties imposed on conspicuous status wearers for violating sumptuary laws were mitigated and transformed into excise taxes or fees. By

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

paying fees, fathers and husbands were able to purchase immunities from sumptuary regulations, enabling their daughters and wives to dress as social necessity demanded.91 Similar processes were in place in early fifteenth-century Bologna where the marking of garments (‘vesti bollate’) that the 1401 law had banned raised substantial revenue for the state.92 In the city of Siena the Biccherna (the equivalent of the Chancellery of Finance) of the city enacted a similar ‘marcatura delle vesti’ (marking): today the binding shows a lady splendidly dressed in gold and turquoise for the volume detailing the ‘provisions against women for wearing clothes of fine silk and velvet, cloth, fabrics embroidered or embellished in gold or silver’.93 Yet the logic of rank could also be present. In eighteenth-century Batavia, a tax on the ownership of a carriage was applied which increased inversely in relation to the status of the owner: so a magistrate had to pay 50 Rijksdaalders (Rds.) a year, but a more modest military captain had to pay 100 Rds. and an ‘ordinary native’ 300 Rds.94 This example highlights two differences with the current system of taxation: first, the tax varied according to the person. It resembled more an income tax (direct tax) than a consumer tax (indirect tax). Today, for instance with cars, one has to pay a road tax but that is dependent on the value of the car or its engine, not the owner’s status or income. Second, unlike today’s taxation that is incremental (i.e. it increases as income increases), the sumptuary taxation of Batavia was instead decremental: it

91

92

93

94

Julius Kirshner, ‘Li emergenti bisogni matrimoniali in Renaissance Florence’, in William J. Connell (ed.), Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 84. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Vesti bollate: The Italian Fashion Gazette of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Shapes, Colours, Decorations)’, in Catherine Kovesi (ed.), Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy (Turnhout: Brepols 2018), 119–36. A list of garments allowed as ‘vesti bollate’ in the city of Bologna in 1401 can be found in Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Belle vesti, dure leggi: ‘In hoc libro continentur et descripte sunt omnes et singles vestes’ (Bologna: Costa Editore, 2003). ‘Provisioni contra le donne nel portare vestimenti di seta (fin)e e velluti, drappu, panni rachamati o veramente profilati d’oro o d’ariento’. Ross, ‘Sumptuary Laws in Europe, the Netherlands, and the Dutch Colonies’, 387.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

183

184

giorgio riello

established a hierarchy of entitlement that the tax was able to support. A second important connection between modern and premodern forms of governance of consumption and fashion is the focus on foreign goods. The 1574 Sumptuary Legislation, issued during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I stated that: The excess of apparel and the superfluity of unnecessary foreign wares thereto belonging now of late years is grown by sufferance to such an extremity that the manifest decay of the whole realm generally is like to follow (by bringing into the realm such superfluities of silks, cloths of gold, silver . . . as of necessity the moneys and treasure of the realm is and must be yearly conveyed out of the same to answer the said excess).95

This principle of singling out the foreign was already present in the first sumptuary law in England of 1337 that forbade the wearing of cloth imported from outside England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.96 Similarly it is to be found in most European and Asian sumptuary laws. It established that imports had to be avoided in order to stimulate local manufacturing and skilled labour, foster economic activity and as a consequence tax returns for the state. These principles later became central to mercantilist theories of the state, especially in the eighteenth century, arguing for a positive balance of trade and a regime of duties and bounties on imports and exports.97 Phil Withington has argued that at least in the British context, the creation of the concept of consumption and the figure of the consumer in the first half of the seventeenth century allowed for a new type of regulation based on taxation by excise and customs that is very familiar to us in the twenty-first century. The political 95

96

97

The text is available at www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/enforcing-statutes-ofapparel.htm (accessed 25 April 2023). N. B. Harte, ‘State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-Industrial England’, in D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (eds.), Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England: Essays Presented to F. J. Fisher (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), 134. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennedlind (eds.), Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

economist William Petty in his 1662 Treatise of Taxes and Contributions maintained that ‘all Superfluities tending to Luxury and sin, might be loaded with so much Impost, as to serve instead of a sumptuary Law to restrain the use of them’.98 A century later Adam Smith, the most representative thinker of an economic enlightenment thought that ‘It is the highest impertinence and presumption . . . in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense . . .’.99 He condemned the interference of government in the actions of individuals as well as on markets. By the time he was writing this in 1776, sumptuary laws had either been repealed, discarded, or simply ignored. Yet, this neat chronology cannot be generalized. In that very same year, 1776, an attempt was made at enacting sumptuary laws in Poland.100 In the European colonies, the laws continued to be upheld; they were enforced in Latin America in the eighteenth century and in Batavia as late as 1818.101 In the newly established United States Republic in the 1780s some even claimed that the infant nation could benefit by introducing sumptuary laws.102 Different accounts have been put forward explaining the disappearance of sumptuary regulation. Over the eighteenth century both luxury consumption and fashion, the two pillars of sumptuary legislation, were redefined. At least in Europe new ideas on the positive nature of luxury production and consumption were minted by arguing that they provided employment to thousands of skilled craftsmen and therefore they had to be encouraged by the state.103 New levels of consumption as well as new goods and their use by a wider strata of society were at odds with the strict dictates 98

99

100 101

102

103

Phil Withington, ‘Intoxicants and the Invention of “Consumption”’, Economic History Review, 73/2 (2020), 384–408, here 396. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan, 1776), Book i, Chapter xi. Harte, ‘State Control of Dress’, 133. Hans Medick, Weben und Überleben in Laichingen, 1650–1900: Lokalgeschichte als allgemeine Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1996), ch. 5. Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 207. Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

185

186

giorgio riello

of the laws. An example is the introduction of Indian chintzes in Europe: traded in their millions of pieces, they became in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a fashionable material for gowns, bodices, and informal men’s robes (banyans). In line with mercantilist ideas, their importation and use were banned in most Europeans states. Yet this was no sumptuary imposition: it established that the ban extended to everyone without exception. The reason for the ban was not moral but highlighted that the use of this type of textile (distinctive for the use of cotton fibre for weft and warp and their colourful printed patterns) was to be discouraged to support local manufactures of linen and woollen cloth.104 Notwithstanding the ban, Indian cottons as well as Chinese and European silks became central to the new role of fashion. From the very early days of regulation, fashion had been in a dynamic dialectical relationship with sumptuary laws: lawmakers struggled to keep pace with the change of fashion by updating their regulations; fashion was at times a way to escape the strictures of the law, at least until the latter could catch up. This view of fashion as change (in time as ‘novelty’ and in space as new items and materials that were imported from abroad) is connected to a second definition of fashion as a form of self-expression of individual choice, taste (or lack thereof), and belonging to communities that are stratified by age, income, professional and social background, etc.105 To us this idea of fashion appears both legitimate and indeed ‘natural’. Ulinka Rublack and I called this a ‘right to dress’, that sits next to other individual and human rights in most – though not all – present-day societies.106 It rests on a definition of personal and social identity that is constructed through things but also actively shaped by the agency of individuals, a principle that only slowly came to be acknowledged in the pre-modern period.

104

105

106

Beverly Lemire, Cotton (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 56–7; Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 118–19. For a critique, see John Styles, ‘Fashion and Innovation in Early Modern Europe’, in Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern, 33–55. Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, esp. ‘Introduction’.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world

conclusion This chapter considered the relationship between fashion and regulation through the lens of pre-modern sumptuary laws. It has argued that fashion came into existence within a matrix of rules imposed by governments for the control of dress. They were part of a ‘material regulation’ of people and of societies that existed – albeit in different forms – across vast parts of the world. Fashion disrupted and opposed regulation, highlighting the role of freedom and individual choice. Yet to see sumptuary laws as enemies of fashion would be reductive. There was an interplay between the two based on a dialectic between change and stasis. Today sumptuary laws appear remote as a legal and practical project. This is because the material control of early modern societies has been replaced by other forms of control – less centred on people and more interested in mobilizing wider economic and political categories of state action. Today’s fashion can be seen as the expression of individuals but this is in no sense free ranging and removed from the structures of regulation.

select bibliography Chen, BuYun, Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019). Clunas, Craig, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991). Earle, Rebecca, ‘“Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!”: Race, Clothing and Identity in the Americas (17th–19th Centuries)’, History Workshop Journal, 52 (2001), 175–95. Harte, N. B., ‘State Control of Dress and Social Change in PreIndustrial England’, in D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (eds.), Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England: Essays Presented to F. J. Fisher (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), 132–65. Hunt, Alan, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). Kovesi Killerby, Catherine, ‘“Heralds of a Well-Instructed Mind”: Nicolosa Sanuti’s Defence of Women and Their Clothes’, Renaissance Studies, 13/3 (1999), 255–82.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

187

188

giorgio riello Kovesi Killerby, Catherine, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). Lemire, Beverly and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). Muzzarelli, Maria Giuseppina, Le regole del lusso: apparenze e vita quotidiana dal Medioevo all’Età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2020). Muzzarelli, Maria Giuseppina, ‘Reconciling the Privilege of a Few with the Common Good: Sumptuary Laws in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39/3 (2009), 597–617. Muzzarelli, Maria Giuseppina, ‘Vesti bollate: The Italian Fashion Gazette of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Shapes, Colours, Decorations)’, in Catherine Kovesi (ed.), Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 119–36. Muzzarelli, Maria Giuseppina and Antonella Campanini (eds.), Disciplinare il lusso: la legislazione suntuaria in Italia e in Europa tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Rome: Carocci, 2003). Owen Hughes, Diane, ‘Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy’, in John Bossy (ed.), Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 69–99. Phillips, Kim M., ‘Masculinities and the Medieval English Sumptuary Laws’, Gender and History, 19/1 (2007), 22–42. Quataert, Donald, ‘Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 29 (1997), 403–25. Riello, Giorgio and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Ross, Robert, ‘Sumptuary Laws in Europe, the Netherlands, and the Dutch Colonies’, in Nigel Worden (ed.), Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World (Cape Town: Rodenbosch, 2007), 382–90. Shively, Donald, ‘Sumptuary Regulation and Status in Early Tokugawa Japan’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 25 (1964–5), 123–64.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

sumptuary laws in the early modern world Zilfi, Medeleine C., ‘Whose Laws? Gendering the Ottoman Sumptuary Laws’, in Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann (eds.), Ottoman Costumes: From Textile to Identity (Istanbul: EREN, 2004), 125–42.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

189

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.008 Published online by Cambridge University Press

part ii Early Modern Global Entanglements

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

7

w

MAGNIFICENCE AT THE ROYAL COURTS IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD suraiya faroqhi

The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires are the focus of this chapter, which between them covered a stretch of Eurasia between Budapest and Murshidabad in Bengal (India). Royal magnificence is the lens through which I will assess the fashion dynamics of these imperial dynasties. The Ottoman realm included Southeastern Europe, with the capital city of Istanbul straddling the border between Europe and Asia. From the 1530s onward, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria – in the broad and historical sense of the latter term – were part of the territory controlled by the sultans as well. Apart from the brief timespans during which the Safavids held Iraq, their realm corresponded roughly to present-day Iran and sections of Afghanistan. Other regions that today are part of Afghanistan, including Kabul, were part of the Mughal Empire, which had expanded first over the territories covered by today’s Pakistan and northern India. In the second half of the sixteenth century, moreover, Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) added the highly productive territories of Bengal and Gujarat to his realm. About a hundred years later, Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) conquered a large part of Peninsular India, so that if we go by a map, his empire stretched almost over the entire subcontinent; however, imperial control over the outlying territories remained very problematic. The Ottoman sultans established one of the longest-lived dynasties in history, on the throne from about 1300 until 1922; the period treated here encompasses the years in which the empire was at the peak of its power. By contrast, the Safavids had a shorter lifespan, as they ruled Iran from 1501 to 1722, followed, after an interregnum,

193

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

194

suraiya faroqhi

by the reign of Nā dir Shā h Afshar (1736–47). Mughal rule in India began with the conquests of Bā bur (1483–1530) between 1526 and 1530, who started out from a newly conquered kingdom in Afghanistan. In a greatly weakened state, the dynasty lasted until 1857. In terms of population and revenue, around the year 1600 the Mughal Empire was by far the most populous and the wealthiest of the three: scholars have estimated that at that time, Ottoman subjects numbered about 22–35 million, Safavid Iran about 10 million, while the population of the Mughal realm may well have reached 100–145 million.1 Mughal revenues were by far the largest as well, as the empire contained the immensely productive Ganges and Yamuna River valleys. Thus, the means for deploying royal magnificence were far greater in India than elsewhere. On the other hand, the practices of the Ottoman court are far better known, due to extensive surviving archives, while the records covering the Safavid and Mughal realms are scanty by comparison. Attention to royal and princely fashions enables an analysis of why many courts spent large amounts of money on clothes and jewellery, especially on the monarch, but in addition, on his family and close associates.2 Political, dynastic, and cultural considerations determined the material shape that royal magnificence might take. When Edward Barton (c. 1562–1598) attended the Ottoman palace as an ambassador of Queen Elizabeth I of England, it is unlikely that the sultan’s courtiers scheduled any special events to impress the representative of a distant ‘infidel’ kingdom, who moreover received his salary from the merchants of the Levant Company. However, when in 1546, the Safavid prince Alqā s Mı̄ rzā arrived at the Ottoman court, and Sultan Süleyman (r. 1520–66) considered him a potentially useful ally in the confrontation with the Safavids, the result was that the Ottoman court gave the Iranian prince a magnificent reception and assigned 1

2

Stephen Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 107–8. The term ‘royal’ is reserved for the courts of the Ottoman sultan, the shah of Iran, and the emperor/pā dishā h of the Mughal realm, as well as the Romanov, Habsburg, and Bourbon rulers. The term ‘princely’ refers to smaller courts, especially but not exclusively those recognizing the superiority of one of the ‘big six’.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

him the considerable sum of 90,000 akçe.3 When Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1446–8 and 1451–81), strongly interested in Italian painting, invited the Venetian artist Gentile Bellini (active from the midfifteenth century, d. 1507), the latter received a golden chain that he proudly took back to Venice. By contrast when the Danish painter Melchior Lorichs (1526/7–after 1583) visited the court of Sultan Süleyman, he was simply a member of the Habsburg ambassador’s suite, as the sultan did not regard him as deserving special recognition or largesse. To make sense of the reasons for royal ostentation, I begin by briefly discussing the religious values attached to the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal dynasties. Outside of the royal courts, controversy might swirl around the ostentation of a given monarch, in part from religious motivations. At the same time, however, magnificent clothes and jewels had the advantage of convincing the ruler’s entourage that he or she had the wherewithal for gift-giving on an impressive scale, a worthy ally. As for the population, given widespread poverty, opulent outfits may have overawed some people seeing them on the royal person. Courtly and costly clothes might symbolize the continuity of the dynasty as well, especially when worn at accession ceremonies. As for female members of Islamic royal courts, they might rightly share in the magnificence of the dynasties to which they belonged by birth or as consorts. Though invisible to the public gaze, some royal women were powerful and even if not, their monarchs often granted them fine clothes and jewels. In the absence of textual evidence, we need to speculate about the reasons for this behaviour. While Ottoman and Safavid royal women did not appear in reliable images, the situation differed somewhat in Mughal India. Generic paintings of harem women were common, so that even though portraits of identifiable personalities are rare, we at least glimpse the manifestations of monarchical power in the garments and jewellery allotted to females at the Mughal courts. A discussion of luxuries as signs of royal and princely privilege concludes this chapter, captured in part in artistic representations. 3

Saleh Muhammedoğ lu Aliev, ‘Elkas Mirza (‫( )ﺍﻟﻘﺎﺱ ﻣﻴﺮﺯﺍ‬ö. 957/1550), Safevî Ş ehzadesi’, in Diyanet İ şleri Vakfı İ slâm Ansiklopedisi, online edition, https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/elkas-mirza (accessed 25 April 2023).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

195

196

suraiya faroqhi

Ottoman and Mughal royal portraits are more numerous than those surviving from Safavid Iran, probably because of the plundering of Isfahan during the Afghan conquest. These capture, in part, the luxuries of court life. The select use of colour, luxurious fabrics, furs and jewels, assembled with great artistry, comprised the components of magnificence, markers of royal and imperial privilege and power. The totality of these elements sustained royal workshops and artisans working to construct unique material splendour, defining the greatest imperial hierarchies on the Asian (Eurasian) continent.

religious foundations of courtly magnificence Historians have been studying the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul from the very moment that the building became a museum in 1924.4 In particular, the regulations on court ceremonial made by Mehmed the Conqueror and amended by Süleyman the Magnificent have become a favoured topic of study.5 On the other hand, until recently, the religious aspects of the sultanate played a secondary role, with Halil İ nalcık especially in his earlier works emphasizing Ottoman continuity with the major Near Eastern empires of antiquity. The same author dwelt on the treatises of ‘good government’ in the Iranian tradition, and discussed how the claims of the Ottoman sultans to be upholders of justice fitted in with this understanding of empire. Historians often emphasized that the title of caliph was of limited importance when compared, for instance, to the sultans’ position as protectors of the pilgrimage to Mecca: titles thus highlighted the practical role of these monarchs, who, while very pious, eschewed fanciful claims to holiness. However, during the last thirty years or so, with a spate of studies revealing Sultan Süleyman and his immediate successors 4

5

Barnette Miller, The Palace School of Muhammad the Conqueror (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941). Halil İ nalcık, ‘Kanunnâme’, https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/kanunname, see section 4 (accessed 2 February 2020); Gülru Necipoğ lu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York, Cambridge, MA, and London: The Architectural History Foundation and MIT Press, 1991).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

surrounded by millenarian expectations, there has been a sea change.6 Quite a few fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts treat the Ottoman sultans as religious figures, who might well rule until the end of time and in addition, were caliphs in the Sufi sense of the term. Thus, the reverence shown them was not merely due to their secular position as just and efficient rulers, but to their numinous spiritual qualities as well. Having taken over the Caliphate, the sultans would only surrender it to ‘the awaited Messiah’.7 On a less refined and more political level, the growing stress on the sultans as religious figures in recent years may have a connection to the increasingly dominant role of Islam and the widespread nostalgia for the Ottoman sultanate currently observable in Turkey. A similar change in the historiography on the Mughal world is also connected with current intellectual and political trends. Representatives of the Aligarh school of Mughal historiography, established by Muhammad Habib (1895–1971) and especially Irfan Habib and Shireen Moosvi have emphasized the image of Akbar (r. 1556–1605) as an active and committed ruler, who ‘recognized India not only as his own but as a country with a distinct political and cultural personality’.8 While the selection of sources in a volume on this ruler put together by Moosvi includes Akbar’s claims to spiritual pre-eminence, her vision does not especially stress this aspect of imperial rule. However, the recent study of Azfar Moin on millennial thought in Mughal India emphasizes just this aspect, stating that ‘In the early modern era, the style of Muslim kingship was inspired by,

6

7

8

Barbara Flemming, ‘Sahib-kıran und Mahdi: Türkische Endzeiterwartungen im ersten Jahrzehnt der Regierung Süleymans’, in György Kara (ed.), Between the Danube and the Caucasus (Budapest: The Academy of Sciences, 1987), 43–62. Cornell Fleischer, ‘Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies at the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in Massumeh Farhad with Serpil Bağ çı (eds.), Falnama: The Book of Omens (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 231–44; Hüseyin Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 286. Shireen Moosvi (ed.), Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences (Delhi: National Book Trust, 2007), ix.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

197

198

suraiya faroqhi

among other things, Sufi saints.’9 Irfan Habib has published a decidedly unsympathetic review of Moin’s work, as for Habib, the astrological and millenarian musings of Akbar’s court are no more than ‘intellectual trivialities’.10 At present, no comparable debates have ensued among Ottoman historians. But the consensus on Mughal rulers now seems to weigh religious standing in equal measure to secular capacity, both of which required earthly manifestations.

the advantages of royal ostentation: the claim to magnificence In the Ottoman world, writing on royal magnificence found a place in treatises aiming to teach good government, a genre part of the Iranian literary tradition. Thus, Mustafa Âlî (1541–1600) wrote about appropriate ways of showing royal generosity, including the provision of gifts and festivities. Open-handedness ennobled even Umayyad rulers (661–750), whom the author otherwise reviled for their opposition to ‘Alı̄ , the fourth caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. As a one-time finance official, Mustafa Âlî even tried to quantify the proportion of public revenues that the sultan should distribute as gifts: from an annual income of 2,000 ‘loads’ of silver coins (akçe), it might be appropriate to give a gift of two ‘loads’ to a figure deemed especially meritorious.11 Speaking pro domo, Âlî opined that the sultans had been especially remiss in suitably rewarding the authors of important books. The issue of royal generosity was especially relevant to Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–17), who built a major mosque complex without having won victories against the Safavid and Habsburg opponents of the 9

10

11

Interview with Azfar Moin, https://cup.columbia.edu/author-interviews/ moin-millennial-sovereign (accessed 2 February 2020); Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Irfan Habib, ‘Book Review: Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam’, Studies in People’s History, 5/2 (2018), 235–7. Gelibolulu Mustafa Âli, Görgü ve toplum kuralları üzerinde ziyâfet sofraları (mevâidü’-nefâis fi kavâidi’-l mecâlis), trans. Orhan Ş aik Gökyay (Istanbul: Tercüman 1001 Temel Eser, 1978), 22. The number of coins in a ‘load’ was variable.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

Ottoman Empire. Therefore, the sultan’s imam and spiritual adviser Mustafa Safi felt that he must defend his advisee, by emphasizing royal open-handedness in particular to modest people. Thus, the mosque complex might feature as another example of the sultan’s generosity.12 While the issue of appropriateness, put differently giving neither too much nor too little, was part of Ottoman advice literature, to the knowledge of this author, elaborate discourses on magnificence, magnanimity, and splendour were not part of the Ottoman literary tradition. Treatises written during the European Renaissance on these issues therefore do not lend themselves well to a comparative approach.13 In the centuries discussed here, a ruler had to show his or her wealth, for a monarch gained and preserved adherents by giving, and giving lavishly. A Mughal ruler retained the loyalty of his commanders only if he could assign them ample revenues, and if he was not generous enough, allies and subordinates might desert him. In the reign of Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703–30) known for his predilection for a well-filled treasury, the Ottoman grand vizier Damad İ brahim Paş a (d. 1730) was careful to give away significant amounts of money in charity.14 Even among fellow monarchs, distributing treasure was a sign of power: when Nā dir Shā h, de facto ruler of Iran after the overthrow of the Safavids, had raided Delhi in 1739, he sent some of the treasure to Istanbul, as an assertive royal gift to Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1730–54). 12

13

14

Rhoads Murphey, ‘Mustafa Safi’s Version of the Kingly Virtues as Presented in his Zübdetü’lTevarih, or Annals of Sultan Ahmed, 1012–1023 A.H./1603– 1614 A.D.’, in Colin Imber and Keiko Kiyotaki (eds.), Frontiers of Ottoman Studies: State, Province and the West, 2 vols. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), i: 3–24. Peter Howard, ‘Preaching Magnificence in Renaissance Florence’, Renaissance Quarterly, 61/2 (2008), 325–69; Evelyn Welch, ‘Magnificence and Private Display: Giovanni Pontano’s De splendore (1498) and the Domestic Arts’, Journal of Design History, 15/4 (2002), 211–21; Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello, Luxury: A Rich History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Selim Karahasanoğ lu, ‘Challenging the Paradigm of the Tulip Age: The Consumer Behavior of Nevş ehirli Damad İ brahim Paş a and his Household’, in Elif Akçetin and Suraiya Faroqhi (eds.), Living the Good Life: Consumption in the Qing and Ottoman Empires of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 134–60.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

199

200

suraiya faroqhi

An easy way of making the wealth of the monarch visible was to exhibit it on the royal person and on the royal entourage. At the Mughal court, rulers and their courtiers both male and female wore knee-length skirts over pantaloons. Pleated and very full, these skirts highlighted the court’s ample supplies of diaphanous cotton, so delicate that it must have deteriorated very quickly, with the message of high privilege inherent in the perishability of the fabric. In a different vein, the kaftans of Ottoman sultans and princes often were heavy and/or easily disfigured by water stains. The young sons of a sultan owning such garments must have ruined quite a few of them, and doubtless this fact was part of royal ostentation.15 As for French kings and queens of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they exhibited the wealth of the monarchy through the extravagant designs of the fabrics depicted on their official portraits.16 While French images highlighted the aristocratic bodies wearing these textiles, female royals depicted in early modern Spain and at the Central European courts taking their cue from the Habsburgs, might appear as mere tailors’ dummies: caps and gowns were stiff with cardboard, starch, silks, and jewellery.17 Materials highlighting royal magnificence were, on the whole, quite similar from one court to the next. Silks, velvets, furs, fine linen or cotton, gold and silver jewellery and gems, with embroideries with plenty of gold and silver wire, as well as the feathers of certain birds were popular in most palaces, although details varied for certain courts or periods. Thus, lace was a favourite in early modern European palaces but had no particular standing in Istanbul, Isfahan, or Agra, while the Ottoman court used fur in larger quantities than its Mughal or Safavid counterparts. Even so, as Venetian velvets were popular in the Topkapı Palace and Indian luxuries had their admirers anywhere between London and 15

16

17

Hülya Tezcan, Osmanlı Sarayının Çocukları: Ş ehzadeler ve Hanım Sultanların Yaşamları, Giysileri (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2008). www.alamy.com/stock-image-tocque-louis-portrait-of-marie-leczinskaqueen-of-france-1740-166323001.html (accessed 23 December 2019). As one example among many, see the portrait of Anne of Austria (1549–80) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna by Alonso Sánchez Coello, published in Peter Noever (ed.), Global Lab: Art as Message, Asia and Europe 1500–1700 (Vienna: MAK and Hatje Canz, 2009), 314–15.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

Istanbul, courtiers could select imperial gifts from a repertoire that they knew well, and showing finesse meant choosing the items appropriate for the rulers and dignitaries who were to receive the gifts. At the same time, not all observers of royal and princely courts approved of royal magnificence. The inclination to devalue this type of ostentation has a long history, present among certain Islamic mystics (Sufis), who indicated their disapproval by wearing rags or even going around partly naked.18 In the Indian context, this attitude resembled that of Hindu renouncers, and Muslim princes might defer to the widespread veneration of these holy men, visiting them and politely listening to their admonitions. Certain European monastic orders, especially the Franciscans, rejected expensive garments as well, although they bowed to the injunction of the Catholic Church that when celebrating mass or officiating as a bishop, even a member of the Franciscan order must appear in the most sumptuous textiles available. Many people from the Islamic world and Latinate Europe may have felt reservations concerning royalty appearing in breathtaking clothes and jewellery. Nevertheless, they rarely articulated their feelings: between Istanbul and Agra, many people seemingly assumed that costly accoutrements were part of royal privilege. But, given widespread illiteracy throughout the early modern world, it is wise to avoid categorical statements on this issue. Nonetheless, in non-capitalist societies where socio-political rank implied the right to parade certain garments that nobody else could wear, appearing in such garb was a way of asserting royal or princely privilege. Thus, at least in the early seventeenth century, donning the elaborate cloak known as kapanıça was the privilege of the Ottoman sultan.19 In the years around 1800, the garb worn by Ottoman sultans on official occasions might include large numbers of diamonds.20 By contrast, it would have been 18

19

20

Ahmet Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Middle Period 1200–1550 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994; repr. London: Oneworld, 2006). Özer Küpeli, ‘Revan Seferine Götürülen Padiş ah Kiyafetleri’, Cihannüma: Tarih ve Coğ rafya Araştırmaları Dergisi, 2/2 (2016), 33–74, at 41–2. See Ünver Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 97 on the fondness of Mahmud I (r. 1730–54) for jewellery.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

201

202

suraiya faroqhi

imprudent of a vizier or pasha to exhibit such jewels on his person.21 Even if he owned these valuables, he likely never permitted them to leave his treasure chests, for until the mid-nineteenth century and sometimes afterwards as well, it made sense to hide one’s valuables. Especially during the difficult times of the later 1700s, sultans might confiscate the property even of wealthy people not part of the Ottoman administration, who had been immune in earlier centuries. After all, Ottoman society was noncapitalist, and (incompletely) transited to capitalism only in the later nineteenth century, with the monarchs confiscating ‘private’ property until their empire dissolved in the 1920s. Many rulers, even of those polities where adherence to a monotheistic religion was universal, proclaimed a special relationship with the deity. Such claims made it difficult to criticize a (supposedly) semi-divine creature for exhibiting a special status through costly clothes and ornaments. Indian rulers and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Ottoman sultans asserted a status higher than that of ordinary mortals; and in the sixteenth century, many soldiers of the Safavid shah believed in the other-worldly status of their ruler.22 Moreover, after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, the restored Bourbon kings of France made comparable claims, appearing in ceremonies in which they ‘cured’ scrofula by the miraculous royal touch.23 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a royal might advertise his and especially her wealth by patronizing famous fashion designers. However, in the period at issue, design was rarely a major factor in determining the cost of royal accoutrements, at least insofar as we know. Outside of early modern Europe, there are few sources documenting relationships between patrons and designers. However, for Istanbul around 1800, there survives the 21

22 23

On the diamonds owned by a grand vizier of the late seventeenth century, see Hedda Reindl-Kiel, ‘Diamonds are a Vizier’s Best Friends or: Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa’s Jewelry Assets’, in Akçetin and Faroqhi (eds.), Living the Good Life, 409–32. Moin, Millennial Sovereign; Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined. Now nearly a century old, the classic study of this issue is still Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale, particulièrement en France et en Angleterre, preface par Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Gallimard, [reprint] 1983).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

correspondence between Princess Hatice Sultan (1768–1822), sister of Selim III (r. 1789–1807), and the French artist Antoine Ignace Melling (1763–1831), who designed everything from seaside villas to jewellery.24 However, in her letters, the princess exhibited an imperious persona, leaving little room for discussions of design and other aesthetic questions. Royal emblems distinguishing the sultan from his suite are reasonably well known. Apart from the kapanıça previously mentioned, the aigrettes holding costly feathers were emblems of the monarch’s supreme power. Surviving examples apart, images and photographs of these jewels are in ample supply.25 Thrones survive in sufficiently large numbers to convince the viewers of Ottoman miniatures that the painters stayed close to reality. In particular, the Topkapı Palace Museum holds an Indian throne that probably was part of the booty brought back by Nā dir Shā h from his plundering raid of Delhi.26 Furthermore, this same museum holds some spectacular ceremonial objects that only a sultan could use, such as a gold- and jade-plated water flask (matara) or a jewelled mace.27 By contrast, in Isfahan, the Afghan conquerors of 1722 destroyed or dispersed many of the valuables in the Safavid palace, and the treasures of the Mughal emperors suffered an even worse fate. After Nā dir Shā h, Ahmad Shā h Durrā nı̄ plundered Delhi in ˙ 1757, and the British took whatever remained in and after 1857. Illustrated manuscripts suffered dismemberment and passed from one collector to the next, often ending up in museums in Great Britain and the United States. As for other valuables, the survival rate has been very low; even the collections of the Kachhwaha princes of Jaipur, while impressive, do not preserve many of the royal gifts that the Mughal emperors must have sent to these princes.

24

25

26

Jacques Perot, Frédéric Hitzel, and Robert Anhegger (eds.), Hatice Sultan ile Melling Kalfa: Mektuplar (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2001). Gül İ repoğ lu, Imperial Ottoman Jewellery: Reading History through Jewellery, trans. Feyza Howell (Istanbul: BKG/Bilkent Kültür Giriş im Yayınları, 2012). Ibid., 320. 27 Ibid., cover image and 164–5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

203

204

suraiya faroqhi

royal and princely valuables as sites of memory On a different level, a monarch or potential monarch might value ostentation in clothing and jewellery because the items displayed referred to the traditions of the dynasty, empire, or kingdom of which he or she was the most recent representative. Thus, in 1605, the Ottoman sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603–17) had the Hungarian nobleman Stefan Bocskai crowned king of Hungary; but as the historic crown of this kingdom was in Habsburg hands, a coronation without this piece of jewellery did not have much prestige among the new king’s aristocratic subjects. As for the Ottoman-made crown used by Bocskai, it ultimately made its way to Vienna.28 These events emphasize that a jewel symbolizing the medieval kingdom of Hungary was indispensable for the legitimacy of a king even in the early seventeenth century. Ottoman sultans did not wear crowns, but in the seventeenth century, a newly enthroned monarch girded the so-called sword of Osman at a solemn visit to the pilgrimage site of Eyüp near Istanbul. Rather than garments or jewellery, this sword stood for the continuity of the dynasty; arrows sometimes served the same purpose.29 Even in death, precious textiles, sometimes of exotic manufacture, might indicate the royal or at least princely status of the deceased. While the Counts Palatine buried in the parish church of St Martin in the little town of Lauingen, Germany certainly were not royal, their family burial, which includes men, women, and children, has yielded a unique collection of late sixteenth-century princely garments.30 Thus, Countess Sophia Dorothea wore a multi-coloured dress of satin and velvet ornamented with gold and silver lace, all of them imports from manufacturing centres in 28

29

30

Anonymous author, ‘Eine türkische Krone für Ungarn?’ (2018), www .kaiserliche-schatzkammer.at/besuchen/ausstellungen/es-geht-um-europa/ (accessed 4 January 2020). Cemal Kafadar, ‘Eyüp’te Kılıç Kuş anma Törenleri’, in Tülay Artan (ed.), Eyüp: Dün/Bugün, 11–12 Aralık 1993 (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1994), 50–61; Nicolas Vatin, ‘Aux origines du pèlerinage à Eyüp des sultans ottomans’, Turcica, 27 (1995), 91–100. Karen Stolleis and Irmtraud Himmelheber, Die Gewänder aus der Lauinger Fürstengruft (Forschungshefte – Bayerisches Nationalmuseum München) (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1977).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

northern Italy.31 By burying the family in what were probably their most valuable clothes, the descendants may have shown off their wealth at the funeral while at the same time expressing their veneration for their deceased relatives by sacrificing garments that they might have reused. In the Ottoman world, it was customary to place the kaftan of a person of standing, sultans, princes, and princesses included, on top of his or her grave.32 Exhibiting jewels in such a place was probably exceptional; but in the Istanbul mausoleum of Ahmed I, royal jewels adorning the sultan’s turban have survived. For the most part, the original textiles placed on royal graves have decayed in the humid climate of Bursa and Istanbul, but exceptionally, archaeologists have retrieved a few examples during recent restorations of the mausoleums adjacent to Aya Sofya.33 As a substitute for textiles, by the later fifteenth century it had become customary to sculpt headdresses in stone and place them on top of the headstones marking male graves. However, the mausoleums of the sultans continued to exhibit high turbans made of textiles, but as the examples currently visible are the product of modern restorers, we do not know what types of headdresses originally appeared on these sites. Moreover, after the death of a sultan, Ottoman court officials preserved in his memory a set of the clothes worn by the deceased. However, these courtiers proceeded selectively, so that we have large collections documenting the wardrobes of certain rulers and almost nothing for others.34 By mischance, palace servants sometimes misplaced the markers identifying the clothing belonging to different monarchs, so that it has become difficult to determine the former owners. Nor do we know according to which criteria 31

32

33

34

www.bayerisches-nationalmuseum.de/index.php?id=546&L=0&tx_ paintingdb_pi[p]=32&tx_paintingdb_pi[categories]=7&cHash= ef59b820238db99152cd1ee61fa75acf (accessed 24 December 2019). Headstones featuring turbans and dervish headdresses identified non-royal males: H. Necdet İ ş li, Ottoman Headgears (Istanbul: European Capital of Culture Traditional Arts Directorate, 2009). Sibel Alpaslan Arça, ‘Ayasofya Müzesi Ş ehzadeler Türbesi’nde Tespiti Yapılan Tekstil Buluntuları’, in Frédéric Hitzel (ed.), 14th International Congress of Turkish Art: Paris, Collège de France 19–21 September 2011 (Paris: ICTA, 2013), 73–80. Küpeli, ‘Revan Seferine Götürülen Padiş ah Kiyafetleri’, 54.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

205

206

suraiya faroqhi

courtiers selected certain outfits for preservation: Were they pieces that the deceased had liked and often worn, or were they of special material value? Palace officials may have recycled those garments featuring designs still in current use at the time of the sultan’s death, while retaining those with only limited appeal to contemporaries. In the end, moreover, we should not discount the role of chance. Typically, the people at Islamic courts wore shirts or underkaftans over loose-fitting pantaloons, with men of status winding their turbans around high caps. The exact shape of the latter indicated whether the wearer adhered to the Ottoman project, although the high red cap supporting the turban was common to certain headdresses worn by the courtiers of Sultan Süleyman and those of his Safavid rival. However, the Safavid-style cap was significantly taller, and for contemporaries the difference between the two types was patent and full of political significance. As for the enormous turbans of high Ottoman dignitaries, they seemingly attracted notice at the Mughal court, although we do not know whether the attention was positive or negative. Whatever the situation, headgear was a condicio sine qua non for public appearances of any kind.

the uses of colour: red, white, and the varying fates of ‘courtly black’ Colours held power and were aligned with dynasties and institutions. From the portraits of sultans and the surviving textiles, it is clear that red was the colour of choice for an Ottoman sovereign – as incidentally was true of the better off among the sultans’ subjects as well.35 In the palace, red often appeared in combination with lavish amounts of gold thread, which drastically limited the number of people wealthy enough to own the relevant fabrics. However, well-to-do subjects of the sultans living in the seventeenth century could buy cushion covers in red, cream, and gold for

35

On the association of the colour red with the sultan, compare Necipoğ lu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power, 84.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

their reception chambers. Importantly, no colour or colour combination was the exclusive privilege of the sultan’s palace.36 At the Ottoman court, white appeared in the shirts that were the foundation garments for men and women alike and in the large headdresses typical for various subgroups of the Ottoman elite. At the Mughal court, as noted, we encounter a large number of white outer garments, worn by emperors as well as by their principal associates, particularly the nearly transparent skirts that both covered and revealed the colourful trousers underneath. Perhaps the fine cottons manufactured in Mughal India explain this predilection. Apparently, the non-colour black, though considered inauspicious in the Ottoman Empire of the mid-sixteenth century, made an impression on courtly painters in both the Ottoman and Mughal worlds. From the fifteenth century onward, the ducal court of Burgundy and later that of Spain had adopted ‘courtly black’ as a fashion statement, and quite possibly, in the Muslim Mediterranean, the predilection of ‘Frankish unbelievers’ for black clothes enhanced the negative associations connected with these people and this colour. Moreover, the black clothes of the Burgundian-Habsburg dynasty ruling Spain from 1516 onward must have reminded viewers of clerical garb. As for European ambassadors to Istanbul, in the mid-sixteenth century they seemingly came in for criticism because of their black clothes, considered appropriate only for people suffering some great misfortune.37 However, as European merchants importing cloth usually carried black fabrics, they must have found a market for these goods. In 1720, European ambassadors assisting at the famous circumcision festival organized by Ahmed III certainly wore black hats and hose, but otherwise their garments were colourful.38 After all, the French and English/British royal courts 36

37

38

Amanda Phillips, ‘The Historiography of Ottoman Velvets, 2011–1572: Scholars, Craftsmen, Consumers’, Journal of Art Historiography, 6 (2012), 1–26. Augerius Gislenius Busbequius, Legationis turcicae epistolae quatuor, ed. Zweder von Martels, trans. Michel Goldsteen (Hilversum: Verloren, 1994), 90–1. Esin Atıl, Levni and the Surnâme: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Festival (Istanbul: Koçbank, 1999), 94–5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

207

208

suraiya faroqhi

had little enthusiasm for ‘courtly black’ and in the seventeenth century their members mostly appeared in colourful clothes. In Mughal India, emperors and senior courtiers very rarely wore black garments; and when the latter appeared on miniatures, the wearers were often the Jesuits that attended Akbar’s court in Fatehpur Sikri, or else the Christian saints sometimes depicted on album leaves.39 However, occasionally, black or nearly black garments might appear on locals too; thus around 1600, a Kamphata yogi appears in a green landscape dressed in a garment of dark purple grey that might be a stand-in for black, and Nā dir Shā h of Iran seemingly had himself depicted in black at least once.40 Intriguingly, black was in favour at the court of Humā yu¯n, who supposedly wore black clothes once a week. According to the litterateur Khvā nd Mı̄ r (d. about 1537), the emperor had decided to organize his court by astrological criteria, and this arrangement included the appearance of the ruler in clothes of a certain colour on certain days of the week, each of the latter supposedly dominated by one of the seven ‘planets’ known at that time.41 The wearing of black clothes, considered especially imposing, had a connection to Saturn, and these garments derived further prestige from the flags of the Abbasids, which had featured that colour as well. However, we do not know to what extent this account was realistic rather than fantastical, and if the emperor ever wore this sequence of clothes, it is unknown for how long he could abide by his own rules. After all, the elaborate crown (tā j) that he had designed for himself lapsed into obscurity when Humā yu¯n 39

40 41

See Elisa Gagliardi Mangilli, ‘Akbar the Great. The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Evolution of Mughal Costumes in the Contemporary Documentary Sources’, in Gian Carlo Calza (ed.), Akbar: The Great Emperor of India (Milan: Skira, 2012), 71–80, at 73; for a surviving princely garment from the seventeenth century, see 75; see also Elaine Wright, Susan Stronge, and W. M. Thackston, Muraqqa’: Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library Dublin (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 2008), 59. Wright et al., Muraqqa’, 270–1. Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 112–27, esp. 121–2; Eva Orthmann, ‘Ideology and State Building: Humā yu¯n’s Search for Legitimacy in a Hindu-Muslim Environment’, in Vasudha Dalmia and Munis D. Faruqui (eds.), Religious Interactions in Mughal India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3–29.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

(r. 1530–40, 1555–6) had to take refuge at the Safavid court and wear the headdress Shā h Tahmā sp I had imposed upon him. ˙

women at court When compared to the clothes left by Ottoman sultans, few garments survive that had been the property of princesses, queen mothers, and the female retinues of these royals. Even so, a garment once worn by a princess of the late sixteenth century has emerged during the restoration of the Ottoman imperial mausoleums, as previously mentioned.42 Moreover, as we have seen, no sultan commissioned portraits of his female relatives, and no images of Safavid princesses seem to be extant. Thus, these royal women remain invisible to posterity. By contrast, from Mughal India a few portraits depicting women of the ruling dynasty and made by Indian/ Iranian artists do survive. One such example is an image from the Akbarnama, painted by Tulsi and Durga about 1595 and showing Akbar’s elderly mother (Figure 7.1). While travelling towards Agra on a ship with a red pavilion and sail, Humā yu¯n’s former queen appears in a cream-coloured gown and a green shawl, which leaves her face visible.43 Other images depict Jahā ngı̄ r’s powerful empress Nu¯r Jahā n (1577–1645).44 One of them is the work of the court painter Abu¯’l-Hasan, who worked ˙ in the early seventeenth century. The official title of this artist was Nā diru’l-Zamā n or Wonder of the Age. The empress stands in a green meadow, and loads a musket, a powder horn hanging from her sash, a strongly martial image. Her turban, which resembles that worn by men, sports a golden ornament and the profile of the empress shows a jewelled earring. Another

42 43

44

Alpaslan Arça, ‘Ayasofya Müzesi’, 75. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O9283/mariam-makani-painting-tulsi/ (accessed 6 January 2020). The explanation given by the Museum authorities identifies the royal woman as Mariam Makā nı̄ and Akbar’s mother, although normally this title applies to the mother of Jahā ngı̄ r. Ruby Lal, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), images, not numbered after p. 142; for explanations, see 144–9, 271–2, 278–9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

209

210

suraiya faroqhi

Figure 7.1 A royal woman of the Mughal dynasty (Mariam Makani) on a boat to Agra. Opaque watercolour and gold on paper from the Akbarnama (Book of Akbar), c. 1590–5. 33 × 20 cm. Alamy.

painting depicts the empress while sitting for her portrait, on which a female artist named Chiterin/Chiteri is working. However, as the empress has covered her body and even her

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

chin with her white shawl, this image does not give much information about her apparel underneath.45 A further portrait shows the empress in light indoor dress, holding a portrait of her husband: perhaps this painting dates to the time of Jahā ngı̄ r’s death. Why did monarchs accord costly clothes and jewels to the women of their families, who for the most part were invisible to the public? Perhaps the members of royal/imperial courts assumed that anybody whom the ruler encountered at close range should be of magnificent appearance to uphold the honour of the dynasty. In addition, at the Ottoman court, from the late sixteenth century onwards, the mothers of the reigning sultans exercised significant power; due to the institutional anchoring of the queen mother’s prerogatives, the holders of this position retained some of their importance even after Köprülüzade Mehmed Paş a had reestablished the primacy of the grand vizier.46 Thus, some female members of the Ottoman court controlled significant wealth, including textiles and jewels, although their property returned to the sultan after their deaths. In Safavid Iran, female royals participated in the charisma of the dynasty, and for this reason, the shahs granted them elegant garments and jewellery. In addition, certain Safavid rulers reserved some princesses as possible spouses for the Hidden Imam, if he were to appear during the reign of the current monarch. Thus, the permanently virgin princesses achieved a certain vicarious holiness. This factor may have furthered the monarchs’ inclination to single them out with expensive accoutrements – however, here we enter the realm of speculation, for documentation is limited. In the Mughal orbit, although Nu¯r Jahā n’s prerogatives remained exceptional, certain females held formal or informal power; but once again, due to the lack of sources, the textiles and jewellery owned by these women remain a subject of intriguing speculation. 45

46

Anjan Chakraverty, Indian Miniature Painting (Delhi: India Crest, Lustre Press, Roli Books, 2008), no page number, includes a larger-scale reproduction of the miniature showing Chiteri at work. However, the author does not link this image with Nu¯r Jahā n. Betül İ pş irli Argıt, Rabia Gülnuş Emetullah Sultan 1640–1715 (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2014).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

211

212

suraiya faroqhi

displaying the royal accoutrements in portraiture: the ottoman case Portraits were a convenient vehicle for displaying the royal person in his or her official garb and wearing the appropriate jewellery, including ornamental weapons. However, we cannot be sure that these portraits depicted the clothes and insignia personally utilized by a given monarch, as court traditions might determine the iconography. Even so, given the limited number of surviving objects, portraits are often the best source on royal or princely garb. Questions of accuracy aside, in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal worlds, the sovereigns decided on the painting and sometimes the distribution of official portraits. In the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed II was the first sultan to have his portrait painted and bust sculpted, with extant depictions de-emphasizing royal accoutrements worn on the person. However, the sheer novelty of such portraits in the Ottoman setting must have emphasized the sultan’s imperial ambitions, and the items framing him render these aspirations obvious (Figure 7.2). A valuable cover enlivened by embroidery and coloured glass/jewels hangs on the balustrade separating the sultan from the viewers, in conformity with the conventions of early Renaissance Venetian portraiture. In the embroidery of the cover, meticulously depicted, we find a crown; and the painter has arranged six further crowns over the Renaissance arch framing the portrait. Supposedly, these items stand for the position of Mehmed II as the seventh ruler of the Ottoman dynasty.47 Perhaps the sultan avoided carrying the symbols of royalty on his person because Islamic religious law disapproved of gold and silver jewellery. Whatever the monarch’s intention may have been, the portrait features the date of 25 November 1480, about six months before the ruler’s death. We may thus assume that the mise-en-scène corresponds to the intentions of Mehmed II at the end of his life, when one of his commanders was conquering the Italian fortress town of Otranto.

47

Julian Raby, ‘Opening Gambits’, in Selmin Kangal, Priscilla Mary Iş ın, and Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi (eds.), The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman (Istanbul: İ ş bank, 2000), 64–95, see 80–1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

Figure 7.2 Gentile Bellini, The Sultan Mehmet II, 1480. Oil on canvas, 69.9 × 52.1 cm. The National Gallery, London, Layard Bequest, 1916, NG3099. Alamy.

If a sultan ruled long enough, as happened in the case of Sultan Süleyman, the extant portraits show that age played a role when the monarch chose his accoutrements. As an old man, this monarch appeared without almost any royal ornaments upon his person, apart from some – probably rare and precious – feathers in his turban (Figure 7.3). In one image, a page followed the monarch, carrying the latter’s golden/gilt sword and scabbard. Likely, the sobriety of Süleyman’s attire pointed to the piety and abstemiousness of the monarch in his later years. However, in the numerous portraits showing the sultan as a young and later as a middle-aged man, produced by both Ottoman and non-Ottoman artists, Sultan

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

213

214

suraiya faroqhi

Figure 7.3 Süleyman the Magnificent. Print by Melchior Lorck (1526–after 1588). 40.4 × 28.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1925, 25.2.49.

Süleyman certainly wore highly decorated textiles and expensive jewellery.48 For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the portraits of Osman II (r. 1618–22) and Selim III (r. 1789–1807) figure prominently. Murdered before reaching the age of eighteen, Osman II is of special interest as his portraits usually show him in precious attire and riding his richly caparisoned and favourite grey horse (Figure 7.4).49 Perhaps the miniaturists intend to highlight the closeness between the juvenile monarch and his mount, depicting him as the victorious warrior of his teenage ambitions. Even so, the 48

49

Jürg Meyer zur Capellen and Serpil Bağ çı, ‘The Age of Magnificence’, in Kangal et al. (eds.), The Sultan’s Portrait, 96–133. Banu Mahir, ‘Portraits in a New Context’, in Kangal et al. (eds.), The Sultan’s Portrait, 298–335.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

Figure 7.4 Osman II on horseback, 1620. Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, Istanbul (Inv. H 2169, Fol. 13a). The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo MN07E7.

painter Nakş i, a contemporary, has understated the martial aspect of his subject’s personality. As we only know that the portraits date to about 1620, and Osman II was already dead by May 1622, perhaps at least some of the images are posthumous. In consequence, it is hard to say whether the painter showed the clothes and jewels actually worn, or rather produced an image commemorating ‘Young Osman’ as he lived on in the imagination of local minstrels. Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807) explicitly used royal portraits for propaganda purposes, even sending samples to England for engraving. Intriguingly, at a time when the empire was in crisis, and the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

215

216

suraiya faroqhi

sultan came to the throne fully aware of this fact, he preferred to appear in jewelled splendour. Earlier monarchs and their advisers perhaps had not considered such shows of opulence necessary.50 In a portrait that shows him, shortly after his accession, giving an audience in the second court of the Topkapı Palace, the monarch wears garments that are all bright red, apart from the brown fur lining his overcoat with the long pendant sleeves (Figure 7.5). Only his turban is white, featuring small gold jewels. However, the most eye-catching aspect is a huge vertical diamond-studded aigrette from which sprouts a very tall bundle of light-coloured feathers. Moreover, Selim III, like his predecessors, had adopted an outer garment studded with rows of diamonds, so that he appeared as if wearing a diamond breastplate. A source of brilliant light, this apparel illuminates the royal presence. In the seventeenth century, Istanbul jewellers produced a significant number of imperial ornaments for the tsars of Russia. Museum specialists continue to speculate on the reasons why the tsars of this period favoured precious items of Ottoman (and Iranian) workmanship.51 Some authors dwell on the Russian tendency to identify Istanbul with Byzantine Constantinople, a city to which the tsars claimed entitlement as part of their imperial identity. Alternatively, the adoption of the title of ‘tsar’ by Ivan IV (1547) may have fuelled competition with other monarchs of imperial status, especially with the magnificent court of Sultan Süleyman.52 Firm evidence seems 50

51

52

Günsel Renda, ‘Portraits: The Last Century’, in Kangal et al. (eds.), The Sultan’s Portrait, 442–543, at 470–1. The huge bunch of feathers and the diamond aigrette reappear in the portrait of Selim’s successor Mustafa IV: see ibid., 500–1. Compare the comments in the section on Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich, ‘Sceptre and Orb’, www.kreml.ru/en-Us/exhibitions/virtual-exhibitions.regaliirusskikh-tsarey/tsar-aleksey-mikhaylovich/ (accessed 4 February 2020). Among valuables of Iranian origin, the so-called diamond throne, dated to 1659, was a gift from Armenian merchants living in Iran. Nurhan Atasoy and Lale Uluç, Impressions of Ottoman Culture in Europe, 1453–1699 (Istanbul: Armaggan Yayınları and The Turkish Cultural Foundation, 2012), 77. On Russian–Ottoman interactions in the decorative arts, see I. I. Vishnevskaya, ‘The Court of the Tsars in the 16th–17th Centuries’, in Olga Bogoslovskaya and Selmin Kangal (eds.), Treasures of the Moscow Kremlin at the Topkapı Palace (Istanbul: Moscow Kremlin Museums and Topkapı Palace Museum, 2010), 15–45.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

Figure 7.5 Detail of Selim III in audience, between 1789 and 1807. Oil on canvas. Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, Istanbul 17/163. © Alamy MW46CM.

to be missing. It is clear, however, that Ottoman workshops and artisans produced masterpieces fit to bedeck royal bodies.

displaying the royal accoutrements in portraiture: the safavids and the mughals Among Safavid royal portraiture there survives an image of Shā h ‘Abbā s I (r. 1588–1629) being offered a goblet by a handsome page, whose arms and shoulders the shah lightly embraces. For informal poses of this kind, there is no parallel in Ottoman royal portraiture. While the page wears an intricately folded turban, the sovereign has donned a cap with a pointed top, bordered with fur and a golden ornament at the brim. A red shirt and a vest of cloth of gold or gilt leather provide colour accents in an otherwise nearly monochrome

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

217

218

suraiya faroqhi

image; the pensive-looking shah wears no other ornaments.53 Apparently, this is the only extant portrait painted during the lifetime of the sitter (Figure 7.6). The prominent red and gold ensemble apparently signified his royal standing. After the fall of the Safavids in 1722, constant warfare made royal patronage precarious, but Nā dir Shā h (1688–1747), who ruled Iran between 1736 and 1747, did commission several portraits reflecting the manner in which a military leader without royal background presented himself as the legitimate successor of the Safavids. In a portrait painted in 1743–4, today in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, Nā dir Shā h wears a full black beard, thus differing from the (more or less) clean-shaven Shā h ‘Abbā s.54 His coat is of a stiff dark material, with buttons but worn open, once again very different from the light and fine materials chosen by Shā h ‘Abbā s. It has a narrow waist and a stiff wide skirt descending to the knee, ornamented with a jewelled belt into which the monarch has tucked a long sword and a dagger, while carrying a ceremonial mace in his hand. Nā dir Shā h adopts a similar pose in a portrait today in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (Figure 7.7), but here the jacket appears as rusty brown rather than nearly black, as is the case in the St Petersburg version.55 In both images, the most striking items are the elaborate jewelled armbands (bazuband) worn above the elbow and a red headdress with its plume surrounded by a golden ornament so large that it resembles a crown. Whether intentionally or not, Nā dir Shā h’s attire emphasizes that he is ‘different’ from his Safavid predecessors and from the Mughal dynasty as well, whose contemporary representative Muhammad ˙ Shā h (r. 1719–48) he had spectacularly defeated in 1739. A wall painting in a pavilion of the Isfahan garden precinct provides a unique perspective on how the seventeenth-century 53

54

55

Sophie Makariou, ‘Le prince et l’album’, in Sophie Makariou (ed.), Les arts de l’Islam au Musée du Louvre (Paris: Louvre Éditions, 2012), 437–83, here at 457. Adel Adamova, Persian Manuscripts, Paintings and Drawings: From the 15th to the Early 20th Century in the Hermitage Collection (London: Azimuth Editions, 2012), 251. Basil William Robinson, ‘Painting in the Post-Safavid Period’, in Ronald Ferrier (ed.), The Arts of Persia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 225–31, here at 225–6.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

Figure 7.6 Shā h ‘Abbā s and his page. Ink drawing, colour highlights and gold on paper signed Muhammad Qâsim, 1627. Musée du Louvre, Paris, MAO 494. © Alamy MNX81T-H.

Safavid court viewed its relationship to the rulers of Mughal India. The historical background was the flight of Bā bur’s son Humā yu¯n, ousted from India by his brothers who competed with him for the throne, in addition to his Afghan opponent She¯r Khā n Su¯r, who later used the title of ‘shah’. After spending over a decade in Iran (1543–55) and converting to the Shi’ite faith at least nominally, Humā yu¯n regained his throne but died in an accident shortly afterward. In the courtly history known as the Akbarnama, composed for Humā yu¯n’s son, this event featured mainly as a triumphal encounter among friendly rulers.56 However, the Safavid angle on this meeting was quite different.57 In the courtly entertainment depicted in Isfahan, Shā h Tahmā sp ˙ and his no-longer-royal visitor certainly shared food and drink on the same dais. However, the shah sported an outsized sabre, while Humā yu¯n was unarmed. In addition, the turban surmounted by the 56

57

For a discussion of the relevant text-cum-image, see Ursula Sims Williams, https://scroll.in/article/833610/how-was-emperor-humayun-received-byshah-tahmasp-of-iran-manuscripts-offer-contrasting-views (accessed 3 January 2020). Ernst Grube and Eleanor Sims, ‘Painting’, in Ferrier (ed.), The Arts of Persia, 200–24, at 215.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

219

220

suraiya faroqhi

Figure 7.7 Muhammad Riza Hindi, Portrait of Nadir Shāh, c. 1740. Gouache on paper, 22 × 14 cm. Entered the Hermitage in 1924; handed over from the Stieglitz Central Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts. Inventory Number: VР-552. Alamy 2F2DHDB.

high and pointed cap, which symbolized adherence to the Safavid project, greatly increased the size of the Iranian ruler, to say nothing of the feathers and ornaments enhancing the latter’s turban. Humā yu¯n by contrast, wore a turban without ornaments, thus, appearing to be a smaller man than the shah was; the Iranian monarch clearly dominated the picture. Apparel signified status emphatically, with varying magnificence.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

A descendant of Timur Lenk, Humā yu¯n’s father Bā bur from 1526 onward had conquered northern India, and his grandson Akbar not only consolidated and expanded the Mughal Empire, but also acted as a major sponsor of royal and elite portraits. The large number of such depictions, produced well into the reign of Aurangzeb, allow us to reconstruct the garments and jewellery that advertised the imperial presence at magnificent court gatherings (durbar), where a halo known from European images of saintly persons typically indicates the sovereign.58 As Bā bur during his few years in India was almost constantly on campaign, the images showing him are posthumous, wearing the garments considered appropriate at the time of painting, rather than recording what Bā bur may have worn in life.59 In an illustrated ‘Bā burnā ma’ dated to 1589, we see the ruler in a sportive contest, wearing a turban wound around a short red cap and adorned with a feather, a long red kaftan with an ornamental closure, and a belt with a suspended embroidered shawl or napkin and a dagger. However, the most eye-catching item is the horsetail hung around the horse’s neck; but this is not an emblem of royalty, as Bā bur’s companions have decorated their horses in the same manner. While clothing and pose highlight the person of the monarch, the al fresco or perhaps warlike atmosphere seemingly precludes the exhibition of ‘showy’ valuables. However, from the reign of Akbar onward, the court employed numerous painters; royal fashions from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth century were thus on record in contemporary imagery.60 Humā yu¯n wore a conspicuous pointed headdress with a bunch of feathers affixed to it and a cloth wrapped all around. As noted, he chose the colour of his garments by astrological criteria; however, his successors did not adopt this custom. Akbar appears in many images, often when ‘in action’. When receiving the Iranian ambassador Sayyid Beg conveying the shah’s condolences because of Humā yu¯n’s death (1562), the adolescent 58 59

60

For Mughal royal portraits, see Wright et al., Muraqqa’, 36–149. Michael Barry and Lale Uluç, ‘The Illustrated Text’, in Margaret S. Graves, Benoît Junod, and Çağ atay Anadol (eds.), Treasures of the Agha Khan Museum: Arts of the Book & Calligraphy (Istanbul: Sakıp Sabancı Museum, 2010), 238–307, at 300–1. Gagliardi Mangilli, ‘Akbar the Great’.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

221

222

suraiya faroqhi

monarch sits on an elevated gold-coloured throne, dressed in what seems to be cloth of gold, wearing a red turban (Figure 7.8).61 In quite a few images, Akbar as a young man appears while engaged in wild and dangerous sports, for which he wears simple dress but always shows his imperial status. These symbols include a sash, as well as a jewelled turban with a feather and an ornamental collar.62 Later in life, when returning to his palace in Fatehpur Sikri after a campaign, the main features marking Akbar as the ruler of a vast empire are again a feather surmounting his turban and the double sash, which seems to be Akbar’s privilege at least in this picture. In other images, by contrast, we see this feature on senior courtiers as well.63 Similar to the image of Mehmed the Conqueror, Akbar’s imperial presence is apparent not so much from signs worn on the person as from the items surrounding him. Portraits documenting Akbar’s appearance in the last years of his life show him wearing a small turban, in one case ornamented by a red band. His shirt has a ruffle at the closure, while around the waist the emperor wears the characteristic double sash and a nearly transparent white skirt over colourful striped pants. In addition to a necklace, probably of pearls, the emperor sports two bracelets featuring similar jewels. His outfit is thus resplendent although the face and manner of standing clearly show his advanced age.64 Portraits of Akbar’s son and successor Jahā ngı̄ r (r. 1605–27) being very numerous, we can only discuss a tiny selection.65 Painted around 1613, an image of Jahā ngı̄ r holding up a picture of his royal father shows that the garments and jewellery worn – or not worn – by a Mughal emperor could vary considerably.66 We need to supplement this image, which only shows head and shoulders, 61

62

63

64 65

66

This miniature is in the Victoria and Albert Museum IS.2:27–1896, https:// collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O9419/akbar-receives-the-iranian-ambassadorpainting-lal/ (accessed 5 January 2020). www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-islam/islamic-art-late-period/a/ illustration-from-the-akbarnama (accessed 3 January 2020). Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi, Fathpur Sikri Revisited (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 32. Gagliardi Mangilli, ‘Akbar the Great’, 72 and 78. Jahā ngı̄ r, The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahā ngı̄ r, Emperor of India, trans. and ed. Wheeler M. Thackston (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Makariou, ‘Le prince et l’album’, 460–2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

Figure 7.8 Akbar receiving the Iranian ambassador Sayyid Beg in 1562. Opaque watercolour and gold on paper by La’l and Nand. Mughal, c. 1590–5. Alamy.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

223

224

suraiya faroqhi

with others showing the full figure. In a durbar scene painted about 1640, over a decade after Jahā ngı̄ r’s death, the emperor wears two elaborate sashes around the waist: the lower one is larger and goldcoloured, while the upper one is narrower and of a darker hue, with a small dagger suspended from it.67 Over his trousers, the emperor wears a richly pleated skirt reaching well below the knees, as do some of his courtiers; however, Jahā ngı̄ r’s garment is much finer, showing the middle-aged ruler’s rather full figure (Figure 7.9).68 To summarize: while certain rulers might prefer ‘understated elegance’ to eye-catching opulence, even those eschewing gold and silks appeared in costly though simple clothes or at least wore one or two pieces of expensive jewellery marking their rank. Thus, when in his sixties, Akbar appeared in sparingly decorated white garb, a valuable jewel in his turban still made it clear that he was in fact the emperor. Similarly, Süleyman the Magnificent in his later years gave up wearing silks. While an outsider to the Ottoman court might have had trouble distinguishing the sultan from the viziers that surrounded him, the feathers set in a jewelled holder decorating his turban made the monarch recognizable to those familiar with Ottoman etiquette.69

exotic valuables: signs of royal privilege In many courts, goods imported from afar emphasized the privileged position of the monarch, who could acquire such valuables through conquest or arouse enough awe in lesser princes for them to send the desired items as gifts. More prosaically, the monarchs at issue might simply be rich enough to purchase whatever was rare and exotic. On a more modest level, this kind of ostentation was accessible to nonroyal persons as well: thus in the seventeenth century, male Polish nobles wore clothing that they fancied ‘Sarmatian’ and which in reality included garments and insignia ‘in the Ottoman style’. Silk sashes with embroidered ends, imported from Iran or the Ottoman 67 68

69

See Jagjeet Lally’s chapter in this volume. Linda Komaroff (ed.), Gifts of the Sultans: The Art of Giving at the Islamic Courts (Los Angeles: Museum Associates/Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, 2011), fig. 154. Necipoğ lu, Architecture, Ceremonial and Power, 20.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

Figure 7.9 Jahā ngı̄ r in a garden with his nobles. Opaque watercolour and gold on paper by Manohar. Mughal, c. 1610–15. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IM.9–1925.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

225

226

suraiya faroqhi

Empire and, at a later stage, manufactured in Poland itself, were part of the ‘Sarmatian’ outfit (Figure 7.10).70 However, the Ottoman sultans, the shahs of Iran, and the Mughal emperors – as well as the female members of their courts – could obtain exotic rarities inaccessible to anyone else. The survival of certain objects and especially archival documents enable us to say more about the Ottoman court than about its Iranian and Indian counterparts. A letter from Nur Banu Sultan (d. 1583), the mother of Mehmed III, addressed to the Venetian resident ambassador (bailo), is very instructive. In this missive, the queen mother imperiously demands that feathers imitated in delicately spun glass and imported from Italy should be a privilege of the sultan’s court, at least until they were no longer in high fashion.71 Thus, her letter shows that while the general shape of Ottoman costume changed very slowly, among the royal cohort the notion of something being in fashion for only a short time, existed already in the sixteenth century. In addition to Venetian velvets, jewellery, large mirrors and other glassware, exotica at the Ottoman court included Iranian silks. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, these items must have caused ambivalent reactions; for at that time, Safavid textiles made for use in non-religious contexts, such as palaces, featured images of people and animals, including references to well-known stories. In the Ottoman world, by contrast, such motifs usually appeared only between the covers of books. However, as some Iranian textiles decorated with mythological and real-life persons have survived in the Topkapı Palace collections, certain sultans probably did not consider these images objectionable.72 In any case, the fashion for textiles decorated in 70

71

72

Nazan Ölçer et al., Distant Neighbour, Close Memories: 600 Years of Turkish-Polish Relations (Istanbul: Sakip Sabancı Museum, 2014), 331–3. Luca Molà, ‘Material Diplomacy: Venetian Luxury Gifts to the Ottoman Empire in the Late Renaissance’, in Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 56–87, here at 76. Mohammad Reza Mehrandish, İ lber Ortaylı et al. (eds.), Onbin Yıllık İ ran Medeniyeti: İ kibin Yıllık Ortak Miras (Istanbul: The National Museum of Iran and T. C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığ ı, 2009), 234–7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

Figure 7.10 An Ottoman sash. Istanbul, first half of the eighteenth century. National Museum Krakow, MNK, Inv. no. XIX 2528.

this style disappeared in Iran during the late seventeenth century, with designers reverting to floral and abstract motifs.73 Indian cottons, silks, and cashmeres were popular among Ottoman subjects with money to spend on luxuries; and some of these pieces have survived in the Topkapı Palace as well.74 Even so,

73

74

Joan Allgrove McDowell, ‘Textiles’, in Ferrier (ed.), The Arts of Persia, 157– 70, at 163–70. Hülya Bilgi and Sumiyo Okumura (eds.), Textile Furnishings from the Topkapı Palace Museum (Istanbul: Vehbi Koç Foundation and Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2007), nos. 19, 20, 35, and 53.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

227

228

suraiya faroqhi

around 1800, Selim III recorded his disapproval of imported luxuries, claiming that he wore textiles of Ottoman manufacture and his courtiers should do the same. However, the many diamonds appearing in his portrait were definitely imports.75

conclusion Magnificence took different forms. While royal courts between Paris and Delhi or Agra went in for splendid, jewel-encrusted paraphernalia on official occasions, the notion of ‘understated elegance’ was present as well. Particularly at the Mughal court, clothes and jewels singled out the emperor; however, especially Akbar and Jahā ngı̄ r’s empress Nu¯r Jahā n had portraits painted on which they appeared in comparatively simple clothes suitable for an active life. In the Ottoman context, Mehmed the Conqueror and Süleyman in his later years presented themselves in powerful simplicity as well, perhaps manifesting religious aspirations. Life cycle and political circumstance could define the apparel chosen by a monarch, including preferred colours. In the empires studied here, while the Ottoman court privileged red, and white was a Mughal favourite, there was no attempt to declare any colour a royal prerogative. This restraint is remarkable as at least in the Ottoman world, certain shades of green were the privilege of the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. At present, our full understanding of colour symbolism at the courts of Istanbul, Isfahan, and Agra is limited indeed – and the same observation applies to other aspects of royal magnificence. However, it is fully evident that magnificence was employed to define a select population of men and women and their dynastic claims, in empires stretching across vast regions of the globe.

75

Enver Ziya Karal, Selim III’ün Hatt-ı Humayunları: Nizam-ı Cedid 1789– 1807 (repr. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1988), 136. I thank Betül Baş aran for this reference. For the diamonds, see Renda, ‘Portraits: The Last Century’, 470–1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

royal courts in the islamic world

select bibliography Alpaslan Arça, Sibel, ‘Ayasofya Müzesi Ş ehzadeler Türbesi’nde Tespiti Yapılan Tekstil Buluntuları’, in Frédéric Hitzel (ed.), 14th International Congress of Turkish Art: Paris, Collège de France 19–21 September 2011 (Paris: ICTA, 2013), 73–80. Atasoy, Nurhan and Lale Uluç, Impressions of Ottoman Culture in Europe: 1453–1699 (Istanbul: Armaggan Yayınları and The Turkish Cultural Foundation, 2012). Atıl, Esin, Levni and the Surnâme: The Story of an EighteenthCentury Ottoman Festival (Istanbul: Koçbank, 1999). Dale, Stephen, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Jahā ngı̄ r, The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahā ngı̄ r, Emperor of India, trans. and ed. Wheeler M. Thackston (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Kafadar, Cemal, ‘Eyüp’te Kılıç Kuş anma Törenleri’, in Tülay Artan (ed.), Eyüp: Dün/ Bugün, 11–12 Aralık 1993 (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1994), 50–61. Komaroff, Linda (ed.), Gifts of the Sultans: The Art of Giving at the Islamic Courts (Los Angeles: Museum Associates/Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, 2011). Lal, Ruby, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 2018). McDowell, Joan Allgrove, ‘Textiles’, in Ronald. W. Ferrier (ed.), The Arts of Persia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 157–70. Molà, Luca, ‘Material Diplomacy: Venetian Luxury Gifts to the Ottoman Empire in the Late Renaissance’, in Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 56–87. Necipoğ lu, Gülru, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapı Palace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York, Cambridge, MA, and London: The Architectural History Foundation and MIT Press, 1991). Phillips, Amanda, ‘The Historiography of Ottoman Velvets, 2011– 1572: Scholars, Craftsmen, Consumers’, Journal of Art Historiography, 6 (2012), 1–26. Reindl-Kiel, Hedda, ‘Diamonds are a Vizier’s Best Friends or: Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa’s Jewelry Assets’, in Elif Akçetin and

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

229

230

suraiya faroqhi Suraiya Faroqhi (eds.), Living the Good Life: Consumption in the Qing and Ottoman Empires of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 409–32. Rezavi, Syed Ali Nadeem, Fathpur Sikri Revisited (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013). Wright, Elaine, Susan Stronge, and W. M. Thackston, Muraqqa’: Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library Dublin (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 2008).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

8

w

EARLY MODERN FASHION CITIES Italy and Europe in a Global Context eugenia paulicelli

introduction The Italian Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) was one of the founders of the Jesuit mission in China. When in China, Ricci discovered that if he presented himself dressed as a priest he was not afforded social legitimacy in elite and court society.1 So he decided to dress as a Confucian scholar, thus ‘translating’ his social position into Chinese. This reference to dress is of a piece with Ricci’s work as the first translator of the Confucian classics into Latin and of Western classics, such as Euclid’s Elements (c. 300 bce), into Chinese in collaboration with the writer, mathematician, and politician Xu Guangqi (1562–1633). As a ‘Western Confucian’, Ricci embodied a hybrid identity where dress acted as the material mediator of cultures, locations, and geographies (Figures 8.1 and 8.2). This anecdote serves as an entry point to the argument of this chapter, which aims not only to critically revisit and expand the map of ‘fashion cities’ in time, going back to the period of early modernity (c. 1450–1700), but also to interrogate the narrative of exceptionalism related to the West and Europe on which fashion I would like to thank Giorgio Riello and Beverly Lemire for their feedback and suggestions on this chapter. Thank you also to Anna Akasoy and David Ward for reading and sharing their comments with me. 1 Peter Burke, see ‘ Introduction’, in Peter Burke and Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia (eds.), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–4; Peter Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’, in ibid., 7–38; and Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, ‘The Catholic Mission and Translations in China’, in ibid., 39–51.

231

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

232

eugenia paulicelli

Figure 8.1 The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1522–1610), left, with Paulus Magnus in China, engraving from China Monumentis or China Illustrated, by Athanasius Kircher, 1667. Photo by Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images.

history has often rested (Figure 8.3). In order to frame my argument, I will refer to the crucial role of translation in the definition and location of fashion cities in a global perspective. The cultural

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

capital and heritage of cities were not only textualized in discourses and documents but were also lived, performed, and translated via mediated exchanges by several actors during the stages of colonial expansions in Asia and the Americas.

translation and cultural history Translation derives from the Latin translatus, the past participle of transferre, which means carrying across. In its etymology, translation hints at a shift, a movement and mobility. Translation is a process that crosses borders and engenders acts of negotiating cultural and linguistic differences. As Renaissance scholar Peter Burke argues: ‘If the past is a foreign country, it follows that even the most monoglot of historians is a translator.’2 Historians as translators go back to the past in an ongoing process of reinterpretation. Intercultural translations have their own history that are embedded in a wide variety and range of cultures and languages, from words to objects, dress and textiles, rites and communities. Cultural capitals of the past, as in the present, were constructed into narratives and materialized through fashion. These global processes can be better understood in the ongoing negotiation and migration of individual and collective identities that bring to the fore embodied historiographies, as the case of Matteo Ricci illustrates, and the gradual formation of nations and colonial empires and inscription of hegemonic blocs. Following these lines and referring to the central notion of translation, I will reference research in diplomatic history and the phenomenon of global gift exchanges. In their co-edited special issue on the topic of ‘Diplomacy and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern World’, historians Toby Osborne and Joan-Pau Rubiés emphasize the importance of studying the role of official diplomats along with the ‘sub-state of diplomatic actors’ that encompass merchant and merchant companies, missionaries, artists, translators, musicians, and the wives of diplomats who acted as ‘cultural mediators’. Fashion and fashion cities would not exist as tangible cultural capital without such a process of mediation. To this end, Osborne and Rubiés stress the role of language, rhetoric, and the performativity of politics. They 2

Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’, 7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

233

234

eugenia paulicelli

Figure 8.2 Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (Map of the Myriad Countries of the World), by Matteo Ricci, 1602. Collection of Nanjing Museum. Photo by Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images.

assert that diplomats could be seen as ‘performers’ whose words and actions bear comparison with the rhetoric of literary genre.3 In their view, this kind of nexus has generated a body of knowledge that has helped to bring different domains into a state of greater proximity. Critical strategies from the world of literary studies have been used to uncover ‘the rhetorical dimensions of diplomacy’, as well as to transform the abstract concept of cultural translation into a concrete form. Scholars in global history have foregrounded this complexity especially in the exchanges and trade between Europe and Asia. As a result, there can be no monolithic definition of fashion. This is

3

Toby Osborne and Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Introduction’, Journal of Early Modern History (special issue on ‘Diplomacy and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern World’), 20/4 (2016), 313–30.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

Figure 8.2

(cont.)

certainly borne out in the case of the European definition and the way I will address fashion here.4 In performing politics, then, diplomats generated symbolic capital. In this way, it is possible to understand ‘the social life’ of things, their political underpinnings and their emotional charge as it is spread by cultural mediators. Historian Claudia Swan, who has considered the relationships between the Dutch Republic and the Ottoman Empire, calls ‘fine textiles, the lingua franca of early modern diplomacy’.5 A similar argument can be put forward about 4

5

Giorgio Riello, ‘Fashion in the Four Parts of the World: Time, Space and Early Modern Global Change’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 133–59. See also Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Claudia Swan, ‘Dutch Diplomacy and Trade in Rariteyen: Episodes in the History of Material Culture of the Dutch Republic’, in Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Global Gifts: The Material Culture

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

235

236

eugenia paulicelli

Figure 8.3 Europa regina (Queen Europe), from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, 1570. Private Collection. Photo by Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images.

another desired object, clothing. Clothes were part of international and local trade as well as a vital part of the practice of gift exchange of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 171–97.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

that involved many cities and countries in Eurasia.6 This exchange saw many actors and protagonists, all serving as cultural mediators between Europe and Eastern countries. In this context, Osborne and Rubiés have rightly asserted that diplomacy is a form of cultural translation, indeed a very crucial one, that allows us to understand the mechanisms that have defined the role and features of the ‘lingua franca’ of objects. However, a key factor for my argument is the fact that ‘lingua franca’ does not mean that fashionable objects can be easily interpreted and understood when brought either as gifts of exchange, as part of diplomatic relations, or transported into foreign markets. Translating languages implies translating cultures, a task that is not self-evident or self-explanatory. In fact, Antonia Finnane has pointed out the inability of Europeans to understand systems of meanings different from their own and how this led to the conclusion that in China there was no fashion.7 She has offered several examples, such as the use of the colour white for mourning in China. In this example, but there are many more, Europeans were lost in translation. Or conversely, Beverly Lemire’s case study of white linen shirts has shown how ‘the world and indigenous peoples adapted and translated these materials, giving a new meaning and life to the garment’.8 At this time, profound transformations occurred thanks in great part to the advent of the printing press, Western colonization, the development of trade, craft and exchange, the roles of religious envoys, diplomats, and ambassadors, all involved – although in different capacities – in cementing relations among European countries and cities and the great powers of Asia, such as the Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan. This process was aided and abetted by the technological revolution that, insofar as it introduced the idea of the reproducibility of knowledge in the form of engravings, maps, and portraits, had an enormous cultural impact. The sixteenth century can be considered the golden age in the production of European 6

7

8

Biedermann et al. (eds.), Global Gifts. See also Sarah Fee’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of gifted robes of honour. Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 1–38. Beverly Lemire, ‘Shirts and Snowshoes: Imperial Agendas and Indigenous Agency in Globalizing North America, c. 1660–1800’, in Lemire and Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies, 70, emphasis mine.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

237

238

eugenia paulicelli

cosmographies, travel reports, maps, and atlases, in which clothed bodies and, in some cases, almost naked ones, were used as vectors to locate and define geographical territories in Europe and beyond.9 This also constituted a hugely intense process of translation facilitated by the new technology of print. Humanistic culture used clothing and fashion as vehicles to transmit the ideology, taste, and style with which the European elite forged its various and local ideals of beauty. It was these ideals that were then transmitted in literature and art and exported to courts around Europe and beyond.10 This background offers a starting point to interrogate and reflect upon the important interconnectedness and convergences that brought together fashion, city, and modernity in the sixteenth century.11 This has been a concern for contemporary fashion studies. Nevertheless, for the most part studies of fashion cities have focused not so much on the early modern period as on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.12 It was, however, in the early modern period that fashion as a manifestation of a dynamics between stability and change, newness and pastness, and time and space relations came to the fore as an object both of desire and of anxiety. In the sixteenth century, and in Italy in particular, we find a prolific literature spanning various genres that brought clothing and textiles to life. A rich discourse on dress, behaviour, and consumption certified and textualized the force of fashion and its power to shape individual and collective identities. Along with artefacts, clothing, textiles, shoes, and other accessories (when they are available in museums and archives), scholars 9

10

11 12

See Guérin Dalle Mese, L’occhio di Cesare Vecellio. Abiti e costumi esotici nel ’500 (Turin: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998), esp. ‘Introduction’. I discuss this process of translation in Eugenia Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). I use ‘sixteenth century’ and ‘early modernity’ interchangeably. Christopher Breward and David Gilbert (eds.), Fashion’s World Cities (Oxford: Berg, 2006); Agnès Rocamora, Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009); I have written on the plurality of Italian fashion cities and how they have impacted and continue to impact the history and historiography of fashion. Besides Paulicelli, Writing Fashion, see Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Eugenia Paulicelli, Italian Style: Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

have been able to reconstruct their history, their affective regimes, and their impact through documents from a range of genres, literature, item lists, expenses, inventories, letters, and so forth. These written documents, considered in combination with each other and with different various artefacts, offer a sophisticated understanding of the economic, political, and cultural geography of fashion and textiles in the early modern period.13 The theorization of the dressed body and the recognition of the affective power of objects and clothing emerged forcefully in early modernity. Thanks to the combination of image and text, the world as seen by Europeans came to be known and represented in its geography and ethnography. Fashion was a powerful medium of cultural translation and in the hands of practitioners, consumers, and producers had aesthetic, political, and economic resonances. Fashion, however, was and is multi-layered and in a state of constant flux. Perhaps it is not by chance that one of the age’s most seminal texts was written by the diplomat Baldassarre Castiglione (1478–1529). In his Book of the Courtier – written between 1508 and 1528 when it was published – Castiglione considers clothing to be one of the most powerful agents of the performance of politics and so very much in line with the changing reality of diplomacy in the sixteenth century. Castiglione elaborated an aesthetic and political philosophy by means of the concept of sprezzatura (the art of concealing art). Castiglione did not invent the term; rather, he invested it and refashioned it with a plurality of new meanings. The Italian diplomat offered his own cultural translation of the term that derived from the classical tradition and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.14 13

14

Osborne and Rubiés (eds.), special issue on ‘Diplomacy and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern World’; Daniela Frigo (ed.), Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Federico Federici and Dino Tessicini (eds.), Translators, Interpreters and Cultural Negotiators: Mediating and Communicating Power from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Claudio Scarpati, ‘Il libro del cortegiano’, in Claudio Scarpati and Umberto Motta (eds.), Studi su Baldassarre Castiglione (Milan: Pubblicazioni dell’ISU Università Cattolica, 2002), 17–45; for the references to classical authors such as Cicero and others, see Peter Burke, ‘The Courtier Abroad: or, the Uses of Italy’, in Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

239

240

eugenia paulicelli

Sprezzatura’s translation and translatability (even in our contemporary world) is to signify cool and elegant masculinity in dress, along with codes of morality, good taste, and norms, and found a ready international audience in the most powerful European courts. However, the attention to appearance and the recognition of the power of dress to perform politics and pleasure was not solely a European concern. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the relationship between Europe and other areas of the world such as the Ottoman and Persian empires was that it was a two-way street. As several studies have shown, Islamic fashion and textiles had significant and uninterrupted influence on European vestimentary systems that go as far back as Arabic-Norman Sicily (c. 1060–1250), a place of multicultural integration with Palermo as the cultural capital of the West.15 James Grehan’s study of Damascus as cosmopolitan hub shows that clothing was ‘much more than a physical necessity. Rather, it was inseparable from a whole system of values, manners, and attitudes, all of which can be summed up in a word, fashion.’16 In a world that was becoming wider and more global, the elaboration of rules involved not only courtly society but also the ‘diplomatic conduct that was being re-articulated in Europe and translated to a wider world’.17 Yet, it is crucial to understand that the elaboration of rules and dress codes, the care of the self and the definition of moral and geographical boundaries emerged at the same time as images of otherness, foreign bodies, unfamiliar

15

16

17

Courtier, trans. Charles Singleton, ed. Daniel Javich (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 388–400; for an analysis of Castiglione, sprezzatura, and fashion, see Paulicelli, Writing Fashion, 54–5. Gèrard-Georges Lemaire, L’Univers des Orientalistes (Paris: Place Victoires, 2010), 16; Roberta Orsi Landini, ‘L’abito per il corpo e il corpo per l’abito’, in Roberta Orsi Landini and Susanne E. L. Probst (eds.), L’abito per il corpo e il Corpo per l’abito. Islam e Occidente a Confronto, catalogue of exhibition (Florence, 1998), 12–28; Grazietta Butazzi, ‘Tra mode occidentali e “costumi” medio orientali: confronti e riflessioni dai repertori cinquecenteschi alle trasformazioni vestimentarie tra XVII e XVIII secolo’, in Giovanna Franci and Giuseppina Muzzarelli (eds.), Il Vestito dell’altro. Semiotica, arti, costume (Milan: Lupetti, 2005); Salvatore Tramontana, Vestirsi e travestirsi in Sicilia (Palermo: Sellerio, 1993). James Grehan, Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in 18th-Century Damascus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 192. See Osborne and Rubiés, ‘Diplomacy and Cultural Translation’, 323.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

cultures, gendered subjectivities, and spaces that disrupted the status quo as for example in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Newness and otherness brought with them modernity in all its complexity, nuances, and multiplicity. Fashion and material culture in early modernity represented an eloquent example of this complexity in action; especially in connection with cities and geography and the great deal of negotiations, and political performances at the formal and informal levels that contributed to constructing cultural capital of given cities.

fashion cities and multiple modernities Geographer David Gilbert in his chapter in Fashion’s World Cities takes up John Agnew’s formulation that fashion has an active role in ‘spatializing the world’.18 This is certainly true if we are to understand fashion at different times and in different contexts. In fact, if fashion is related to time and to different kinds of temporality and rhythms, it is certainly not related to linear time; space and spatiality define its power in political, cultural, and economic terms. As several studies have illustrated, fashion is a powerful force that has not only gradually shaped the identity of cities, but has also defined the spaces of consumption, business, and tourism, thus materializing and rendering tangible the abstract concept of modernity. More precisely, fashion has a profound impact in shaping the urban experience of modernity as an integral part of the city. Fashion is an experience that has emotional, cognitive, and affective underpinnings, as the framework supplied by Miles Ogborn has confirmed. Building on the scholarship of theories and histories of modernity, Ogborn argues for the study of ‘multiple modernities’ through a process of contextualization of ‘their historical geographies and [thus], the production of a variety of “spaces of modernity”’.19 This ‘constellation’ opens up ‘the 18

19

David Gilbert, ‘From Paris to Shanghai: The Changing Geographies of Fashion’s World Cities’, in Breward and Gilbert (eds.), Fashion’s World Cities, 3–32, at 10. Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680–1780 (London and New York: Guilford Press, 1998), 12.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

241

242

eugenia paulicelli

possibility of writing’ a plurality of histories and geographies that take into account the different ‘versions’ of modernity, so assuming the form more of a crystal than of a linear path to progress.20 If there are, then, ‘different modernities in different places’, we must conceptualize modernity as a matter of the hybrid relationships and connections between places. This also implies that ‘differentiated geographies’ manifest themselves in a relational mode between places (public and private) and across spaces (cities, countries). We can no longer conceive of modernity as ‘exported’ from what was considered a centre (e.g. the West, Paris, etc.) to a periphery (e.g. colonial regions, the Global South, etc.). As we know, this hierarchical, competitive system is still very much in place today. Not everyone has agreed to abandon the idea of European exceptionalism and centrality. Following these lines, Ogborn emphasizes what Peter Osborne identifies as ‘the spatial unification of the globe through European colonialism’ and which is ‘the geopolitical condition for the development of the concept of modernity: the marker not just of a new historical present, but a new temporalization of history itself’.21 The connections between urban development and fashion cultures have a long, intertwined history and carry an intimate link to modernity. Studies on modern and contemporary cities and their definition as ‘fashion cities’ have been growing; yet not enough attention has been dedicated to the status of fashion cities in early modernity.22 As David Gilbert has observed, in order to interrogate definitions and classifications, as well as fashion historiography in general, we need to focus on the connecting threads that link the present to the past both in its continuities and ruptures. The label ‘fashion city’ has long been attributed to the Paris of the nineteenth century – the age of the birth of couture – following court society under the reign of Louis XIV and the aggressive, nationalistic, and propagandistic campaign put forward by the king and his statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert to establish France 20 21

22

Ibid., 13. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (New York: Verso, 2011), quoted in Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, 19. Gilbert, ‘From Paris to Shanghai’, 19.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

and Paris as the nation and capital of culture, modernity, and fashion.23 None of this, of course, could have happened without a strategic plan that saw the active role of royal sponsorship of a cultural economy that worked to merge court (aristocracy) and city (the bourgeoisie) and so ensure a fast-growing manufacturing industry in textile, fashion, ceramics, furniture, etc.24 This does nothing to undermine the undeniable achievements, beauty, and excellence of Parisian fashion. What it does do, rather, is to question the presumption of French exceptionalism that has come to be a master narrative to frame fashion in general (European and non) and thus prevent us from appreciating cultures of fashion and cities distant from Paris and Europe both geographically and temporally. When we think of what ‘fashion cities’ are and do today, we consider the way they project cultural capital to attract business, tourism, and cultural and economic exchange. Generally speaking, the term fashion city has been attributed to the emergence and popularity of fashion weeks, initially located in metropolises such as London, Milan, New York, Paris, and Tokyo. But with the proliferation of social media and the growing development of global economies and new fashion industries, ‘fashion weeks’ have multiplied all over the globe. They share the common project of attracting attention, visitors, buyers, and potential investors not only to the local fashion industry but also to the places that host them – Cape Town, Delhi, Johannesburg, Moscow, Seoul, and Shanghai – thus creating a multi-billion return in consumption, hotels, restaurants, and entertaining. With the gradual 23

24

Agnès Rocamora, Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009); Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Christopher Breward, Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis (Oxford: Berg, 2004); see also Hannah Azieb Pool, Fashion Cities Africa (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2016). The notion of fashion cities and geography is central to the Fabric of Cultures project started in 2006 by the author; see Eugenia Paulicelli and Hazel Clark (eds.), The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, Globalization (London and New York: Routledge, 2009) and website: www.thefabricofcultures.com (accessed 25 April 2023) Christopher Breward, ‘Fashion Cities’, in Joanne B. Eicher and Phyllis Tortora (eds.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 10: Global Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 226–9; Valerie Steele (ed.), Paris, Capital of Fashion (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

243

244

eugenia paulicelli

disappearance of local manufacturing industries in the West, culture, with its forms of consumption of art and fashion, becomes ‘the business of cities – the basis of their tourist attractions and their unique competitive edge’.25 This contemporary phenomenon not only brings to the fore the strong symbolic capital of the global fashion system, but also engenders a process of rethinking and reframing of local histories and heritage, tradition and innovation in design and textile in the wider context of what developed as a multi-billion-dollar tourism industry. The phenomenon decentres Western capitals and adds to the map new fashion capitals, acting in conjunction with another shift: namely, that of the ‘decolonization’ of fashion.26 A growing body of scholarship aims at undermining a narrative that sees the West as the place where fashion had its origin and with which it continues to be associated. Such scholarship acts as a counterweight to an earlier narrative that saw non-European areas of the world as places devoid of fashion.27 Fashion had often been associated with a narrative of progress, mobility, change and modernity, and, of course, the city, whereas ‘costume’, often associated with Asian countries, was understood as immutable and not subject to change. This assumption has been challenged by scholars who have proved that ethnic and traditional dress is also subject to change and goes through different processes of refashioning.

25 26

27

Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 1–2. See, for instance, Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton (eds.), Fashion and Postcolonial Critique (Vienna: Sternberg Press, 2019); Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun, Fashion History: A Global View (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, ‘Introduction: The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives’ and ‘Westernisation and Colonialism: The Ages of Empires’, in Riello and McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 1–14 and 357–64; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). Joanne B. Eicher, ‘The Anthropology of Dress’, Dress, 28 (2001), 50–71; Joanne B. Eicher, ‘Preface to Global Perspectives’ and ‘Overview of Global Perspectives’, in Eicher and Tortora (eds.), Berg Encyclopedia, xv, xvi, and 3–10; Karen Hansen Tranberg, ‘The World in Dress: Anthropological Perspectives on Clothing, Fashion, and Culture’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), 369–92.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

In this perspective, cities were positioned on a hierarchical grid according to which a specific city and country become more important than others and so could draw or earn greater cultural capital. In other words, they acquire ‘monopoly rent’.28 This is a term that the geographer David Harvey has borrowed from economics. Cultural capital alone does not explain how and why a given city that acquires the status of ‘fashion city’ is able to maintain it, and construct its branded identity upon it. By applying the notion of ‘monopoly rent’ to the culture of cities, Harvey explains the mechanism according to which a place or a city is able to transform its cultural capital in ‘monopoly rent’. Or in other words, a given place is able to exhibit unique traits of distinction as compared to other cities and places, so that it becomes a destination whose competitive value is recognized by all. Paris is one of the most obvious examples of this dynamic. A further factor is important for my argument: an ongoing master narrative (not only in the study of fashion) sees Paris as the quintessential model of modernity and so a ‘fashion city’. ‘Modernity’ and ‘fashion city’ are twin terms, at one and the same time ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ (Benjamin), ‘capital of modernity’ (Harvey), and ‘capital of fashion’. In its own history of fashion, Italy always had to measure up to Parisian chic.29 In fact, scholars use the term ‘emancipation’ (from Paris) to pinpoint the time in which Italian fashion achieves an autonomous status. Various historians dispute the ‘origin’ of Italian fashion and affirm that it is only in the post-war period that it was able to emancipate itself from Paris and create an autonomous fashion. Such a narrative has not only interested Italian fashion. Were we to interrogate the terms of this narrative, rather than accepting it at face value, we might well uncover the processes of intercultural translation and the existence of multiple modernities that would enable us to tell other stories. In a recent essay, David Gilbert has stressed that: ‘Paris’s longstanding declaration to be “the Fashion Capital” works through the ways that claim is understood and 28

29

David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (London: Routledge, 2001), 95–110. See Simona Segre Reinach’s chapter in volume ii.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

245

246

eugenia paulicelli

made manifest in other cities’ or, to use the terms I am adopting, ‘translated’ and ‘mediated’ in other cities.30 To the point that the narrative of modernity and Paris chic becomes the blueprint for subsequent narratives of progress and a univocal definition of fashion. Recent scholarly works in fashion studies, material culture, and Italian studies have all elaborated alternative models that contest the unidirectional notion of modernity. Instead, this new focus has been on a notion of plurality, of multiple modernities, that sees in the series of exchanges and hybrid relationships between places one of its constituent parts.31 In the next part of the chapter, I examine how the plurality of fashion centres in the Italian peninsula illustrate this model, especially Venice, with its global connections with other important fashion centres outside Europe. My aim, then, is to restore to the map of fashion and of modernity, with a European case study, those countries and places that have thus far been invisible and so deemed non-participants in the narrative of modernity. It might not be so odd, after all, to think of ‘fashion cities’ or fashion hubs as phenomena of early modernity. In what follows, I examine some of the most important Italian hubs to show how transnational connections to other fashion spaces were key in their development.

variety of costumes, styles, and cities: from italy and beyond ‘Girl from Aleppo’ The city of Aleppo, because it is very rich in merchandise, is also very rich because of the great number of people from different nations who meet there from all over the world. [. . .] Many 30

31

See David Gilbert, ‘Paris, New York, London, Milan: Paris and a World Order of Fashion Capitals’, in Steele (ed.), Paris, Capital of Fashion, 74. For Italian studies, see, for instance, the recent volume Charles Burdett and Loredana Polezzi (eds.), Transnational Italian Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020). As for fashion studies and material culture, see the references in the notes throughout the chapter and the select bibliography.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context fabrics are brought here, including silks woven in very beautiful patterns, very fine linen and cotton, and the whitest lisaro [fine cottons]. All of these things are conveniently and freely available to whoever wants to acquire them and wear them. (Cesare Vecellio, 460, 512) ‘First view of the Piazza of San Marco, Venice’ The city of Venice seems marvelous to whoever sees it, owing to its location, more than wondrous for its buildings and other features, and more than magnificent in its government – indeed, had it existed in the era that first named the Seven Wonders of the World, it would have been placed first among them. [. . .] Every Saturday a huge market takes place [in Piazza San Marco], equaling and in fact surpassing any great fair whatsoever. (Cesare Vecellio, 40, 92)32

The phenomenon of fashion as a manufacturing industry and a powerful symbolic force is always linked to specific places and geography. But in the case of Italy this phenomenon is particularly striking. In Italy, the emergence of fashion is intimately linked to the birth of cities, beginning with the medieval ‘comuni’ characterized not only by their rich diversity of craftsmanship, techniques, and economies, but also and especially by their international relations and trade. In Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528), clothing and dressing are clearly defined by space, place, and geography: ‘imagined’ nations and cities, as well as the court seen as the embodiment of a structured micro-society. In Chapter xxvi of Book ii, Giuliano de’ Medici (1479–1516), third son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, invites Federigo Fregoso (1480–1541), a nobleman who spent his youth at the court of his uncle the Duke of Urbino, to illustrate the way the courtier should dress. It is in this part of the text that the protagonists make a series of observations about the relationship between the achievement of sprezzatura and the desire to create a ‘national’ identity through choices of dress identified by geography and specific 32

The quotations from Cesare Vecellio are taken from the English translation by Margaret Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones, Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni. The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

247

248

eugenia paulicelli

spaces. In Book ii, Federigo responds to Cesare Gonzaga’s remarks regarding clothing and gentlemen’s reputations: ‘What you say is true’, replied Messer Federico. ‘Yet who of us, on seeing a gentleman pass by dressed in a habit quartered in varied colours, or with an array of strings and ribbons in bows and cross lacings, does not take him to be a fool or a buffoon? ‘Such a one would be taken neither for a fool’, said Messer Pietro Bembo,33 ‘nor for a buffoon by anyone who had lived for any time in Lombardy, for they all go like that.’ ‘Then’, said the Duchess, laughing, ‘if all go dressed like that, it must not be imputed to them as a fault, since such attire is as fitting and proper to them as it is for the Venetians to wear puffed sleeves (maniche a comeo), or for the Florentines to wear hoods.’34

Details in dress characterized the diversity of styles in cities such as Venice or Florence and materialized local identity and personality. Another noblewoman, Elisabetta Gonzaga from the powerful court of Urbino, one of the protagonists of The Book of the Courtier, wrote an answer to Vincenzo Calmeta, a friend of Paolo Cortesi. Cortesi had been Beatrice d’Este’s secretary in Milan before becoming part of the entourage of Cesare Borgia who was the brother of Lucrezia. Elisabetta writes: You show a lot of admiration for the new styles of hats and how different they are from others. I would like to say that those women who wished to make new dresses did not steal the style from those they saw wearing the stockings in the Sforza style, but felt honored to imitate them. [. . .] We cannot judge which angels were more beautiful, those who came from Rome and those women who were already in Ferrara. We will leave this opinion to those who have looked at them most lovingly.35

Elisabetta’s letter is illuminating not only because it documents the diversity of contemporary Italian courts, but also because it

33 34

35

Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), poet, humanist, and literary theorist. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Singleton, ed. Javich, Book ii, Chapter xxvi, 89. See Paulicelli, Writing Fashion, 236.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

stressed how the rulers (the dominus and the domina) were arbiters of elegance (arbitri elegantiarum). Given the number of courts, the rivalry, and the wide-ranging geographical and cultural differences between them, it should come as no surprise that there were a plurality of styles (foggie) in dress. Indeed, a famous wedding celebrated in Ferrara in 1502, between Lucrezia Borgia, who came from papal Rome and had Roman and Spanish courtiers in her entourage, and Alfonso d’Este, brother of Beatrice (Duchess of Milan, wife of Lodovico Sforza), is a vivid illustration of how the world of the courts was diversified, up to the point sometimes that each one seemed to speak a different language. If fine clothing and textiles were the ‘lingua franca’ in different courts, each one of them elaborated its own idiolect and distinct accent.36 As to cities and their fashions, they too elaborated a specific language of style that helped to certify their distinction and position them in a hierarchical order. Some women, especially the few in positions of power, were actual agents in the construction and negotiation of their public identities, as illustrated by Isabella d’Este’s correspondence and also by her active role in fashioning herself. Mantua, the landlocked north Italian state where Isabella ruled, was an important centre for trade and diplomatic exchange with the Ottoman Empire. Antonia Gatward Cevizli has studied the gift exchanges between Mantua governed by Francesco Gonzaga, husband of Isabella and Bayezid II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1481 to 1512.37 The exchange was motivated by Francesco’s desire to consolidate his power in the wider European context and bring visibility to its relatively small court. The friendship with the Ottoman Empire enhanced the prestige of Mantua. Specific documents attest to the exchange of horses, portraits, cloth, clothing, and armour, which was particularly praised by the Ottomans. 36

37

See the recent book published by the Archivio di Stato of Modena, Diane Ghirardo (ed.), I Tesori di Lucrezia Borgia. Gli inventari del guardaroba (1502–1504) e delle gioie (1516–1519) nel fondo ‘Archivio Segreto Estense’ dell’Archivio di Stato di Modena (Modena: Archivio di Stato, 2020). Thank you to Morena Corradi who alerted me to this book. Antonia Gatward Cevizli, ‘Portraits, Turbans and Cuirasses: Material Exchange between Mantua and the Ottomans at the End of the Fifteenth Century’, in Biedermann et al. (eds.), Global Gifts, 34–55.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

249

250

eugenia paulicelli

A courtier informed Isabella as to ‘how Francesco had wished to have six robes (“casaghe”) “alla turchesca” made as gifts for the ambassador and how, not succeeding in finding a sufficient brocade or damask in the merchants’ shops, he had ordered that the palii (banners) from his own collections should be used for the tunics’.38 The local styles that characterized Italian cities ran parallel to flourishing textile trades. Historian Elizabeth Currie, in her study on Florentine Renaissance fashion, identified a local male garment, il lucco (a long cloak) that enjoyed a distinguished republican tradition as a symbol of civic authority and continued to be part of the male wardrobe during the Medici rule (1550–1620).39 Along with the items that characterized local identity and style, the ‘most tangibly “Florentine” aspect of clothing of this period was the fabric from which it was made’.40 As it happens, fabric is a key carrier of meanings. Florence had a long tradition of producing wool and several kinds of silk, from the polychrome damask velvet and damask to the more affordable versions such as ermesino (sarcenet) and tabby. Each one of these fabrics carried with them precise meanings of class and status within society. Italy and its fragmented political system were far from being the only sites where multiple centres boasted a distinct fashion and textile industry. As Antonia Finnane has shown, in its relations to taste, the dynamic relationship between production and consumption of fashion can be located in multiple places.41 For example, dynamism in Chinese interregional and international trade in textile was a sign of the prominence of Chinese fashion cities. The Chinese Ming dynasty’s ‘Southern Capital’, Nanjing, and other cities such as Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Yangzhou, became important sites for economic and cultural productivity and for social and political change.42 Cities, then, globally shaped fashion.

38 39

40 41

42

Ibid., 46. Elizabeth Currie, ‘Clothing and a Florentine Style, 1550–1620’, Renaissance Studies, 6/3 (2008), 33–52 and Elizabeth Currie, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Currie, Fashion and Masculinity, 49. Antonia Finnane, ‘Fashions in Late Imperial China’, in Riello and McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History Reader, 365. Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

Starting in the second half of the sixteenth century, no genre other than European costume books can better illustrate the link between fashion and spatiality. The popularity of Italian costume books testifies to the relevance and sedimentation of the language of fashion linked not only to individual identities and garments but also to geography and cities in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. At the same time, another genre appeared: namely, illustrated alba amicorum and travel albums that circulated throughout Italy and Europe. A text like Mores Italiae, for example, shows how foreign travellers, often European students in Italian universities, perceived and depicted Italians.43 These illustrated publications attest, as Riello has argued, to the crucial role that visual and material culture had in ‘bridging microhistory and global history’; and, for our purposes, bridging individual local and national life with transnational realities.44 An important exemplar of the genre of costume books that interact with images, a unicum, was Cesare Vecellio’s (c. 1530–1601) two editions of Habiti antichi et moderni.45 Through print the world was translated into images of different ‘nations’ made recognizable through men’s and women’s clothing, thus bringing closer places that were distant and not yet known to Europeans through visual representations. This process, according to Riello, provides an insight into the ways Europeans understood the articulation between local and global geographies

43

44

45

Maurizio Rippa Bonati and Valeria Finucci (eds.), Mores Italiae. Costumi e scene di vita nel Rinascimento, bilingual ed. (Cittadella: Biblos, 2007) accompanied by essays of the editors and Margaret F. Rosenthal. Giorgio Riello, ‘The World in a Book: The Creation of the Global in Sixteenth-Century European Costume Books’, Past & Present, 242, Supplement 14 (2019), 281–316; Susanna Burghartz, ‘The Fabric of Early Globalization: Skin, Fur and Cloth in de Bry’s Travel Accounts, 1590– 1630’, in Riello and Lemire (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies, 15–40; Katherine Bond, ‘Mapping Culture in the Habsburg Empire: Fashioning a Costume Book in the Court of Charles V’, Renaissance Quarterly, 81/2 (2018), 530–79. Guérin Dalle Mese, L’occhio di Cesare Vecellio; Cesare Vecellio, De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo. Libri due fatti da Cesare Vecellio (Venice: Zenaro, 1590); Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo di Cesare Vecellio, di nuovo accresciuti di molte figure (Venice: Bernardo Sessa, 1598), English translation by Rosenthal and Jones, Habiti Antichi et Moderni; see Giorgio Reolon, Cesare Vecellio (Pieve di Cadore circa 1530 – Venezia 1601 (Il Prato: Belluno, 2021).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

251

252

eugenia paulicelli

and how they connected the microscopic dimension of bodies and their mode of dress to wider interpretations of the very shape of the world.46 Fashion and Europeans’ encounter with the Americas walked in tandem, says Vecellio, as each new discovery brought to the fore new clothes, styles, and tastes in dress. Vecellio’s ambition, in fact, was to map the diversity of dress, ornaments, and customs of a world that was then, as he tells us, being revealed before his eyes. As fashion, he says, changes according to individual desires and for capricious reasons, his project is and can only be an unfinished and provisional one. As such, costume books are, as Giulia Calvi has argued, ‘a genre that goes beyond Europe and the West, rejects linear notions of historical change and unique models of Western modernity’. In particular, Calvi’s essay focuses on a comparative approach that considers Italy and Japan where a large quantity of maps and costume books were also printed.47 In Japan, for instance, folding screens pictured and reproduced painted images of Western European maps of the world. Scholarship has also shown how Japan’s major court city of Edo paralleled that of Paris during the reign of Louis XIV.48 Costume books contributed to an understanding of the social, political, and aesthetic dynamics of cultural production and the material culture of the time. It is by reading a section of the text or by perusing a single costume plate that elite European readers visit a different geographical space, a city, a house, a harem, or a country. Thus, the costume plates that make up the text’s sections and chapters are virtual spaces explored by readers that open the door to familiar or unfamiliar geographical settings. The use of images and words, and the way Vecellio employs the multi-faceted category of space, illustrate how the techniques of the art of memory establish a mental path leading to an identification of places.49 46 47

48

49

Riello, ‘The World in a Book’. Giulia Calvi, ‘Cultures of Space: Costume Books, Maps, and Clothing between Europe and Japan (Sixteenth through Nineteenth Century)’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 20/2 (2017), 331–63. James L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru (eds.), Edo and Paris: Urban Life & the State in the Early Modern Era (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). Eugenia Paulicelli, ‘Mapping and Memory’, The Fabric of Cultures website, http://fabricofcultures.qc.cuny.edu/mapping-and-memory/.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

Therefore, the visual organization of Vecellio’s material is akin to a mental process in which he wishes to instruct readers and develop their awareness of the significance of dress and appearance, creating in their minds a mental cartography with which to locate information about his subject matter. This is even more so in the second edition of Vecellio’s Habiti (1598), where he adds pages on the Americas, and organizes a table of contents listing in alphabetical order the costumes, the wearers, and their geographical provenance. If the 1590 edition starts with ‘acconciature’ (hairdos), the 1598 edition starts with ‘Africana’, perhaps a marker of difference given the geo-politics of the time. However, the table of contents does not correspond to the order in which the reader finds the entries. These take the form of a spatial organization that gives prominence to two places, Rome caput mundi, and Venice, which in the eyes of Vecellio inherited the former’s grandiosity. Nevertheless, despite Vecellio’s curiosity about other cultures and geographical spaces, his depictions of the ‘other’ are set against a European model in which Italy and his beloved city, Venice, play a major role.50 Space, then, has a multi-layered meaning that touches on many levels, from the intimate to the public and the political. Physical and mental images operate in this scheme similar to the processes of digitization and spatiality made possible by modern technology. Vecellio’s costume book demonstrates the complexity of the genre in illustrating the way the geographical underpinning of dress is materialized through discourse and representation. Of note in his excursion on global dress is the attention he gives to material and fabric in his introductory discourse on ‘Ancient and Modern Clothing: Their Origin, Transformation, and Variety’. In fact, it is not by chance that special attention is dedicated to the material foundation of dress: cloth. He lists the different kinds of cloth such as cotton and silk, as well as listing the colours available. In his description of the materiality of fabric and colours, Vecellio entices his readers into almost sensing the process of cloth production. And among the ‘variety of cloths and the material with which 50

Eugenia Paulicelli, ‘Mapping the World: The Political Geography of Dress in Cesare Vecellio’s Costume Books’, The Italianist, 28 (2008), 24–53.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

253

254

eugenia paulicelli

dresses were made in the old days’, he lists wool, silk, cotton, linen and concludes with ‘feathers’. He says: And there are also extremely beautiful, well-woven garments, divided into sections of feathers of different birds, skilfully and artfully made, in such a variety of well-matched colors that for this reason and for this variety, they can be considered the most delicate and sumptuous clothing to be found anywhere. And these are worn by the Indians of America and in other places very far from our own country.51

This reference to feathers raises the question of the geography of fashion and that of the global exchange between Europe and the Americas during colonial times, another example of the global interconnectedness of Renaissance fashion. Feathers accrued new meanings for Europeans at the time of their colonization and trade in the Americas, including some that emanated from the first peoples of that land. As Marcy Norton notes, material systems devised by Indigenous Americans produced ‘powerful sensory’ experiences throughout Europe through the impact of tobacco and chocolate; feathers join this list, though differently resonant.52 Europeans recognized the skill and craftsmanship involved in weaving feathers on looms and artfully manipulating them to create a soft textual surface, skills of which Europeans were previously unaware.53 In fact, traded feather goods from the Tupi people, from what is now Brazil, first entered Europe via a Portuguese fleet in 1500. Feathers were a highly profitable colonial commodity and became fashionable throughout Southern and Northern Europe, goods avidly collected and ‘translated’ in different European contexts.54 In 1522, the Venetian ambassador to 51 52

53

54

Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo, 57. Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 10. Katherine Bond, ‘Hierarchies of Texture: Feathers & Fur in Costume Books’ (unpublished paper). I wish to thank Katherine Bond for sharing her paper with me. Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Feathers and Fashion, Venice and The Hague, 1590– 1660’, in Eugenia Paulicelli (ed.), The Fabric of Cultures: Systems in the Making (New York: Art Center, Queens College, 2017), 98–101; Mariana Françozo, ‘Beyond the Kunstkammer: Brazilian Featherwork in

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

Spain, Gaspare Contarini, praised and marvelled at the new texture of feather work. As an experiment in craft and design, feathers were an exotic colonial commodity for European clothing and accessories. Art historian Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank has shown how feathered artworks were created in Mesoamerica before and after the Spanish conquest in 1521 and how Spaniards and other Europeans wondered at their shimmering beauty.55 Feather works were prized objects in the early post-conquest period, with Hernán Cortés sending feathered objects to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. In 1539, the governor of Mexico City, Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin, commissioned a feather work representing the Mass of St Gregory for Pope Paul III (r. 1534–49), now the oldest surviving feather work from colonial Mexico.56 The artwork is the product of cross-cultural collaboration in a new colonial hierarchy of power, including those made by an Indigenous man supervised by the Franciscan missionary Pedro de Gante from Flanders. With the aim of converting local peoples to Christianity, the friar established the school of San José to train Indigenous men in European artistic techniques. As a result, the feather work after the conquest, especially those featuring religious motifs, materialized the meeting point of distant worlds borrowing and mixing European and Indigenous traditions, within shifting power dynamics. Collaborations such as this are also documented by the encyclopaedic Florentine Codex produced by the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun and his teams of Indigenous people and students (Figures 8.4–8.6). The Codex is composed of twelve volumes and was completed in 1579. It was then sent

55

56

Early Modern Europe’, in Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (eds.), The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2016), 105–27; Ulinka Rublack, ‘Befeathering the European: The Matter of Feathers in the Material Renaissance’, American Historical Review, 126/1 (2021), 19–53. Lauren Kilroy Ewbank, ‘Featherworks: The Mass of St. Gregory’, Smarthistory, 8 March 2016, https://smarthistory.org/featherworks/ (accessed 14 May 2021). See also Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano (eds.), The Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2019); and Jeanette Favrot Peterson, ‘Images in Translation. A Codex “Muy Historiado”’, in ibid., 21–36. The work is based on a European print, though the feather mosaic embodies the fusion of Indigenous and European traditions. ‘The Mass of St Gregory’ is held at the Musée des Jacobins, Auch (France).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

255

256

eugenia paulicelli

Figure 8.4 Set of adornments and emperors’ feather headdress, page from the Florentine Codex, or General History of the Things of New Spain (Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana), bilingual version in Spanish and Nahuatl, by the Spanish missionary Bernardino de Sahagun (1499–1590). Aztec civilization, sixteenth century. Facsimile. Mexico City, Biblioteca Manuel Gamio Inah Museo Del Templo Mayor. Photo by DeAgostini / Getty Images.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

Figure 8.5 Processing feathers, text in Nahuati, from the Florentine Codex, by Bernardino de Sahagun. Sixteenth century. Mexico City, Biblioteca Manuel Gamio Inah Museo Del Templo Mayor. Photo by DeAgostini / Getty Images.

to Spain and served to document ‘the general history of the things of New Spain’. The Codex provides illustrations and descriptions of the artisans called ‘Amanteca’ from the neighbourhood called ‘Amanta’ and gives details of how they produced the valuable feather works. The Codex itself is a document that travelled: from Madrid to

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

257

258

eugenia paulicelli

Figure 8.6 Feather processing after the Spanish conquest, from the Florentine Codex, by Bernardino de Sahagun. Sixteenth century. Mexico City, Biblioteca Manuel Gamio Inah Museo Del Templo Mayor. Photo by DeAgostini / Getty Images.

Florence, hence its name of Florentine Codex, and was acquired in 1588 by Ferdinando I de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany who, among other things, actively collected feather works and other items from colonial Mexico.57 57

Peterson and Terraciano (eds.), The Florentine Codex.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

Figure 8.7 Louise Hollandine of the Palatinate, Sophia of Hanover dressed as an American Indian, c. 1644. 116.0 × 84.2 cm. Museum Wassenburg Anholt.

The feather works produced by skilled Indigenous artists created a soft texture that captured light and air as they passed over their surface, thus animating the objects with the movement of the feathers as if illuminated by a ‘divine light’. Vecellio was among the community of intellectuals and elite collectors that lauded the feather work garments made in the Americas, describing these, as we have seen, as the ‘most delicate and sumptuous clothing to be found anywhere’.58 It was these qualities of the feathered objects that made them very attractive for European religious artworks, liturgical garments, and of course fashionable items as visible in Figures 8.7 and 8.8. The portrait of Sophia of Hanover, daughter of

58

Rosenthal and Jones, Habiti Antichi et Moderni, 57.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

259

260

eugenia paulicelli

Figure 8.8 Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Laura Pola, 1543–4. Oil on canvas, 90 × 75 cm. She is wearing a fan with feathers. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy. Photo by Leemage / Corbis via Getty Images.

Frederick V, documents her adaptation of an Indigenous garment, worn now as a royal mantle, an example of European translated fashion that was ‘a reflection both of the place of the New World in the early modern [European] mindset as well as of the development of specific forms of cultural performances in Europe’.59 In Vecellio’s Habiti, we see in the images and words the interactions, hybrid forms, and mistranslations between different cultures as they are manifested in clothing and adornment. But what we also see is that Europe and its cities were far from being the only centres of fashion and aesthetic hierarchy. Two of Vecellio’s costume plates are particularly relevant. Ann Jones has pointed out that in the Americas, dress changed as a result of the presence of Europeans. Conversely, we 59

Françozo, ‘Beyond the Kunstkammer’, 116.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

have seen how techniques and material originating in Indigenous cultures of the Americas influenced ‘European’ fashion. Vecellio includes two particularly striking images in his section on ‘The Clothing of America’. One is of a ‘young man from Mexico’ and the other is of a ‘nobleman of Cuzco’, both bearing the signs of the process of hybridity visible in material culture. The young man from Mexico is, in fact, two young men. In the foreground a man is dressed; in the background a man is naked. The clothed man is carrying flowers in one hand and a mirror in the other (Figure 8.9). Vecellio tells us in his commentary that the Indigenous men consider mirrors as jewels: ‘these are brought to them from Europe by the Spaniards’, he adds. Translucence was one of the most valuable powers of attraction for peoples of the Americas. As historians Nicholas Saunders and Molly Warsh have shown, Europeans exchanged objects including reflective goods like mirrors, and sometimes garments, for pearls, precious stones, and metals.60 Luminescence and brilliance represented the sacredness, beauty, and power seen in many European portraits of men and women whose clothes are adorned with a profusion of pearls and gemstones. Vecellio also tells us that the naked young man in the background is from the province and goes completely naked, except for his private parts, because of the heat. His head is adorned with feathers and he carries a dart. It is interesting to note here the dialectic between the naked body, ‘coming from the province’, and the clothed one, holding a mirror whose surface is positioned towards the viewer/reader, who exhibits a fashion-conscious self, a worldliness linked to a more urban setting. The notion of ‘nakedness’ is not univocal and is in itself a language, a ‘social skin’ to use Terence Turner’s definition, in which European understanding was often lost in translation.61 The 60

61

Nicholas J. Saunders, ‘Biographies of Brilliance: Pearls, Transformations of Matter and Being, c. AD 1492’, World Archaeology, 31/2 (1999), 243–57; Molly A. Warsh, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); see also for an earlier period and focused on Italian courts and male fashion, Timothy McCall, ‘Brilliant Bodies: Material Culture and the Adornment of Men in North Italy’s Quattrocento Courts’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 16/1–2 (2013), 445–90. Terence S. Turner, ‘The Social Skin’ [1980], reprinted in Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin (eds.), Not Work Alone: A Cross-Cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival (London: Temple Smith, 2012), 112–40; and for

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

261

262

eugenia paulicelli

Figure 8.9 ‘The Young Mexican’, from Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti antichi, et moderni di tutto il mondo di Cesare Vecellio di nuovo accresciuti di molte figure, Venice, 1598. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

young man from the province was not naked in the context of the Indigenous culture. Quite a complex dynamic is materialized a discussion of colonial perceptions of nakedness, see Grace Karskens, ‘Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin: Aboriginal Men and Clothing in Early New South Wales’, Aboriginal History, 35 (2010), 1–36.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

through dress, dressing, and undressing and the presence of an exotic European item of consumption: the mirror. Almost unwittingly, the young Mexican, dressed in a combination of foreign textiles, does not look at himself in the mirror. His gaze is nonchalantly directed to whoever is looking at him. This seems to be a coded language where the Indigenous body talks back to its colonizers. A similar form of métissage and coded language is also contained in the costume plate of the nobleman from Cuzco (Figure 8.10). Here’s how Vecellio describes him: ‘The noblest men of this country that we call America wear various kinds of clothing . . . On top of an undergarment made of a square of cloth, they used to wear a mantle similar to our lenzuolo, of black or white cotton or of wool. Today they cover themselves with a mantle that they call a hacola. They are delighted by any shirt the Spaniards may give them.’62 Indigenous peoples in newly colonized lands adapted new material media to suit existing cultural purposes, integrating novel items into functional and cultural systems, ‘translating’ effectively, to sustain their priorities.63 We can see, in fact, in the illustration the details of the shirt collar and the sleeve that so intrigued the Italian observer. The editors and translators of Vecellio’s Habiti, Ann Jones and Margaret Rosenthal, have commented on this particular illustration noting that: Rather than presenting this man as a noble savage, fixing him in an unchanging past and present, Vecellio shows that he occupies a changing culture, one being transformed by contact with Europeans. [. . .] In the last line of his description of the Cutzcan nobleman, he [Vecellio] focuses on the social hierarchy not of Spain but of Peru: this costume is reserved for the elite of the tribe, signifying their exclusive right to wear two feathers attached to the front of a ‘beautifully colored headband’.64

62 63

64

Emphasis mine, 555. Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade: The Indigenization of European Trade Goods in Historic and Contemporary Canada’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 20 (2007), 69–81. Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Introduction: Vecellio and his World’, in Rosenthal and Jones, Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni, 41.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

263

264

eugenia paulicelli

Figure 8.10 ‘The Nobleman from Cutzco’, from Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti antichi, et moderni di tutto il mondo di Cesare Vecellio di nuovo accresciuti di molte figure, Venice, 1598. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

We might mention historian Beverly Lemire’s remarks in her study of the linen shirt that illuminate other important features of this global exchange. Lemire recalls how ‘gifted and traded, these items [shirts] were ingredients in the creation of métissage, a material and cultural mixing intended by Europeans to sign leading indigenous partners’ and how for ‘European elites the white linen shirt

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

became an almost fetishized commodity [. . .] a proxy for physical cleanliness’.65 However, similar to the case of the Young Mexican, the nobleman from Cutzco re-elaborates and negotiates his own response to the gift and finds his own way of wearing it. The plate synthesizes how the exchange worked in both directions and how Indigenous people also ‘adapted and translated’ European modes of dress and identity. Venice for its strategic geographical position, its networks, and its history was central to the global exchanges of fashion. It is not surprising that Cesare Vecellio’s and later Giacomo Franco’s costume books, described it as a fashion city.66 As we saw earlier, Vecellio first describes the city as: ‘Marvelous to whoever sees it, owing to its location, more than wondrous for its buildings and other features, and more than magnificent in its government – indeed, had it existed in the era that first named the Seven Wonders of the World, it would have been placed first among them’ (40, 92). The text appears side by side with an etching of Piazza San Marco overlooking the sea, the heart of Venetian splendour and international trade. In the commentary additional information is offered: ‘The view is available to a person standing near the water, looking towards the famous convent of the church of San Giorgio’ (40, 92). Vecellio does not limit himself to giving only one picture from a single point of view. In fact, we find in sequence three perspectives of Piazza San Marco, each one of them taken from a different angle, each one of them introducing a different gallery of costumes. In choosing three different sites of Piazza San Marco and linking them in a sort of shot sequence, Vecellio becomes a film director avant la lettre. He introduces 65 66

Lemire, ‘Shirts and Snowshoes’, 71 and 69. For Giacomo Franco, see Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Eugenia Paulicelli, ‘Power, History and Dress in Giacomo Franco’s Costume Plates (1610–1614)’, in Paulicelli, Writing Fashion, 127–74; Eugenia Paulicelli, ‘Venice: City of Fashion and Power in Giacomo Franco’s Habiti d’Huomini et Donne Venetiane (ca. 1610)’, in Tara Zanardi and Lynda Klich (eds.), Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (New York: Routledge, 2019), 77–89.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

265

266

eugenia paulicelli

movement into his pictures by placing the different images in a narrative sequence, a montage, linked to his verbal script, his commentary. And we might add that since these three perspectives of the piazza introduce a series of costumes, they can be seen as an early modern version of a fashion show, akin to those in the last few years organized by those luxury brands that have set their fashion shows in cities and locations laden with history, cultural heritage, and architecture. What I wish to underline is that the link between fashion and both the city itself and the definition of what a fashion city is, lies very much at the core of fashion, spatiality, and branding. From this point of view, and to stay with Venetian costume books, we can see very clearly how Venice, depicted as the centre of the world, becomes the hero of a narrative of exceptionalism similar to the one noted for Paris and Europe in general. With its wealth, Venice had established itself as one of the most important fashion cities in early modern Italy and beyond, had become an important player in Italy’s domestic and international politics, while playing a key role in East/West relations and the Silk Road, during times of war and peace. Venice then is at the centre of a complex world that can be read through clothing and material culture. David Rosand and other historians have emphasized that the attraction the Serenissima exercised on English and foreign tourists from West to East was the result of astute self-advertising campaigns.67 To this end, Venice was very quick to appropriate the technological innovations of the recently invented printing press and it soon became the ‘printing capital of Europe’. There was, then, a felicitous convergence of interests between the print industry and the commercial enterprises that produced Venice’s signature goods – silk, lace, and glass – and with these an image of the city itself. Historian Luca Molà has shown how successfully Venetian silk fabrics, woollen cloth, and glass were received in the Ottoman Empire’s markets. These industries employed tens of thousands of people. The Venetian Consul, based in Aleppo, a city praised by Vecellio, was one of the three largest cities in the Ottoman 67

David Rosand, The Myth of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

Empire, and boasted a large European merchant community, where Molà ‘estimated that between 1589 and 1592 the silk and woollen cloth trade to Syria was worth one million ducats a year’.68 In addition, silk and woollen cloth, and the exquisite Murano glass were not solely items of trade. They were the most desired items sent to the Porte as gifts in the diplomatic exchange with the Venetian Republic.69 Fashion was at the heart of the Serenissima’s commercial life, and much space was dedicated to it in the city’s many public spectacles and festivals. The city was to be ever more defined by its producers and by those – both locals and the many visitors – who consumed its goods. Even in this early modern era, one of the effects of costume books was to spread the word about those cities that were deemed centres of fashion and including those in the Americas. Fashion, with all its mediatic apparatus and industry, played a key role in ‘branding’ the image of Venice, creating it as a myth and promoting it as one of the most prominent European early modern fashion cities – one of the first, but certainly neither the last nor the only one. Cities are shaped and textualized through a literary tradition of travel writing and costume books that create narratives and tropes to define the image of the city for visitors and inhabitants. If fashion, as we have seen, has an impact on spatializing the world, costume books in the age of exploration, scientific advancements, and colonization spatialized the hierarchy of the clothed body. In this way, in Valerie Traub’s words, a new epistemology of the body is produced, similar to the cartography we have seen in Vecellio. Traub argues in fact that: ‘The voyage illustrations translate European colonialists’ experiences of human diversity into an orderly, systematizing uniformity, while constructing a rationalized measure that encourages classification and comparison.’70

68

69 70

Luca Molà, ‘Material Diplomacy: Venetian Luxury Gifts for the Ottoman Empire in the Late Renaissance’, in Biederman et al. (eds.), Global Gifts, 57. Ibid., 58. Valerie Traub, ‘Mapping the Global Body’, in Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (eds.), Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 44–92.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

267

268

eugenia paulicelli

conclusion Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. ‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?’ Kublai Khan asks. ‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’ Marco answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they form.’ Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: ‘Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.’ Polo answers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.’71

In this chapter my aim has been to connect early modern fashion cities with the notion of intercultural translation, the spaces of multiple modernities and differentiated geographies that function in a relational mode between places and across spaces. These analytical tools interrogate the master narrative of the history of fashion and fashion cities that have seen Europe, and Paris in particular, as the model to be imitated, or against which all are judged. This mode has prevented us not only from seeing other important centres and hubs around the world but has also had the result of offering a positivistic approach to the history of fashion and dress. Recent works of scholarship in many disciplines, from global history to cultural geography, literary studies, material culture, and translation studies have challenged these assumptions. As I emphasize, fashion cities are defined in a network of both local and international relations as well as by interconnected forces and players that shape their economy and symbolic capital. In view of this multi-layered definition of fashion cities and their interconnected spatialities, perhaps it would not be out of place to mention a point touched on by Roland Barthes. He says, in fact, that ‘Any vestimentary system is either regional or international, but it is never national. The geographical presentation in histories of dress is always based on a “leadership” in fashion.’72 With this 71

72

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. from Italian by William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1974), 82. Roland Barthes, ‘History and Sociology of Clothing: Some Methodological Observations’, in Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, trans. Andy Stafford, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

italy and europe in a global context

he hints at the constructed nature not only of a ‘national’ fashion but of the ‘nation’ itself and the complex processes of its fashioning.

select bibliography Barthes, Roland, ‘History and Sociology of Clothing: Some Methodological Observations’, in Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion, trans. Andy Stafford, ed. Andy Stafford and Michael Carter (Oxford: Berg, 2004). Biedermann, Zoltán, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Breward, Christopher and David Gilbert (eds.), Fashion’s World Cities (Oxford: Berg, 2006). Burke, Peter, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’, in Peter Burke and Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia (eds.), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7–38. Currie, Elizabeth, ‘Clothing and a Florentine Style, 1550–1620’, Renaissance Studies, 6/3 (2008), 33–52. Guérin Dalle Mese, Jeannine, L’occhio di Cesare Vecellio. Abiti e costume esotici nel ’500 (Turin: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998). Lemire, Beverly and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). McClain, James L., John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru (eds.), Edo and Paris: Urban Life & the State in the Early Modern Era (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). Osborne, Toby and Joan-Pau Rubiés (eds.), ‘Diplomacy and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern World’, special issue of Journal of Early Modern History, 20/4 (2016). Paulicelli, Eugenia, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). Riello, Giorgio, ‘The World in a Book: The Creation of the Global in Sixteenth-Century European Costume Books’, Past & Present, 242, Supplement 14 (2019), 281–316. Rosenthal, Margaret and Anne Rosalind Jones, Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni. The Clothing of the Renaissance World: Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

269

270

eugenia paulicelli Traub, Valerie, ‘Mapping the Global Body: The Making of the Cartographic Body in the Making of Nations’, in Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (eds.), Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 44–97. Vecellio, Cesare, De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo. Libri due fatti da Cesare Vecellio (Venice: Zenaro, 1590). Vecellio, Cesare, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo di Cesare Vecellio (Venice: Bernardo Sessa, 1598).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press

9

w

FASHIONING POSSIBILITIES Early Modern Global Ties and Entangled Histories beverly lemire

The early modern era (c. 1500–1800) is characterized by the movement of goods and movement of people at an unprecedented scale, interactions described as ‘codependent’.1 The use of ‘early modern’ is argued to be a useful term by James Grehan, reflecting a shared material transformation that defined this age, with goods like tobacco, once known only in the Americas, sweeping the globe by 1600.2 Material innovations of many sorts took hold, manifested in the multiplication of old and new commodities and their wider social manipulation in world communities – shifts in fashion by another name. Diffusion of new material culture did not mean the simple transplanting of goods or the standardization of meanings attached to objects and object systems. Neither colonial nor imperial authorities could wholly impose such values. Indeed, Indigenous scholar Sherry Farrell Racette emphasizes that goods offered by European fur traders to Indigenous North Americans had to conform to existing priorities, with colour and ‘improved function’ equally vital. In this context, ‘[Indigenous] Women literally stitched new goods into daily and ceremonial life.’3 Translation 1

2

3

Sophie White, ‘Geographies of Slave Consumption’, Winterthur Portfolio, 45/ 2–3 (2011), 242; Robert DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). James Grehan, ‘Smoking and “Early Modern” Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries)’, American Historical Review, 111/5 (2006), 1354. Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade: The Indigenization of European Trade Goods in Historic and Contemporary Canada’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 20 (2008), 71, 72.

271

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

272

beverly lemire

and incorporation are terms applied to the growing complex of materials, a mixing facilitated by new and expanded exchange systems.4 Shifting material expectations also defined this period, driven by expanding global trade with busier sea routes. Established empires in various world zones (Asia, Africa, and the Americas) now butted up against new imperial initiatives launched by Western powers, with peoples of diverse cultures mediating their options as they could. Some faced extraordinary pains, but also generated exceptional fashions.5 Material goods and systems marked these events. Colonial-inflected structures of various kinds – cultural, social, and economic – were characterized by unequal power. Nonetheless, the aesthetics and knowledge of subaltern and colonized peoples materialized fashions and shaped tastes. These histories are my focus. I offer case studies that illuminate the power of illicit networks and address gendered and racialized peoples whose myriad interventions shaped styles in this era. Material evidence is a staple of this chapter, recognizing that, as Leora Auslander observes, things that are ‘felt and touched’ and part of embodied routines ‘are not only the product of history, they are also active agents in history. In their communicative, performative, emotive, and expressive capacities, they act, have effects in the world.’6 Early modernity was marked by more than the circulation of vast inanimate cargoes. Imperial and commercial systems also organized the traffic of 12.5 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to American colonial locales; and, at the same time, there was sustained

4

5

6

Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), ch. 6; Marcy Norton, ‘Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World’, Colonial Latin American Review, 26/1 (2017), 24 and Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasure: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Diana D. Loren, The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), ch. 4. Chapters in this collection by Melissa Bellanta and Steeve O. Buckridge explore these themes. Leora Auslander, ‘Beyond Words’, American Historical Review, 110/4 (2005), 1016–17.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

effort to dispossess millions of Indigenous peoples from ancestral lands.7 These were defining features of the early modern world. Such monumental events shaped aesthetic practices, including expressions of style and expressions of resistance. Their inclusion in this history mitigates against historic Eurocentrism and also admits the long-run dependence of Western colonizers on the technologies arising from Indigenous and African knowledge systems, on which generations of colonizers relied. Marcy Norton advocates acknowledging these entangled histories, attending to what she terms ‘subaltern technologies’, which offers another sort of perspective, ‘allowing a sharper view of the intertwined processes of imperial and colonial dependence of subaltern groups . . . [and] foregrounding the possibilities of permeability, rather than incommensurability, in the encounter between different ontologies, epistemologies, and other cultural systems’. The term ‘subaltern’ is used ‘to designate but not conflate the heterogeneous groups of non-white subjects of colonialism in European-controlled Atlantic systems in the Americas, Africa and Europe’.8 In this chapter I explore the mobile populations of seamen who disrupted material hierarchies, a heterogeneous group whose numbers expanded markedly from the sixteenth century. The refashioning brought about by the transpacific Manila Galleon trade is another focus, with the wealth of fashions generated by impacts of goods and people between Asia and the Americas. The arts of Indigenous women from the northeast of North America next take centre stage, interpreting traditional and new media, illuminated in a singular accessory and a hide garment. The final section considers Western ready-made clothes in the context of (quasi) uniform practice, as a surge in ready-to-wear garments followed from the seventeenth century. Uniforms and quasi uniforms transformed the look and ware of mobile maritime populations, plus colonial peoples in part. The intent of this garment system was to define imperial power; yet resistance ensued. Uniformed African American rebels recast imperial assumptions underpinning uniform styles. Throughout, European actors take their place among Native American and Asian, African, and African American, to ‘reveal an entangled early 7

8

Eric Nellis, Shaping the New World: African Slavery in the Americas, 1500– 1888 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 29. Norton, ‘Subaltern Technologies’, 18, 19.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

273

274

beverly lemire

modern world in which Europeans and settler-colonists were dependent on subaltern actors not only as laborers but also as knowledge producers’.9 Lived modes of dress reveal both expected and unanticipated histories; these expansive fashions redefined norms of the age.

extralegal exchange and reimaged colonial fashions From the sixteenth century onward, a population came into being that was previously rare: long-distance, deep-sea sailors. Their numbers expanded gradually in line with long-distance fleets, as with each generation more men and boys embarked on long journeys, with the hope of reward for perilous adventuring. Imperial ambition and commercial appetite drove the development of expansive, competitive, seaborne networks, especially in the West. Crews were frequently multi-ethnic, with Arab and European crewing together, along with Europeans, Asians, and Africans and sometimes Indigenous Americans, as routes became routinized. New hands were often sought at next ports of call. Transatlantic voyages were normalized, as with journeys around Africa to the Indian Ocean, and eventually transpacific journeys became habitual as well. This maritime knitting together was complete by the mid-1560s, when the Manila Galleon route was formalized under Spanish auspices, leaving the Philippine port of Manila to sail the Pacific to the port of Acapulco, in colonial New Spain.10 In 1585, a Spanish treasury official in Manila rhapsodized about this new traffic, writing that: ‘There is greater profit investing in Chinese goods than in gold.’11 From the outset, ships from Manila were filled with legal and illicit cargoes of Asian wares, with unofficial contraband shoved into 9 10

11

Ibid., 20. Cuauhtémoc Villamar, Portuguese Merchants in the Manila Galleon System, 1565–1600 (London: Routledge, 2020), 1–11; José Luis GaschTomás, The Atlantic World and the Manila Galleon: Circulation, Market, and Consumption of Asian Goods in the Spanish Empire, 1565–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Virginia Benitez Licuanan and José Llavador Mira (eds.), The Philippines Under Spain: A Compilation and Translation of Original Documents (Manila: National Trust for Historical and Cultural Preservation of the Philippines, 1993), iv, 249.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

nooks by common sailors and loaded openly by higher ranked officers and special passengers.12 Fashionable textiles from Asia, lacquerware and other arts travelled along this route, paid for with cargoes of silver from the Americas.13 Above all, those plying these routes wanted rewards for dangers at sea. Thus, all formal commercial structures faced the predations of smugglers (often crews themselves) illicitly acquiring desirables in systematically disruptive ways.14 This was defined as criminal by authorities; but it can better be described as ‘extralegal’, a term coined by anthropologists Alan Smart and Filippo M. Zerilli. They define in this: ‘three domains: the illegal; the informal; and the not-yet-(il)legal, the latter involving issues not yet decided by a legal system’. These authors assert the value of this perspective as it ‘avoids a dichotomy between legal and illegal, [and] encourages attention to fuzzy or contested boundaries between these domains’.15 Legal cargoes were always larger than illicit counterparts; but extralegal payloads brought niceties and luxuries to the hands of even humble folks, along worldwide networks, in vital and unaccountable ways. The significance of extralegal circulations cannot be overstated, and recent studies make the case for the power of smuggling in global markets, shaped by fashion demands.16 Seafarers drove 12

13

14

15

16

William J. McCarthy, ‘Between Policy and Prerogative: Malfeasance in the Inspection of the Manila Galleons at Acapulco, 1637’, Colonial Latin American Historical Review, 2/2 (1993), 163–83. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”: The Origins of World Trade in 1571’, Journal of World History, 6/2 (1995), 201–21. Huw Bowen, ‘“So Alarming an Evil”: Smuggling, Pilfering and the English East India Company, 1740–1810’, International Journal of Maritime History, 14/1 (2002), 1–31; Beverly Lemire, ‘“Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660– 1800’, Journal of British Studies, 54/2 (2015), 297–306. Alan Smart and Filippo M. Zerilli, ‘Extralegality’, in Donald M. Nonini (ed.), A Companion to Urban Anthropology (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 222. Robert J. Antony (ed.), Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers: Violence and Clandestine Trade in the Greater China Seas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010); Alan L. Karras, Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Hanna Hodacs, Silk and Tea in the North: Scandinavian Trade and the Market for Asian Goods in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Lemire, Global Trade, 137–89, 218–23.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

275

276

beverly lemire

material innovations, through their relentless efforts to acquire novel and fashionable goods, compensation for the extraordinary risks they faced. Edward Barlow, an English seaman who rose through the ranks, recounted his goals for a trip from England to Taiwan in 1671: I [was] hoping that it might be a profitable voyage and that if I carried a small venture in some sort of goods I might gain a little money by it, intending if it were possible to get myself a little money beforehand that I might drive some trade or way to live ashore and leave the sea before I came to be old, it being a calling which is accompanied by many crosses and calamities, with perils and great dangers.17

Repudiated by authorities and celebrated among subaltern populations, the unsanctioned movement of cargoes enabled a wider participation in consumer practice. Maritime labourers collaborated with land-based allies to bring an exceptional range of things within the grasp of plebeian folks, through systems of reciprocity, gifting, and sale.18 Mariners’ wills, including those sailing on (English) East India Company ships, reveal the breadth of goods they bequeathed, well outside what might normally be handled by men of this rank, including violet breeches, with other seamen carrying home ‘peeces [sic] of cheyney taffityes one red, one watchet [light blue]’, plus lengths of calico. Another mariner willed ‘one looking glass 2 combs, 2 brushes and a case . . . bought at Venice’ among the many items redistributed by seventeenthcentury English sailors.19 Others redirected their stores of Indian handkerchiefs and silks to family, shipmates, and land-based friends. Things most valued were readily sold or treasured, such as fashion items like textiles, clothing, and jewellery. On occasion, even sailors and fishermen could obtain trinkets that could be disbursed once on land, to pay for goods, secure sexual favours, or

17

18 19

Basil Lubbock, Barlow’s Journal of his Life at Sea in King’s Ships, East & West Indiamen & Other Merchantmen from 1659 to 1703 (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1934), i, 204. Lemire, ‘“Men of the World”’. Probated wills, 1603, PROB 11/101/ir 902, 1603, PROB 11/102/ir 1017, National Archives, UK; Probated will, 1601, Guildhall 9171/19/461v, Guildhall Library; Lemire, ‘“Men of the World”’.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

treat their families. And though these men were sometimes termed ‘pirates and smugglers’, as Robert Antony notes for the oceans of East Asia, ‘Piracy and smuggling were part of the process of commercialization.’20 They fed plebeian fashions as well. Sailors’ sea chests universally stored small and large treasures, fashion wares and treats.21 Mariners’ bequests and shore-going redistribution upended social and material hierarchies, upsetting imperial authorities who were invested in orderly gradations of material wealth, including the suitable modesty of non-elites.22 Disorder prevailed in portside locales as ships were unloaded and crews disembarked, often carrying small stashes to sell, share, or consume.23 Mariners’ encounters can be charted by the steady diffusion of tobacco along world sea lanes, well before it became a staple crop outside the Americas. Seafarers learned the value of tobacco from Indigenous Americans, for recreation, contemplation, and to steel themselves against hardships; and they carried it with them to ports and beaches in West Africa and Western Europe, to the Indian Ocean world and East Asia where it arrived by the later 1500s. Imperial and commercial networks intersected with individual lives in material ways, as with the Japanese resident of Nagasaki who acquired the smoking habit in the 1570s, perhaps from Portuguese traders or others caught up in various sorts of exchange.24 Tobacco became a fashion (and necessity): Figure 9.1 shows the title page of a 1647 Dutch publication

20 21

22

23

24

Antony, ‘Introduction’, in Antony (ed.), Elusive Pirates, 9. Hester Dibbits, ‘Pronken as Practice: Material Culture in The Netherlands, 1650–1800’, in Rengenier C. Rittersma (ed.), Luxury in the Low Countries: Miscellaneous Reflections on Netherlandish Material Culture, 1500 to the Present (Brussels: Pharo, 2010), 135–58. Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). For Japanese examples: John E. Wills, Jr, 1688: A Global History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 156–7; and for China and Japan, Antony (ed.), Elusive Pirates. Carol Benedict, Golden Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550– 2010 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 19; Lemire, Global Trade, 190–332.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

277

278

beverly lemire

Figure 9.1 Dutch Ships . . . Navium Variæ Figuræ et Formæ, by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1647. Note the Dutch sailor quietly smoking his tobacco pipe, bottom left; smoking was a fad that became an iconic habit of mariners globally in the early modern era. 25.83.1. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1925. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.

celebrating their shipping, showing sailors at work and at leisure; one mariner is shown with a pipe in hand, at bottom left, catching a short repose with a favourite resort. By this date, tobacco was the pleasure and solace of mariners worldwide, plus many others, and a profitable commodity from the Ottoman Empire to Qing China. Over time, consumption of tobacco in all Indigenous American forms spawned accessories from snuffboxes to pipes and cigar cases. New rituals were fashioned, as everyday and ceremonial usages perfumed the air.25 Seafarers were instrumental in dispersing this leaf and its fashions, though they were viewed with suspicion for their mobile lives and inventive ways. 25

Beverly Lemire, ‘Material Technologies of Empire: The Tobacco Pipe in Early Modern Landscapes of Exchange in the Atlantic World’, MAVCOR Journal, https://mavcor.yale.edu/mavcor-journal/essays/materialtechnologiesempire-tobacco-pipe-early-modern-landscapes-exchange (accessed 14 April 2021).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

Material circuits were difficult to police and stern injunctions were repeated endlessly, trying to enforce who could carry what goods and when.26 Embedded in these circuits were sites where valued commodities entered points of exchange: legally and extralegally. Policing intensified at these locales, as did the rewards for evading detection. The Baltic amber trade exemplified this phenomenon. There, unruly agents worked to evade detection, purveying a precious item imbued with aesthetic and spiritual meanings, all to meet regional and international demand.27 The Caribbean pearl fishery was another such site, along the coast of what is now Venezuela, exploited by the Spanish from the early sixteenth century. Enslaved African pearl divers, as well as Indigenous labourers, extracted wealth for their owners, but also redirected pearls into extralegal pathways as opportunity allowed. Spanish royal authorities thought the fishery was poorly managed, with streams of pearls entering local markets. Enslaved African divers routinely held back the best pearls for their own use and a robust extralegal network flourished, as pearl divers bartered with locals and transient visitors.28 Pearls served as a type of currency in parts of the Caribbean with various colonial folks (enslaved and free) handling these jewels. Even worse, in the eyes of colonial authorities, was that ‘the use of the luxury object now muddied distinctions among subjects that the possession of pearls had heretofore helped to mark’. Black women wore pearls, to the chagrin of commentators. This persisted through generations, in defiance of sumptuary laws that aimed to fix ranks, races, and fashions.29 Indeed, the ownership of certain garments or fashion 26

27

28

29

For example, instructions from the English East India Company to crews while moving goods to Canton up the Pearl River: British Library, IOR/E/3/ 106, Miscellaneous Letter Book, 1733–1736, 6. Adrian Christ, ‘The Baltic Amber Trade, c. 1500–1800: The Effects and Ramifications of a Global Counterflow Commodity’ (Unpublished MA Diss., University of Alberta, 2018). Molly Warsh, ‘Enslaved Pearl Divers in the Sixteenth Century Caribbean’, Slavery & Abolition, 31/3 (2010), 357–60 and American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), ch. 3. Warsh, American Baroque, 81, 126–7; Rebecca Earle, ‘Race, Clothing and Identity: Sumptuary Laws in Colonial Spanish America’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), Right to Dress, 325–45.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

279

280

beverly lemire

items by residents in colonial Spanish America was of considerable importance, as this could confer or complicate racial status. As Rebecca Earle observes: ‘The colonial archive is full of complaints about individuals who changed their clothing or living habits, and thereby “became” a different race.’30 The question of dress and equipage in colonial Spanish America was the focus of recurring legislation, for racial categorization hinged on the use of materials appropriate to status. However, undoing these sumptuary orders could advance individuals and families through the ranks. Figure 9.2 exemplifies Spanish colonial sartorial complexity. This 1763 casta painting, by Miguel Cabrera, was one of many produced in New Spain in this period depicting the nuances of rank, race, and fashion. These issues generated heartrending among those opposed to ambiguity.31 Here we see the results of congress between a Spanish man and Indigenous woman, shown with their mestizo daughter. Potential fluidity is on display. The woman’s neck is circled with strands of pearls, with pearl drops and perhaps coral bead embellishments; long pearl earrings complete the suite of jewellery. Her daughter’s necklace and earrings are equally evocative, and their dress includes fine diaphanous fabric and embroidered or brocade textiles. The female figures claim the viewer’s eye, standing before shelves laden with what appear to be silk brocades. Are these fabrics intended to remake the status of mother and daughter? Is social instability proposed in this portrait? This image certainly reinforces possibilities of ‘becoming’, regardless of the assigned positions noted in the painting. Fabrics and jewels could remake social standings. The extralegal networks through which goods spread made it easier to dress in disruptive ways. Recall, too, that in early modern Europe (and elsewhere) clothing was understood to have potency, with garments investing the body through their embedded qualities; thus, unruly investitures might supersede the rankings at birth.32 30 31

32

Earle, ‘Race, Clothing and Identity’, 332. For discussion of colonial ‘mixing’, see Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, ‘Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America’, Colonial Latin American Review, 12/1 (2003), 9–11. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

Figure 9.2 Miguel Cabrera (1695–1768), Español e India, Mestizo, 1763. One of a pair of ethnographic portrait groups (Mexico), scroll. Private collection. CH6166489. Bridgeman Images.

Materials of many sorts also resonated with Indigenous, African, and other populations interacting in these environments. The colour of cloth, the luminescence of pearls, beads, shell wares and quills, plus the animal source of furs, could embody animate and spiritual values, beyond the control of colonial powers.33 In this

33

Farrell Racette, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade’, 71–7; Ann Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 173–93; George R. Hamell, ‘Strawberries, Floating Islands, and Rabbit Captains: Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes, 21/4 (1987), 72–94.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

281

282

beverly lemire

way, the components of fashionable apparel could unsettle, reverse, and undo static social gradations; colonial authorities could do little to fix meanings, or stem the flows of unlicensed goods, or the ways they were employed.

new spain and the manila galleons Early modern global fashions incorporated patterns and designs, displayed in various physical media, with some of the most influential aesthetics arising in Asian cultures, with interactions within Asia and beyond. Patterns expressed in porcelain and textiles, metalwork and lacquerware, traded globally, became design primers in themselves.34 The diffusion and adaptation of designs were catalysing in a number of ways, including through cycles of circulation and responses. Commodities, along with artisans themselves, brought aesthetic influences across continents and oceans where they were reinterpreted anew. The embroiderers who traversed oceans did so voluntarily or involuntarily, enslaved or free. Tracing this history responds to the call of noted historian Natalie Zemon Davis who urges us to ‘decentre’ our studies, including histories of ‘cultural crossings’.35 The examples to follow document the different fashion forms and pathways that crossed cultures. The Philippine islands were long enmeshed in regional exchanges with China, Vietnam, Thailand, India, and more.36 Evidence of this vitality appears in a sixteenth-century decorative stoneware plate from Vietnam. This blue and white vessel (Figure 9.3), made in Vietnam for Philippine and Indonesian 34

35

36

Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, 9/2 (1998), 141–87 and The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); John Guy, ‘“One Thing Leads to Another”: Indian Textiles and the Early Globalization of Style’, in Amelia Peck (ed.), Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 12–27. See also Peter McNeil’s chapter in this volume. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World’, History and Theory, 50/2 (2011), 197. Father Gabriel Casal, Father Regalado Trota Jose Jr, Eric S. Casino, George R. Ellis, and Wilhelm G. Solheim II, The People and Art of the Philippines (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 13–14. My thanks to B. Lynne Milgram.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

Figure 9.3 Stoneware dish with peony design, sixteenth century, made in Vietnam, Red River Delta, with cobalt blue painted floral motifs, for Philippine or Indonesian markets. This Vietnamese stoneware plate carries influential globalized patterning in its blue and white design. Gift of Mr and Mrs James E. Breece III, 2021. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

markets, exemplifies popular peony motifs and vegetative stylings inspired by Chinese blue and white porcelain patterning. Design elements such as this moved through different material platforms, including needlework, for which Filipinos were noted. Regional techniques in the south Philippines could include ‘appliqué, and embroidery, as well as beads, buttons, and sequinlike shellwork (kalati)’, just some of the design repertoire among artisans on the islands of Mindanao and Sulu.37 In sum, the complex influences within and outside the Philippines provided an exceptional aesthetic inventory, with artisans incorporating their inspirations in carvings and metalwork, textile design, and needlework.38 This was

37

38

Eric S. Casino, ‘Arts and Peoples of the Southern Philippines’, in Casal et al. (eds.), The People and Art of the Philippines, 137. Casino, ‘Arts and Peoples of the Southern Philippines’.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

283

284

beverly lemire

the rich design language on which ‘Europeans and settler-colonists were dependent’, as Asian knowledge-producing peoples and European colonists (in Asia and in the Americas), became entangled through transpacific trade.39 The Manila Galleon tied the Philippines (and Asia generally) to the colonial port of Acapulco, gateway to official traffic with colonial Spanish America and beyond. Figure 9.4 is an example of a seventeenth-century Filipino-made chest for use on the transpacific route. It epitomizes both the wealth of Asian design and the skilled artistry found in the Philippines, an exceptional piece of furniture with both function and fashion on display. Striking high relief carving lays out a pattern of leaves and vines that wraps the chest, perhaps hinting at wonders to be found inside. Scholars of the Philippine islands of Mindanao and Sulu note the exceptional tradition of carving among local Muslim artists: ‘so much so that the vocabulary of art designs in all their art work is derived principally from the carving context’.40 Aside from beauty, the chest’s practical features include iron handles for periodic hefting, as well as metal-reinforced corners and a substantial lock. This chest embodies design and purpose, and (Philippine) Manila Galleon fashion, an example of the varying sources of inspiration emerging during this era. The movement of goods and people were ingredients of change and Iberians were seasoned in transporting enslaved peoples, including from Asia. About 1600, enslaved Asians with needlework talents were shipped to Portugal from East Asia, including Japanese and Chinese men, plus women embroiderers from the Philippines. Filipino women were noted embroidery specialists, with rich traditions of training. In this period, skills were best transferred in the body of the person herself and improving the output of regional workshops, or the products of elite households, required the transplanted talents of embroiderers.41 Asian servants 39 40 41

Norton, ‘Subaltern Technologies’, 20. Casino, ‘Arts and Peoples of the Southern Philippines’, 129. Maria Joao Pacheco Ferreira, ‘Chinese Textiles for Portuguese Tastes’, in Peck (ed.), Interwoven Globe, 54–5; Maria Jose de Mendonça, ‘Some Kinds of Indo-Portuguese Quilts in the Collection of the Museu de Arte Antiga’, in Embroidered Quilts from the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisboa (London: Kensington Palace, 1978), 13–14.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

and enslaved sailed from Manila to New Spain, many with fine textile skills, travelling with their masters and mistresses, or finding new owners on arrival.42 Their origins varied, coming from ‘Timor, Ternate, Makassar, Burma, Ceylon, and India’. The women, in particular, were noted as ‘excellent seamstresses . . . and are neat and clean in service’.43 An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Asians crossed the Pacific to Spanish colonies in the Americas over a 250-year period – most were enslaved – one of the major dynamics of the transpacific route.44 At the port of Manila, the apogee of the slave system, captives from the Indian subcontinent to East Asia were sold whose labour would sustain colonial households or commercial enterprise.45 Important new research by José Gasch-Tomás reveals the roles of elite colonial women in this system, moulding their material environments in Mexico City and Manila. Letters from Doña Teresa Setin, a merchant’s wife in Mexico City, were sent to a Manila-based merchant, though it was his wife who organized return cargoes from Manila to her female correspondent. Doña Teresa, like many ambitious women in New Spain, had a taste for Asian wares and relied on the knowledge of her female interlocutor to assuage her desires. In 1636, Doña María de Birué, the Manila correspondent, reported on the ribbons and Chinese slaves being shipped to Doña Teresa in New Spain. We might imagine a trunk such in Figure 9.4, stuffed with cargo, or a plainly functional chest where the importance lay in its contents. Clothing, pearls, porcelain, and fine yarn travelled from Manila to Mexico City over several years at Doña Teresa’s request, examples of fashion creation with human and material ingredients.46 On another occasion Doña Teresa was informed by her Manila correspondent that her money was used to buy a ‘good male slave, who is learning to be a good tailor and barber; 42

43 44

45 46

Edward R. Slack, ‘The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image’, Journal of World History, 20/1 (2009), 41. Ibid. Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 83–4; Eva Maria Mehl, Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 54–5. Seijas, Asian Slaves, 32–6. Gasch-Tomás, Atlantic World and the Manila Galleons, 40.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

285

286

beverly lemire

he is a good cook, smart, and likes to serve’.47 Fashion and material landscapes were created through intersecting local and long-distance links, often directed personally by colonial women. Distinctive aesthetic forms emerged, only some of which I can list here.48 Enslaved artisans, men and women, were instrumental in the creation of colonial styles, with skills that would be termed by Marcy Norton as ‘subaltern technologies’. Norton suggests, as well, that ‘early modernity was marked by elite, male Europeans’ dependence upon subaltern technologies and their “disavowal” of this dependence’.49 The same is true, of course, for elite females of that time.50

Figure 9.4 Chest (Baúl), made in the Philippines, seventeenth century. Elaborately carved wood in floral design, typical high relief Philippine carpentry. The double-headed eagle on the lock plate symbolizes the Habsburg and the Spanish monarchy. This expert Philippine carving reflects the fashion for botanic design, influences that were carried along the Manila Galleon route. 68.58 × 106.68 × 58.42 cm. Gift of Ernest Schernikow. M.2019.269. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

47 48

49 50

Ibid. Lemire, Global Trade, 72–6; Donna Pierce and Ronald Otsuka (eds.), At the Crossroads: The Arts of Spanish America & Early Global Trade (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2012). Norton, ‘Subaltern Technologies’, 20. Christine Walker, Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain’s Atlantic Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

Gloves and handkerchiefs, fans and silk cushions, India tablecloths and taffetas (and thousands of people) were relayed across the Pacific by women invested in imperial and familial systems, links fashioning Spanish colonial households on both sides of the Pacific. The importance of these gendered interventions cannot be overstated. Gasch-Tomás explains that: ‘If women were in charge of ordering and choosing these textiles and other items both for themselves and for the home, it was because their taste was essential in sumptuously decorating houses and in selecting children’s clothing. The Asian component was significant in the case of Mexico.’51 In this way, female elites instrumentalized their desires, shaping the fashion ecosystem that marked this region. Dana Leibsohn argues that: ‘The value of Chinese things drew sustenance from their site of origin, but no less so from the ways in which they traveled and took up residence in American homes.’52 Look again at the portraits in Figure 9.2 and consider the context of global trade. Questions abound about both the fashions on display and the intermediaries who shaped these styles. Examining this rich image, we might wonder as well about the ribbon trimming the neckline of the woman’s gown: Was this ribbon or braid ‘made in China or made in Mexico’?53 The same question could be posed about all the components of the female dress. Cross-cultural infusion/confusion is a hallmark of this time and place, with diverse participating populations. So, too, the use of fashion to undercut social categories bespeaks a complex and contentious material environment.

colonial northern north america and aesthetic exchange Northern colonial landscapes also produced unique fashion histories, among the most compelling of which are those revealing the agency of Indigenous North Americans. Female skills in particular produced a wide range of garments and accessories, rooted in 51 52

53

Gasch-Tomás, Atlantic World and the Manila Galleons, 41. Dana Leibsohn, ‘Made in China, Made in Mexico’, in Pierce and Otsuka (eds.), At the Crossroads, 21. With thanks to Dana Leibsohn for her insights and my acknowledged reuse of her title: ‘Made in China, Made in Mexico’.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

287

288

beverly lemire

traditional aesthetics and spirituality, adapting to new circumstances and material possibilities. Trade, swaps, and barter were mainstays during early contacts, as European fishers and adventurers touched down in harbours and shorelines along the northeast of North America. A late seventeenth-century map of the most northerly regions presents the scope of European knowledge and demonstrates their whimsical conceit by naming Indigenous lands ‘New Denmark’, ‘New North Wales’, and ‘New South Wales’, spots pinpointed along the margins of what became Hudson’s Bay (Map 9.1). The depiction at the top of the map shows the context of repeated relations, hinting at the natural resources to be found, plus the skills to be learned from the peoples of that region. Particular attention was paid to the tailored apparel worn by peoples of the high north: Inuit. Learnings of different sorts took place on all sides and found their ways into fashions, several of which I explore. Map 9.2 traces the wider western colonial passage in North America, from New France (Nouvelle France) to Florida, with the British colonies marked out along the Atlantic seaboard and Indigenous nations noted throughout. These maps are a type of shorthand for the European-driven colonial processes (and resistances as well), alluding to the material entanglements that paralleled these cartographic scenes. The historical chronologies of the northern region differed from those of more southerly Americas. Still, records of fishing fleets indicate that ‘the Gulf of St. Lawrence was a pole of attraction for Europeans on a par with the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean . . . one of the most profitable European business destinations in the New World’.54 Generations of the transatlantic fishery involved Basque, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English west country fishers, whose whispers of long voyages and rich fisheries ultimately brought formal imperial interventions. Contacts and exchange were integral to these histories, accelerating as European fishers (and then quasi fur traders) grew in numbers.55 Europeans carried goods that penetrated along Indigenous networks confirming their importance, circuits where 54

55

Laurier Turgeon, ‘French Fishers, Fur Traders, and Amerindians during the Sixteenth Century: History and Archaeology’, William and Mary Quarterly, 55/4 (1998), 593. Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The North Pole and the parts adjoining, 1680. Alamy. Map 9.1 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Map 9.2 Canada or New France, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Carolina, New Britain, and New York and the course of the Mississippi River, Paris, 1703. David Rumsey Map Collection.

early modern global ties and entangled

trade took place more widely and rapidly than formal settlement or colonization. In turn, Indigenous makers began a substitution process with some refashioning as well. The Ottawa River (Algonquian for ‘river of trade’) arises in the interior and drains into the Saint Lawrence River, near what is now Montreal. Archaeological excavations of an Indigenous settlement on the Ottawa uncovered Venetian glass beads dated to the fourteenth century, a manifestation of dynamic commerce.56 Sherry Farrell Racette observes that: ‘the presence of beads implies the involvement of women. While both men and women wear beads and their manufacture is often a male activity, working with beads is generally categorized as women’s knowledge.’57 Late sixteenth- to mid-seventeenth-century Basque locations for processing fish and whales, on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and Labrador coasts, often coincided with traditional Indigenous sites, confirming seasonal interactions. These locales also yielded caches of trade beads, as well as Indigenous-made ceramics, marking the beginning of the European trade for furs with Indigenous contacts.58 Glass beads flowed in growing abundance, coming to supplement Indigenous media and were rapidly integrated into belief and symbolic systems.59 At points of direct and indirect contact, Indigenous media gradually combined with European and global goods to produce notable refashionings.60 Material circuits brought a host of media through Indigenous landscapes, only some of which are documented. Excavations from the early English colonial site of Jamestown, Virginia, revealed a range of decorative ceramics with Asian or Asian-inspired blue and white

56

57 58 59

60

University Press, 1984), ‘Introduction’; Turgeon, ‘French Fishers, Fur Traders’, 590–603. A Background Study for Nomination of the Ottawa River under the Canadian Heritage Rivers Systems (Ottawa: Ottawa River Heritage Designation Committee, 2005), 54. Farrell Racette, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade’, 70. Turgeon, ‘French Fishers, Fur Traders’, 604–10. Loren, Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment, 55–8; Laurier Turgeon, ‘French Beads in France and Northeastern North America during the Sixteenth Century’, Historical Archaeology, 35/4 (2001), 58–82; Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). Phillips, Trading Identities, 3–48.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

291

292

beverly lemire

patterning, dated to the early to mid-seventeenth century.61 Over the 1670s–1680s, London agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company shipped Indian-made blue or white and ‘fine’ painted chintz shirts to their northern trading fort – 900 in 1678 and 500 the next year. These were dispersed along Indigenous trade routes to communities inland, followed in later years by Indian cotton handkerchiefs that became a staple of trade cargoes.62 In sum, decorative goods became part of the material ecology of Indigenous peoples, although we cannot pinpoint all junctures.63 These examples hint at the many members of Indigenous communities who studied and were inspired by empathic designs. Skilled Indigenous women were the principal translators and innovators, deploying reimagined motifs in their arts amidst other colonial contexts. Fur-trading and settlement were priorities of the New France colony, including along the banks of the Saint Lawrence River. As in other imperial settlements (such as New Spain and the Philippines), the Catholic Church was an agent of colonization, including in the teaching of Indigenous children. The world views of European and Indigenous peoples were very much at odds both in terms of spiritual systems and gender roles;64 nonetheless, diplomacy prevailed, and girls were sent to the Ursuline convents, built up from the 1640s in Quebec City. Needlework was a field

61

62

63

64

www.chipstone.org/article.php/6/Ceramics-in-America-2001/EuropeanCeramics-in-the-New-World:-The-Jamestown-Example (accessed 24 April 2021). Database of Asian imports, HBC York Factory, Post Account Books, 1689– 1770. Available through Adam Matthew, Marlborough, Global Commodities, www.globalcommodities.amdigital.co.uk.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/ Documents/Details/HBCA-B239-d-1 (accessed 1 July–1 October 2014). A 15/1 Grand Journal 1676–1682, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Archives of Manitoba. Lemire, Global Trade, 274–82; DuPlessis, Material Atlantic, 58, 60, 61, Table 2.1, 93–4, 96 Table 3.1; Timothy Shannon, ‘Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion’, William and Mary Quarterly, 53/1 (1996), 38, Table 1; Farrell Racette, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade’, 77; Kevin Moody and Charles L. Fisher, ‘Archaeological Evidence of the Colonial Occupation at Schoharie Crossing State Historic Site, Montgomery County, New York’, The Bulletin: Journal of the New York State Archaeological Association, 99 (1989), 7–8. As vividly analysed by Haudenosaunee scholar Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2000).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

where gendered Indigenous and Catholic education overlapped, even as the goods they used initially differed. Formal conventbased instruction has been emphasized as the singular source of design exchange; but it was only one of several ways that design translation occurred. Moreover, exchanges also took place in a counterflow manner, as curious nuns learned to use bark, quillwork, and moose-hair embroidery from their pupils, Indigenous coreligionists, and family members.65 Indigenous-made and inspired arts flowed back to France from the seventeenth century, where there was a steady demand, with women in both religious and Indigenous communities making accessories and household fashions.66 The context in which these items were produced is also worth considering, both for its meaning in the past and the present. Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn assessed equivalently complex family genealogies in colonial Spanish America, ones that combined many lineages, shaping the material culture that surrounded them. Dean and Leibsohn observe that: ‘Because cultures are collective, they are inherently heterogeneous’, noting that this mixing was ‘unremarkable’ to those involved – indeed, ‘commonplace’.67 Yet, it must be acknowledged that Indigenous arts might receive varying responses over the object’s lifetime, depending on setting and circumstance. A beloved style in one context could be despised for its Indigenous heritage in more racialized times and places.68 What is indisputable, however, were the streams of fashion arts and the focused talents of the makers from complex colonial settings. A silk pocketbook dated to about the early eighteenth century raises a host of questions (Figure 9.5). Held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, it was described for some time as made in France. It is now catalogued as Italian and most likely made in a convent. This pocketbook was a fashionable male accessory, intended to hold banknotes, letters, and paper ephemera. A white

65 67 68

Phillips, Trading Identities, 104–8. 66 Ibid., 104–7. Dean and Leibsohn, ‘Hybridity and Its Discontents’, 5, 11. Laura Peers, ‘“Many Tender Ties”: The Shifting Contexts and Meanings of the S BLACK Bag’, World Archaeology, 31/2 (1999), 288–302.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

293

294

beverly lemire

Figure 9.5 Pocketbook, front view, made c. 1700 (1720–40?), with Italy the suggested place of making; possibly in a convent. Satin silk embroidered with satin stitch, couched metal thread, straw splints, and porcupine quillwork. The quillwork on this pocketbook demonstrates the impact of Indigenous American media and aesthetics, here interpreting an Asian-inspired design. T.29–1915. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

satin exterior, lined with white silk, was embellished with metalwrapped thread, silk satin thread, straw splints and porcupine quills, a product of cross-cultural networks and adaptive Indigenous skills. Quillwork, as with bark work, had been ‘Frenchified’,69 in part, from the late 1600s and 1700s and its mastery by Catholic nuns suggests the skills transfer along channels transecting spaces and cultures.70 Whether or not the maker was of Indigenous ancestry, Indigenous knowledge shaped this polyvalent fancy; while the main theme – the vase with flowers – was Asian in origin and widely interpreted as part of global design.71 Other details are unknown. Did the maker acquire her knowledge of quillwork directly from Indigenous kin or from other instruction? 69

70

A term defined by Sophie White as ‘the transformations engineered by French and Indians as a result of colonization, conversion, and métissage’. Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 1. Phillips, Trading Identities, 107. 71 Lemire, Global Trade, 255–88.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

How did the maker secure dyed porcupine quills for this project? As Nicholas Thomas advises: ‘exchange is always, in the first instance, a political process, one in which wider relationships are expressed and negotiated in personal encounters’.72 The theory of ‘contact zones’ has been useful employed, coined by Mary Louise Pratt to ‘foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination’.73 Figures 9.6(a) and (b) are front and back perspectives of a painted hide coat, in the style of a banyan, a garment with unique heritage. The male use of informal banyans or dressing gowns began in Japan in the seventeenth century, with kimonos awarded to prominent Western traders by Japanese authorities. This mark of esteem acquired a notable cachet and Western merchants in those precincts demanded similar robes, if by other means.74 Manufacturing began in the Indian subcontinent, as demand for the fashion grew in Europe and its colonies; Indian technologies enabled substantial production in ways unmatched in the West.75 Part of the prestige of this garment lay in its global pedigree and the suggested knowledge this implied. Although different names were assigned to this robe in Europe, the garment held a shared purpose, enjoyed by fashionable professional and genteel men, who demonstrated expertise while draped in its folds. Writing, accounting, mathematics, or painting were all conducted in designated domestic spaces – offices, studios, and libraries – where like-minded male friends could meet. Similarly, ambitious men captured their cosmopolitanism in countless portraits over the centuries, enrobed with purpose.76 Figure 9.7 72

73

74

75

76

Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 7. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7. Beverly Lemire, Cotton (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 44–7; Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis, Sitsen uit India (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1994). Ariane Fennetaux, ‘“Indian Gowns Small and Great”: Chintz Banyans Ready Made in the Coromandel, c. 1680–c. 1780’, Costume, 55/1 (2021), 49–73. Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys . . . 30 March 1666 (London: Dent, 1906), ii, 24; Lemire, Cotton, 44–7; Brandon Brame Fortune, ‘“Studious Men are Always Painted in Gowns”: Charles Willson Peale’s Benjamin Rush and the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

295

296

beverly lemire

Figure 9.6(a) Deerskin coat with painted decorations, of European pattern, bound with red and gold wool cloth. Note the remainder of the former lining on the interior of this garment. 1906.83.1. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, UK.

exemplifies associations between this garment, its prestige, and its wearers. In this case two Dutch merchants, swathed in banyans, pour over their accounts, discussing trade and profit. References to these matters are scattered about the image, from the ship outside the window, to volumes labelled from England to Smyrna, plus a short poem. Careful trade and profits are the theme.77 Banyans entwined fashion with cultural, political, and economic priorities, vital issues for men not usually of noble birth, who sought to advance.

77

Question of Banyans in Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Portraiture’, Dress, 29 (2002), 27–40. My thanks to Prof. Margriet Haagsma for her translation.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

Figure 9.6(b) Deerskin coat with painted decorations, of European pattern, bound with red and gold wool cloth. Decorative quillwork epaulet on shoulder. Note the tailored seams along the back. 1906.83.1. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, UK.

Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) trading forts were part of a global network from its founding charter by the English Crown in 1670. I noted, above, the shipments of Indian ready-made chintz shirts by HBC agents almost from the inception of this body. Tailored garments, like ready-made coats, were likewise shipped in volumes to HBC forts and to east coast North American locales: 4,000 jackets to HBC sites alone between 1684 and 1694.78 Seeing and translating tailored garments became part of Indigenous women’s skill

78

Beverly Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 37; Marshall Joseph Becker, ‘Match Coat and the Military: Mass-Produced Clothing for Native Americans as Parallel Markets in the Seventeenth Century’, Textile History, 41/1 (2010), 153–81.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

297

298

beverly lemire

Figure 9.7 ‘Koopman De Koopman’, after drawing by Jan Luyken, printmaker Caspar Kuyken, Amsterdam, 1694, in series Het Menselyk Bedryf (Human Enterprise). This pastiche celebrates Dutch commerce, with merchants in banyans (dressing gowns), emblematic of professional male fashion. RP-P-OB-44553. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

sets, adjusting prepared hide to new patterns.79 The making of this deerskin banyan reveals the ways Indigenous women manipulated concepts from Asia, reinterpreted through traditional materials like hide. The recognized prestige of a banyan was refitted to the new environment. I came to examine this garment at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, as part of an interdisciplinary collaborative project, including Indigenous scholars, ethnographers, art historians, and historians of dress.80 We learned from each other in the close study of this intriguing robe, its cut unlike other painted hide coats of this time and place, tailored closer to the body. And, unlike many painted hide coats in museum collections, it was clearly very well worn. Its original lining survived in ragged remnants around the interior edges. And additional red and gold-patterned wool trim, placed around the cuffs and front edges, was added at some later time in its life. This hide banyan was made and used in the distinct cultural settings of fur-trading society, around 1800, a post run by company agents and their multi-ethnic teams of servants. Indigenous suppliers and allies were also critical, with numbers resident permanently on site. Some HBC fur trade posts evolved to become significant settlements in Rupert’s Land,81 of which the Red River Settlement was one, near what is now Winnipeg. Residents in and around Rupert’s Land posts were predominantly Cree–Métis populations and all depended on the skilled contributions of both Indigenous men (as hunters) and women (as makers). The women, in particular, made critical garments ensuring survival and comfort – snowshoes for winter, moccasins for all seasons, and hide coats on 79

80

81

Laura Peers, ‘Crossing Worlds: Hide Coats, Relationship, and Identity in Rupert’s Land and Britain’, in Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw (eds.), Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), 65–9. 1906.83.1, Deerskin coat with painted decorations, of European pattern, bound with cloth. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Our project was funded (2014–18) by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, www.objectlives.com (accessed 25 April 2023). Lemire et al. (eds.), Object Lives and Global Histories. ‘Rupert’s Land’ was the term given to the disputed territory in North America the English Crown assigned to the HBC in 1670 – all the lands draining into Hudson’s Bay.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

299

300

beverly lemire

occasion – women who were often allied with HBC men in ‘country marriages’. Generations of Cree, Ojibwa, Métis, and other First Nations created a community with varying ‘spiritual, cultural, and material practices inclusive of their entire heritage’,82 shaping the arts and fashions that emerged. It is not clear where this banyan was made. But it signals the artistry of these regions, materialized in the fringe on the bottom hem, the surviving quillwork epaulet on the left shoulder with quill-wrapped fringe hanging down, and the red painted patterns down the centre back seam, with a red and blue pattern, inches deep, around the bottom of the coat skirt (Figures 9.6(a) and (b)). The use of epaulets was another retelling of status, a design feature adapted from British military dress, where such embellishments were common.83 In sum, this garment exemplifies the mutability of globalized fashions and the distinctive iterations made in Indigenous lands. In decentred history, individual sites are understood for their particular character and evolution, their nature altering at times with external and internal shifts; a fur trade post, like urban centres, reflected creative frictions, much like urban spaces, brought on by cycles of labour and celebration, cultural heterogeneity and material variability, within evolving systems of power.84 The imperial construct within which such posts are set can be theorized as a ‘webbed or networked conceptions . . . as a set of shifting, uneven and often unstable inter-regional and global connections’.85 The generative creativity emerging from fur trade centres shaped the cultures of that place and beyond, interpreting and reinterpreting global fashions, such as the Eurasian banyan that became a craze in the Americas as well. The man for whom the hide banyan was 82

83

84 85

Laura Peers, ‘Crossing Worlds’, in Lemire et al. (eds.), Object Lives and Global Histories, 58. Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Sewing Ourselves Together: Clothing, Decorative Arts and the Expression of Métis and Half Breed Identity’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Manitoba, 2004), 69; Cynthia Cooper, ‘“A Typical Canadian Outfit”: The Red River Coat’, in Lemire et al. (eds.), Object Lives and Global Histories, 87–8. My thanks to Cory Willmott for elaborating this point some years ago. Tony Ballantyne, ‘The Changing Shape of the Modern British Empire and its Historiography’, Historical Journal, 53/2 (2010), 451.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

made was likely a senior member of the HBC community, perhaps one who brought his comfortable cloth banyan to this posting. It would not suffice in that climate. Might a cloth banyan serve as a pattern for a hide exemplar? Tailoring was routine by this time for local women, and hide garments were also routinely added to wardrobes that included wool blanket coats, also commonplace in northern lands, coats worn by Indigenous and Métis men as well as others.86 The visible wear on the hide banyan suggests extensive use, perhaps swaddling its owner as he kept accounts up to date, wrote letters, visited with locals and incomers, or wrapped it tightly around his body for winter travels, with a waist sash in red and multi-coloured wool. Sashes like this were emblematic accessories for fur trade men, a sign among Métis of self-governing communities.87 Yet, painted hide coats (and any accessories) were typically packed away once HBC staff returned to Britain, their ‘Indianness’ too evident in an era of increasingly rigid racial politics. Coats like this were too unsettling in Britain when whiteness was the cultural aim and ‘exotic’ wares were carefully curated.88 This painted hide coat demonstrates an assertive fashion invention, notable additions to this time and place and beyond.

uniform apparel and racial reimaginings The clothing operations set in place during the early modern era included major technology systems aimed at dressing imperial and colonial populations: military and civilian. These were particularly noted in the West, with only centres in Asia to match this capacity.89 The HBC was supplied with ready-made garments 86

87

88 89

Farrell Racette, ‘Sewing Ourselves Together’, 69, 89, 94, 219–22. Dr Sherry Farrell Racette, University of Regina, produced seminal research on the subject of hide coats, plus other elements of Indigenous creative culture. Cooper, ‘“A Typical Canadian Outfit”’, 87, 89–92; Farrell Racette, ‘Sewing Ourselves Together’, 104–14. Peers, ‘Crossing Worlds’, 72–6. For Indian Ocean world ready-made garments: Lemire, Global Trade, 126; Miki Sugiura, ‘Garments in Circulation: The Economies of Slave Clothing in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Cape Colony’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 104–30; Fennetaux, ‘“Indian Gowns Small and Great”’. More remains to be uncovered.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

301

302

beverly lemire

from British suppliers, businesses growing in size and number since the seventeenth century. Marshall Joseph Becker emphasizes the intersecting production of clothing for the military and equivalent goods for Indigenous peoples in colonial regions.90 A tonnage of garments – shirts, trousers, drawers, waistcoats, jackets, and headwear – dressed the growing British navy through an integrated putting-out system, with the military supplied by regiment through like channels.91 There was disciplinary intent behind this quasi uniform clothing, a form of rationalization and ‘modernization’ of military ware and all those dressed in like apparel.92 Other populations might be disciplined as well, through the imposition of proto-uniforms – or so authorities might hope. Surpluses were channelled to metropolitan and colonial markets, becoming a mainstay type of apparel by the early 1700s. The totality allowed Western garments to circle the globe, aboard fleets of naval, merchant, and whaling vessels, disbursing these commodities to other cultures and communities.93 Cheap female labour sustained sweated production in Europe; low price (or unfree) labour in parts of Asia and some colonial regions enabled other exploitative labour patterns marking these ‘fast fashions’. Garments like shirts and trousers came to denote populations, defining race, rank, and status; even while some meanings shifted profoundly. Trousers, for example, moved from an exclusively labouring affiliation to that of fashionable elites by 1800, a style materializing imperial masculinity.94 Meanings could be fluid. 90 91

92

93

94

Becker, ‘Match Coat and the Military’. Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce, 9–40; Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 1–40; Meaghan Walker, ‘Mobilizing Clothes at Sea: Naval Dress Culture and Economy during the French Wars, 1793–1815’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Alberta, 2020). Alison Matthews David, ‘Decorated Men: Fashioning the French Soldier, 1852–1914’, Fashion Theory, 7/1 (2003), 23. Søren T. Thuesen, ‘Dressing Up in Greenland: A Discussion of Change and World Fashion in Early-Colonial West Greenlandic Dress’, in J. C. H. King, Birgit Pauksztat, and Robert Storrie (eds.), Arctic Clothing (London: British Museum, 2005), 100–1; Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were, ‘Introduction’, in Susanne Küchler and Graeme Were (eds.), The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience (London: UCL Press, 2005), ix–xxx. Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce, 9–74; DuPlessis, Material Atlantic, 78–9, 181; Beverly Lemire, ‘A Question of Trousers: Seafarers, Masculinity

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

And efforts to sustain and enforce ready-made dress and its meanings concerned imperial governments, plus those subaltern populations embroiled in enforced re-dressing.95 Printed accounts from 1693 and 1711 list Dutch East India Company cargo on fleets from their Batavia headquarters in Java to the Netherlands, disclosing the Dutch role in dressing enslaved Africans. Both cargo lists noted thousands of pieces of ‘Negro Kleden’ (‘negro clothing’) for broad colonial markets.96 Readymade clothes dealers in Britain also directed their products to plantation communities, though fewer stipulated that fact directly.97 However, public notices of the sale of clothing for enslaved Africans were published in colonial regions, such as Jamaica.98 Newspapers in the early 1800s, in the former Dutch colonies of Essequibo and Demerara (later the British colony of Guyana), echoed the same, with listed imports from London of ‘Negro clothing’, and auctions to follow.99 These ready-made garments, the cheapest kind, were offshoots of a supply system producing countless tons of cheap, functional apparel, changing the dress landscape in world regions. Without doubt, these were intended as ‘anti-fashion’ garb, to extinguish personal or community aesthetics in service of imperial or colonial intent. But those assigned these garments did not necessarily comply as intended. The imposition of uniform dress was always fraught.

95

96

97

98 99

and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress, c. 1600–1800’, Cultural and Social History, 13/1 (2016), 1–22; Lemire, Global Trade, 122–31; Sugiura, ‘Garments in Circulation’; Walker, ‘Mobilizing Clothes at Sea’. Robert DuPlessis (in Material Atlantic) employed the term ‘re-dressing’ in a colonial context, which I employ here. There were 9,520 pieces of clothing in the 1693 cargoes and 1,280 in the 1711 listing. Carrie Anderson and Marsely Kehoe, ‘Visualizing Textile Circulation in the Dutch Global Market, 1602–1795: Method and Process’, presentation at The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, 8 April 2021. One dealer, Richard Dixon & Co., 12 Fenchurch Street, London, identified his business as a ‘Warehouse for all kind of Slops, Negro-Cloathing etc’. 1797. Heal, 108*.2, British Museum, London. ‘Slops’ were sailors’ garb. For example, Kingston Journal, 26 August 1789, no. 68. Essequebo and Demerary Gazette, 13 July 1805, no. 133; 25 October 1806, no. 200; 28 March 1807, no. 65; 24 December 1808, no. 156; 8 September 1810, no. 300, for example.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

303

304

beverly lemire

The subject of clothing exercised officials, and plantocrats, keen to delimit what enslaved peoples could wear.100 And while garments were often made on plantations, ready-made was a cheap option. The priority of planters was to issue the bare minimum.101 The dress of the enslaved, and the military who patrolled and enforced enslavement, might have a common origin in their supply chain, but the categories of garments were intended to be visibly different, not least through stylings of breeches and jackets and the symbols assigned military ranks. Yet, there were occasions when elisions occurred, when the enslaved became soldier, turning the colonial world upside down. Slave revolts were the terror of planters and imperial governments, who feared the recurring outbreaks that roiled the eighteenth century. The Dutch-born Scottish mercenary John Gabriel Stedman recounted his five years (1773–7) in the Dutch colony of Suriname attempting to overturn the successful Maroon revolt.102 Among the habits of the insurgents was to strip military corpses of their clothes, to be repurposed by dissidents, a style of re-dressing horrifying to settlercolonists as much as the conflict itself.103 The illustration in Stedman’s later memoir of the ‘Coromantyn Free Negro, or Ranger, Armed’ (Figure 9.8) shows two enslaved men at a distance, in requisite short trousers. The leader is foregrounded, smoking tobacco at his leisure, in repurposed military breeches, with the stylized white waistband turned down. This redirection of imperial supply chains signalled sartorial possibilities. Rebels such as these were not unique to the Dutch colony, with like-minded settlements of African descent scattered throughout

100

101

102

103

Steeve O. Buckridge discusses the resistance of the enslaved in Chapter 12 in this volume. Acts of Assembly, passed in the Island of Barbadoes [sic], From 1648, to 1718 (London, 1732–9), i, 120, 179; DuPlessis, Material Atlantic, Chapter 4; Steeve O. Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 31–3. The term ‘Maroon’ was coined about 1650, for enslaved men and women who successfully fled servitude, surviving in scattered communities throughout plantation regions of the Americas: ‘maroon, n.2 and adj.2’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/114284 (accessed 6 April 2021). John G. Stedman, Narrative, of a five years’ expedition . . . (London: J. Johnson & J. Edwards, 1796), 227.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

Figure 9.8 William Blake (1757–1827), ‘A Coromantyn Free Negro, or Ranger, Armed’, after John Gabriel Stedman (1744–97), Narrative, of a five years’ expedition. The military breeches seized from a defeated colonial soldier represent a radical re-dressing. Bravo Images / Alamy Stock Photo 2AA3D9A.

plantation regions, an enduring source of alarm for those invested in the status quo. Jamaican Maroons were sometimes assigned ‘Coromantee’ lineage from the West African Gold Coast and preserved resilient self-governing communities. Their effective armed resistance to re-enslavement, men and women infused with a ‘Dangerous Spirit of Liberty’, brought British military and

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

305

306

beverly lemire

colonial forces to a standstill in the 1730s.104 Following the 1739 treaty, Maroons were actively in the marketplace, securing marks of their unique standing as free black citizens and landholders. Maroon military leaders dressed in martial styles, a selffashioning that fitted their prowess as warriors, though the ways they acquired these items are not fully recorded. Certainly, tons of ready-made apparel stocked warehouses in Jamaica, not least for the growing number of soldiers stationed there and the perpetual resupply needs of fleets. Aside from unknown depredations of official stock, second-hand or irregular purchases, Maroon officers and senior officials were gifted coats by the governor in yearly meetings. Such gifting was a long-established diplomatic practice between commercial and imperial officials and Indigenous leaders in North America; as British allies they received ready-made wool jackets, often embellished. This practice was particularly active when colonial powers depended on Indigenous allies, a powerfully symbolic investiture practised in many colonial locales.105 The Jamaican-born poet Robert Charles Dallas (1754–1824) recounted apparel given to Maroons: ‘if a Chief, he wore a kind of regimentals, perhaps some old military coat finely laced . . . with this he wore a ruffled shirt, linen waistcoat and trowsers [sic] and a laced hat’.106 These garments made claims to personhood and authority, what Kathleen Wilson terms a ‘performance of freedom that flaunted . . . [Maroon] privileges’. However, sartorial enactments by black insurgent men menaced the imperial status quo and ‘resonated jarringly with Caribbean configurations of power and abjection, with the Jamaican Maroon . . . an admirable, dangerous, and

104

105

106

Edward Trelawny to Robert Walpole, 30 June 1737, quoted in Kathleen Wilson, ‘The Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Order in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound’, William and Mary Quarterly, 66/1 (2009), 56–8. Lemire, ‘Question of Trousers’, 4; Walker, ‘Mobilizing Clothes at Sea’, 70–2; Wilson, ‘Performance of Freedom’, 56, n.12, 63–4; Becker, ‘Match Coat and the Military’, 175; Shannon, ‘Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier’; Grace Karskens, ‘Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin: Aboriginal Men and Clothing in Early New South Wales’, Aboriginal History, 35 (2011), 1–36. Robert Charles Dallas, The History of the Maroons, from the Origin to the Establishment of their Chief Trade at Sierra Leone . . . (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1803), i, 116.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

volatile character’.107 Disruptive images of black uniformed soldiers resounded through the wider ‘Atlantic sound’, subversive apparel signalling explicit challenge.108 The island of Hispaniola was divided between the French and Spanish, with France controlling the sugar-colony of SaintDomingue, its most valuable gem.109 This French colony (now modern Haiti) was ‘awash with maroons’, a group whose resolve eventually secured a treaty in 1785, an uncertain peace that dissolved in 1791.110 These military contests culminated, in the late eighteenth century, with the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and its extraordinary black military leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743?–1803). The black population was estimated at about 500,000 prior to the revolt (enslaved and free) and as in other regions, rumours of rebellion and defection by runaways seasoned the air.111 The outbreak of the French Revolution (1789–99) heightened tensions and expectations. Yet, it seemed ‘unthinkable’ that those in servitude would revolt, or so a French colonist wrote, months before the revolt: ‘Freedom for Negroes is a chimera.’112 Such assumptions proved false. Toussaint Breda, a freeman of colour, renamed himself and joined the rebels, rapidly moving to the head of the revolutionary militia. The importance of these events and its major actor compels an examination of the dress practices aligned with Toussaint L’Ouverture himself. He is shown in military uniforms in numerous prints, at the same time as his martial genius was made clear, defeating Western imperial powers, one after the other. The repeated conjuring of his person in rumours and in print shocked colonial and imperial leaders, a history that was, until recent decades, a neglected landmark, ‘silenced’ and ignored in larger 107 108

109 110

111 112

Wilson, ‘Performance of Freedom’, 63, 72. Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London and New York: Verso, 2020), 8–11. Ibid., xiv–xvi, 6. Philippe Girard, Paradise Lost: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hot Spot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 24–31. Nellis, Shaping the New World, 83, Table 4.2. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 72.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

307

308

beverly lemire

historiographies.113 Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that the Haitian Revolution ‘constituted a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in England has a conceptual frame of reference. They were “unthinkable” facts in the framework of Western thought.’114 The black, abolitionist, anti-imperial power of the revolution and its leader were distilled in images like Figure 9.9. This print was possibly made during his lifetime and offers a strikingly subversive performance.115 L’Ouverture wears fitted stirrup trousers and boots, just as white cavalry officers might, with a gold braid trimmed cut-away jacket with large epaulets squaring his shoulders; from his high hat, akin to French styles of the time, sprouts a tall feather. These elements tally with the idiom of martial uniforms of the day, whether his was ready-made or made to measure. But other elements hint at disruptive aims: his brilliantly white shirt is open at the neck, a wholesale rejection of military norms. Further, the multi-coloured woven sash that binds his waist is perhaps suggestive of other colonized peoples, such as the Métis for whom this was an emblem – although whether this element is true to life or artistic fiction cannot be known. This uniform, worn on a black body, announced his challenge to the status quo, including the stability that uniforms were intended to enforce. Toussaint L’Ouverture was a man of transnational legacy, growing up with a West African heritage – his first language was Fon; he was also rooted in Haiti through Haitian kreyòl and culture.116 Did he hear legends of the great Benin warriors, perhaps from his grandfather?117 Certainly, during and after the Haitian Revolution prints repeatedly showed him as a general, uniformed as a leader.118 113

114 116 117

118

The radical black Caribbean writer C. L. R. James wrote extensively about Toussaint L’Ouverture in the interwar period, but decades passed before attention returned to this topic. Philippe R. Girard, ‘Un-Silencing the Past: The Writings of Toussaint Louverture’, Slavery & Abolition, 34/4 (2013), 663–72. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 82. 115 Wilson, ‘Performance of Freedom’. Girard, ‘Un-Silencing the Past’, 664. J. R. Beard, Toussaint L’Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography (Boston: James Redpath, 1963), 35. Such as, Toussaint L’Ouverture, by Nicolas Eustache Maurin, printed by François Séraphin Delpech, lithograph, early nineteenth century, NPG D8211; Toussaint L’Ouverture, by François Bonneville, after unknown

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

Figure 9.9 Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743?–1803), Haitian general and liberator, line engraving, French, c. 1800–5. This revolutionary black general, dressed to reflect his disruptive intent, epitomized the greatest challenge to racialized systems in the imperial Atlantic world. North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy Stock Photo AE1XN8.

Pictures and rumours flowed along porous networks, where sailors, runaways, enslaved and common folk of all colours shared thoughts about freedom and its manner of dressing.119 Daniel Roche describes the French military uniform as ‘an instrument in a process designed to shape the physique and the bearing of a combative individual . . . into collective power . . . an

119

artist, etching and aquatint, early nineteenth century, NPG D8212; Toussaint L’Ouverture, by J. Barry, published by James Cundee, after M. Rainsford, line engraving, c. 1800–1825, NPG D15719 – all National Portrait Gallery, London. Scott, Common Wind, 1–37.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

309

310

beverly lemire

image of the military ethos’.120 Uniforms were intended to secure obedience to the French Empire above all. L’Ouverture’s military victories upended Western expectations, their ‘ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants’.121 Recall that images have agency, as with all material culture: ‘the product of history, they are also active agents in history’.122 Prints of a powerful black uniformed figure turned assumptions on their heads. This historical moment was an emphatic disruption, a reversal of the often-involuntary re-dressing of populations caught in imperial projects.123 L’Ouverture was later captured by stealth and imprisoned high in the Jura mountains of France, where he soon died. As part of official attempts to disarm him, he was stripped of his uniform and dressed in convict clothes, an intended humiliation.124 Yet portraits of this man proliferated long after his death, with his uniform an animating part, a radical enactment that echoed far beyond his lifespan, inspiring abolitionist and decolonization movements in the generations ahead.

conclusion The fashions that characterized the early modern era were shaped by the greater flow of materials along newly expanding networks – oceanic and land-based, imperial and colonial – even as longestablished routes persisted and enlarged. My early focus was on the interaction of peoples, places, and media, including the expanding population of mariners and their tangible affects. Their numbers grew over centuries – shock-troops of material transformation and social disruption – even as they served the aims of globalizing trade. Their formal and informal labours punctured sumptuary hierarchies, bringing uncountable quantities of desirable goods to kindred and ally. The Manila Galleons were seminal historic 120

121 123 124

Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 229, 230. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 73. 122 Auslander, ‘Beyond Words’, 1017. DuPlessis, Material Atlantic, 82–163. Dannelle Gutarra, ‘L’Ouverture’s Stay at Fort de Joux: The Construction of Race and Colonialism During the Haitian Revolution’, Journal of Intercultural Disciplines, 49/2 (2011), 85–98.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled

phenomena, altering key regions of the Americas and Asia. The force of fashion was instrumentalized, managed and negotiated by a cross-section of men and women, with a sometimes-disruptive circulation of goods altering the social landscape. And while power was unequal throughout, unsanctioned material mixing was a signal feature of fashion in this age. The entanglement of subaltern technologies shaped colonial styles, including in northern North America, styles with wide importance for that region and beyond. Indigenous knowledge in the crafting of decorative arts was valued in varied circumstances, with quillwork and hide coats a cultural bridge of a kind, leaving some lingering questions. The history of banyans reveals subaltern technologies and entanglement. Fur-trading spaces, as Laura Peers observes, were defined by: ‘the presence of intermarriage, of crosscultural borrowing and stimulation, [and] . . . the reassignment of old meanings to new forms of material culture and ways of life’.125 The provisioning systems for uniform clothing were tied to the expansion of fleets and Western imperial purpose. Yet uniforms adapted by subaltern black rebels embodied other aims. Disruptions by uniformed Maroons in the Caribbean challenged the intent of white uniformed cohorts, troops that enforced a savage regime. Maroon dress represented a profound refashioning, suggesting new possibilities to all subalterns who saw pictures or heard of these men. The iconic images of Toussaint L’Ouverture set a new benchmark for rebellion, and a refashioned black man. In these we see that goods arising from imperial networks were sometimes a means to achieve other ends, as colonized peoples re-dressed in pursuit of higher goals.

select bibliography Dean, Carolyn and Dana Leibsohn, ‘Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America’, Colonial Latin American Review, 12/1 (2003), 5–35. DuPlessis, Robert, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 125

Peers, ‘“Many Tender Ties”’, 291.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

311

312

beverly lemire Farrell Racette, Sherry, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade: The Indigenization of European Trade Goods in Historic and Contemporary Canada’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 20 (2008), 69–81. Farrell Racette, Sherry, ‘Sewing Ourselves Together: Clothing, Decorative Arts and the Expression of Métis and Half Breed Identity’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Manitoba, 2004). Gasch-Tomás, José Luis, The Atlantic World and the Manila Galleon: Circulation, Market, and Consumption of Asian Goods in the Spanish Empire, 1565–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Grehan, Grehan, ‘Smoking and “Early Modern” Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries)’, American Historical Review, 111/5 (2006), 1352–77. Lemire, Beverly, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Lemire, Beverly, ‘“Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660– 1800’, Journal of British Studies, 54/2 (2015), 297–306. Norton, Marcy, ‘Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World’, Colonial Latin American Review, 26/1 (2017), 18–38. Peers, Laura, ‘Crossing Worlds: Hide Coats, Relationship, and Identity in Rupert’s Land and Britain’, in Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw (eds.), Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780– 1980 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), 55–81. Peers, Laura, ‘“Many Tender Ties”: The Shifting Contexts and Meanings of the S BLACK Bag’, World Archaeology, 31/2 (1999), 288–302. Phillips, Ruth B., Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). Riello, Giorgio and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern global ties and entangled Turgeon, Laurier, ‘French Fishers, Fur Traders, and Amerindians during the Sixteenth Century: History and Archaeology’, William and Mary Quarterly, 55/4 (1998), 585–610. Warsh, Molly, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Wilson, Kathleen, ‘The Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Order in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound’, William and Mary Quarterly, 66/1 (2009), 45–86.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.011 Published online by Cambridge University Press

313

10

w

FASHION BEYOND CLOTHING Early Modern Visual Culture of Eurasian Dress peter mcneil

introduction The ‘visuality’ of fashion conjures up thoughts of directional garments, spectacular catwalks, and the fashion image. The term ‘visuality’ was coined by Thomas Carlyle in the 1830s to capture his conservative view of British imperial history as a series of ‘vivid pictures’ exceeding archival facts. It took on a very different resonance within late twentieth-century post-modernism when it came to mean ways of seeing, ‘sight as a social fact’, and the ‘politics of representation in transnational and transcultural form’.1 Fashion studies has been dominated by this discursive mode of analysing the fashion image via the insistence of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard on ‘written fashion’ within twentieth-century media: printed page, photograph, simulation, and copy. This approach tends to obscure the different work and connotation of fashion before modernism, although early modern prints and drawings of dress often resorted to words to convey the colours, textures, and materialities of dress. Fashion itself and the textiles, trimmings, and accessories of which it is made generate the first visual register of dress. Acts of dressing and appearing provide a second register. It then undergoes multiple forms of representation that encompass a wide range of

1

Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘On Visuality’, Journal of Visual Culture, 5/1 (2006), 54, 76.

314

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

artefacts and materialities.2 I here propose the ‘visual culture’ of fashion as not simply the domain of two-dimensional prints, drawings, manuscript illustrations and paintings, and threedimensional sculpture, all of which are commonly used to ‘illustrate’ fashion histories, but a much wider realm of material culture, design, and the decorative arts. These include textiles, ceramics, glass, mirrors, and enamels. Urbanized cultures around the world in this period were marked by a propensity to expect, enjoy, and explore interactions between a wide range of new consumer goods. They were appreciated for their material, sensual, and sometimes even alchemical attributes, understood within the cultural, scientific, and philosophical frameworks of their time and place. This led to a distinctive visual economy of fashion between 1500 and 1800 which embraced not only cloth and clothing but also supercharged and surpassed it with cognate practices, materials, and accoutrements. Fashion is transient, short-lived, and fragile. Yet it is also mutable and open to translations and transformations across media and genre. It was the circulation of prints, drawings, models, written and verbal instruction, but primarily prints, that permitted the circulation and spread of ideas about fashion and fashionability in the era before photography and film. This was the case not only in the West but also in Eurasia: Japan and China. The enormous expansion of European trade, conquest, and colonization from the sixteenth century onwards generated a raft of new fashions for all concerned not limited to clothes and textiles but encompassing spatial environments modified with new textiles. Trading companies engaging in European and intra-Asian trade commenced with the Portuguese and included also Dutch, English, French, Swedish, and Danish concerns. They traded in an incredible range of goods, many of which were promoted as new fashionable pastimes – tea, 2

This formulation owes much to, but also differs from, the structure accorded to fashion by Roland Barthes, who developed his semiotic study of fashion published as The Fashion System (1967). Barthes described three codes based on his studies of 1950s–1960s French fashion magazines: the vestimentary (real fashion), the terminological (spoken), and the rhetorical (how fashion is translated into words and images in magazine spreads). Paul Jobling, ‘Roland Barthes: Semiology and the Rhetorical Codes of Fashion’, in Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (eds.), Thinking Through Fashion (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 134.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

315

316

peter mcneil

coffee, and chocolate taking – and which introduced new visual registers to European eyes.3 This chapter therefore takes a comparative approach to West European, North American, Japanese, and Chinese fashion objects and their representations. The selection is deliberate, as Asian exported goods from chintz to parasols transformed European fashion in the early modern period, and European goods and technologies including oil painting, timepieces, mirror glass, and lenses were adapted in China and Japan. Fashion itself, particularly the design and colours of the textiles of which it was crafted, influenced the formats, colours, and design of adjacent artefacts ranging from French porcelain coffee services to Japanese lacquer lunch-boxes. As well as considering the primacy of textiles, the chapter ranges across a series of very different artefacts that also were fashions themselves: from Chinese export ceramics depicting dress, to printed instructions for designing a Japanese kimono, and to a print-like silhouette portrait ‘dressed’ with textiles in the early American Republic. Scenes of fashion were frequently depicted on porcelain and pottery tea wares and figurines, lacquer, enamels, and reverse-painted glass in the early modern period. In the case of porcelain, images of fashionable people sometimes provided the very form of the object. Although not always yielding up their certain meanings or intentions, for Europeans they often inferred the novelty and excitement of new fashion products and encounters. The exchange was not always positive: for Japanese or Chinese imperial viewers, images of foreigners in Western dress might indicate the latter’s supplication or derision.

the art of textile design Silk occupied a particular point of prestige and preference for fashion in the early modern period. Chinese silk had since antiquity astonished Europeans for its lustre and complex brocaded designs. 3

Goods ranged from Chinese silks to Indian chintzes, as well as spices, tea, coffee, chocolate, porcelain (including chine de commande or export commissions), woven and raw silk, linen (nankeen), drugs, aromatics, tropical woods, silver, wallpaper, lacquer, silver, pewter, ivories, jade, soapstone, mother-of-pearl, rattan and hardwood furniture, enamels, painted fans, paintings on wood and paper, and in reverse on glass.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

The first patterned silks woven in Europe date only from the thirteenth century and were manufactured first in Lucca. Despite East India silks being banned in England from 1699 and Chinese silk in France from 1702, they were not prohibited in Holland and were much re-exported. Many simpler, unpatterned silks were traded by the Chinese with Europe and large amounts of silk were imported to the Netherlands throughout the eighteenth century.4 In some cases entire garments of expensive local silk were shipped to Europe from China. Anne Maria Bogaert, the daughter of an Amsterdam merchant with Batavian connections, was married in a formal mantua gown of cream Chinese silk in the mid-eighteenth century. Made to measure from six lengths of silk in China, the dress was also embroidered there (its rich embroidery surface has no interruption at the seams), and onward-shipped to Europe as part of the ‘pacotille’ or privilege of a private trader on board an East India Company vessel (Figure 10.1).5 Both dress and upholstery silks were subject from an early date to precise fashion directives. European agents worked with Chinese go-betweens and brokers to develop woven textiles that suited European consumers. Different textiles conveyed different moods and materialities. The glossy Chinese silks were very suitable for the making up of women’s dresses and were used widely in France, England, the Low Countries, and colonial North America. In 1773 the Dutch sent out a precise order for dress fabrics: ‘100 painted lustrings in a new taste: half of the order should be with small lozenges woven into the ground, the other half should be with softcoloured stripes. Both types have to be nicely painted with small scrolls, not too coarse and the pattern not too large.’6 Palettes changed after 1770 from colours such as green, ochre, dark red, and pink to white, grey, dark blue, and other cool colours, reflecting new tastes in art and design and also a new conception of the body in which more was revealed. The neo-classical body could not afford to be swamped by very large pattern repeats.

4

5

Christian J. A. Jörg, ‘Chinese Export Silks for the Dutch in the 18th Century’, lecture given 18 October 2008, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, 73 (2008–9), 13–14. Ibid., 9. 6 Ibid., 16.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

317

318

peter mcneil

Figure 10.1 Mantua court dress, embroidered ivory-coloured Chinese silk, c. 1747. Kunstmuseum Den Haag / The Hague Art Museum, K13/ 1959/K93-1996, 1006296.

Europeans also coveted Chinese painted silks for men’s banyans (T-shaped ‘undress’ garments worn by European men, akin to a dressing gown) and room hangings. Such textiles were cheaper but not inferior versions of the most expensive format, Chinese embroidered silk, that was also used for clothing and upholstery. These two categories of silk were made for export in the same factories in Canton and designs were often provided to the Dutch East India Company by Chinese artists, not by Europeans, as was generally the case with ceramics. A Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie – VOC) report noted in 1786: ‘Anthonij the painter will prepare new designs for the painted textiles in order to enable us to select the most beautiful and fashionable

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

patterns.’7 ‘Anthony’ was ‘the famous Chinese [artist], also known as Antonio the Deaf’ who both created designs for others, and also painted textiles himself. Such a statement indicates the appeal of designs drawn with a strong Chinese character: Europeans particularly liked the way in which the Chinese painted colourful flowers, birds, and insects which suited the bucolic mood of mid-to-late eighteenth-century taste.

print and chintz Historians including Giorgio Riello and Beverly Lemire have argued that European fashion can partly be understood as an interplay between the desire to consume Eastern textiles and new methods of production including sericulture and printed cotton textiles, as well as new European consumer tastes. They argue that printing was not only a form of information but also a technique in which European markets and consumers ‘produced a type of fashionability that could be “read”’.8 Exchange and transformation was also very much the case for chintz, the painted-and-dyed cottons or indiennes from India noted for their range of dye-fast properties and the depth of their colour, achieved by painting the mordants on the fabric by hand for each dyebath. Europeans preferred lighter grounds and requested pan-cultural motifs such as ‘the tree of life’. Indian craftsmen also copied the grand French Baroque decorative style of arabesques and ‘grotesques’ (derived from Pompeii and much used in Europe for wall paintings and garden design) reproduced in engravings of court ornament and spectacle by Jean Bérain (1640–1711), the official state designer for festivities from 1674.9 Rosemary Crill 7 8

9

Ibid., 15. Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, ‘East and West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Social History, 41/4 (2008), 887–916. Rosemary Crill, ‘Asia in Europe: Textiles for the West’, in Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer (eds.), Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800 (London: V&A Publishing, 2004), 270–1. Grotesques were anti-classical and referred to a mode of decoration, but they also referred to wider visual culture such as masquerade costumes, mixing low and popular motifs from the commedia dell’arte and chinoiserie taste.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

319

320

peter mcneil

suggests that the effects of copying European engravings can be observed in the stippling and cross-hatching that appear on some Indian painted chintzes.10 She remarks that the French and Italian ‘bizarre silks’ of the early eighteenth century, once thought to be possibly of Asian design, but now understood to be European amalgams of Asian (particularly Japanese) and Persian design motifs, were occasionally translated into Indian chintz.11 Liza Oliver’s recent study of the French East India Company’s trade with the Coromandel east coast notes that Bérainesque palampores and chintzes depicting ‘Don Quixote’ were manufactured in India in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These she sees as indicating the immediacy of the impact of hybrid visual cultures, a period of ‘nuance and complexity that defined interactions in this formative period’ well prior to imperialism.12 Her words echo the earlier ones of Finlay for porcelain: ‘artists, craftsmen, and entrepreneurs around the world during the early modern period were relaying, integrating, and generating cultural forms’.13 The nature and impact of these exchanges took many forms, involving even movement. From the mid-seventeenth century, wealthy Europeans adapted a new transportation practice derived from the Chinese and Indian manner of moving people around in wheelless sedan chairs or palanquins (‘palki’ meaning bed or couch) carried by ‘chairmen’ not drawn by animals. Unlike Indian chairs, the European ones were enclosed, upright, and glazed, and the passenger sat up rather than reclined.

10 11

12

13

Ibid., 268. Bizarre silks combined Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Persian motifs and were produced in Venice, Lyon, and Spitalfields around 1705– 10. They frequently depicted Ottoman flowers such as the tulip, carnation, hyacinth, and rose. Related ‘lace-patterned’ silks reproduced stylized lace grounds that did not depict real lace. They were therefore doubly artful. See Anna Jolly (ed.), A Taste for the Exotic: Foreign Influences on Early Eighteenth-Century Silk Designs (Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2007). Liza Oliver, Art, Trade and Imperialism in Early Modern French India (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 29. Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, 9/2 (1998), 186.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

designing fashion In Europe, fashions across a wide range of products from furniture to perfumed snuff and foodstuffs were generated through a complex imbrication of the skills of the designer who was also sometimes an entrepreneur, with the know-how of intermediary merchants who were closely attuned to consumer taste in towns and urban centres. What can be termed the ‘conceptual’ work of design, separate from making, was very evident in textiles of this period, and predates the better-known category of industrial ceramics produced by Josiah Wedgwood and metal goods by Matthew Boulton. The silk merchants of Lyon in eighteenth-century Europe were considered unrivalled for their knowledge of fashion and skills of innovation, partly owing to their ability to judge and create changing tastes as well as their technical expertise. Some were also inventors who changed the visual appearance of silk altogether. These designers benefited from the existence of state sponsorship via the Grande Fabrique (silk weaving guild), a free drawing school for 1,500 pupils (École gratuite de dessin), use of mobile sample-books, and the presence of high-quality flower paintings available for study by the draughtsmen providing freehand sketches and ‘point paper’ plans for weaving. Lesley Miller has demonstrated in her numerous publications how the merchant weavers of Lyon were able to respond strategically to annual and season fashion change by the 1720s–30s, sending out new silks every three months and conveying French silks to centres as disparate as Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Russia, Germany, Italy (Milan), and Spain.14 Seasonal change for the Lyon dress silks was achieved by adaptation and was not as swift or absolute as might be expected in subsequent centuries.15 The influence of Lyon was widespread, not simply from imitations but as Anna Jolly remarks, many Lyon-trained artists emigrated and transferred their design skills to new settings,

14

15

Lesley Ellis Miller, ‘Mysterious Manufacturers: Situating L. Galy, Gallien et Compe. in the Eighteenth-Century Lyons Silk Industry’, Bard Studies in the Decorative Arts, Spring/Summer (2002), 87. Lesley Ellis Miller, ‘Innovation and Industrial Espionage in Eighteenth-Century France: An Investigation of the Selling of Silks through Samples’, Journal of Design History, 12/3 (1999), 271–92.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

321

322

peter mcneil

including Jean Eric Rehn (1717–93) to Stockholm and Fayetant de Saint Clair to a Florence textile drawing academy.16 Lyon silk design was notable for its ability to marry commerce with design and technological innovation. Jean Revel (1684–1751) perfected the point rentré technique around 1730 in which colours were dovetailed, creating a three-dimensional effect as in woven tapestry. Fluffy chenille yarns and frisé silver were used to create unusual textures with added three-dimensional air (Figure 10.2). The celebrated designer (dessinateur) of Lyon dress and notably furnishing silks, Philippe de Lasalle (1723–1804), was both merchant and designer. He leveraged state incentives to promote the French decorative arts and demanded a status somewhat akin to what we today call a fine artist, providing a new template for what the French call an ‘artiste’ or an ‘artisaninventor’.17 Lasalle had been formally trained by the academic history painter Daniel Sarrabat (1666–1748) and spent time with the celebrated artist François Boucher (1703–70). Lasalle therefore learned figure drawing, which was not common for European silk designers. Lasalle was capable of incredible three-dimensional verism: recalling the Greek painter Apelles, his apologist abbé Bertolon wrote: ‘we saw on fabrics, something most astonishing, flowers and fruits imitating nature perfectly, peaches with all their velvety texture, grapes with their transparency, birds with all the richness and pomp of their colouring, charming landscapes in which the spaces were skilfully managed, they all created the most ravishing illusion’.18 Designers of silks were actively encouraged to seek out interconnections between fashionable things. In 1765 the Lyon silk designer and manufacturer Joubert de l’Hiberderie (1725/9–73) published his commentary on French silk. He noted that it was a pity that women were excluded from this profession as they would have made great contributions due to their proximity to 16

17

18

Anna Jolly, Fürstliche Interieurs. Dekorationstextilien des 18. Jahrhunderts (Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2005), 227. Lesley Ellis Miller, ‘The Marriage of Art and Commerce: Philippe de Lasalle’s Success in Silk’, in Katie Scott and Deborah Cherry (eds.), Between Luxury and the Everyday: Decorative Arts in Eighteenth-Century France (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 66. Ibid., 63.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

Figure 10.2 Design for woven silk from the ‘Leman Album’, pencil, pen and ink, watercolour, and body-colour on laid paper, possibly by Jean Revel, 1736–9. 20.3 × 26.4 cm. The silk is likely French and by Revel, or an English copy. Victoria and Albert Museum, E.1861:47–1991.

fashion.19 He neglects here the famous exception of Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688–1763), Spitalfields (London) silk designer, noted for her brocaded floral and ribbon silks with contrasting textured grounds, which would have looked well when moving with the body. She worked from engravings and precise drawings provided by botanists of local as well as exotic specimens.20 De l’Hiberderie’s text made explicit the central role of what we might now call ‘inter-media’ within eighteenth-century design. Of the

19

20

Joubert de l’Hiberderie, Le Dessinateur, pour les Fabrique d’étoffes d’or, d’argent et de soie (Paris: Sébastein Jorry, Bauche, Brocas, 1765), xxvii. Huguenot silk weaver Daniel Vautier purchased 122 designs from Garthwaite between 1741 and 1751, but often had his weavers change her colours and backgrounds to suit his customers.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

323

324

peter mcneil

design of luxury cloths such as velours, cut gold, chine, and plush he wrote: it is necessary to find ideas for this genre, apart from samples, in all the mosaics, on snuffboxes, on Chinese, Meissen (Saxon) and Sèvres [Sève] porcelain, on faience vessels and even terracotta where there are to be found designs, on both fine and common indiennes alike with their little subjects, where one finds sometimes mosaics of singular taste, apart from the assembly of colours which can furnish ideas finally on all works in miniature, decorated with ornaments, fruits, foliage, plants etc.

Many of the artefacts listed above are Asian imports.21 Furthermore, de l’Hiberderie remarked that it was necessary to have rapport with the taste of the day and to engage with the many ‘trinkets’ (colichet) of fashion, including ‘pearls, pompons, knots, plumage, martin, ermine, tiger fur etc. All these fantastical things, presented to the proposed buyer, will give a shape to his designs, and make for him a reputation.’22 When in Paris, he advised, the designer of luxury cloth should visit the flower painters as well as the Library of the King, the Louvre, look at coaches, the Gobelins, to ‘visit the couturiers and makers of fashion’, as well as fan-makers, silversmiths, and embroiderers.23 In other words, a good designer had to be up to date with the luxury trades as well as the emerging academic art institutions. De l’Hiberderie’s claim that Lyon silk was excellent because of the proximity of silk designers to other arts and crafts was taken one step further by his near contemporary the designer and manufacturer Jacques-Charles Dutillieu (1718–82), who ascribed Lyon’s excellence to the presence of first rate painters there, particularly of flowers. He ‘thereby randomly rather than consciously set up the beginnings of a history of design and designers, akin to that already existing for painters’.24

21

22 24

Indiennes refers to chintz but also sometimes meant Dutch woven chinoiserie silk. Sjoukje Colenbrander and Clare Brown, ‘Indiennes: Chinoiserie Silks Woven in Amsterdam’, in Jolly (ed.), Taste for the Exotic, 127–38. De l’Hiberderie, Le Dessinateur, 25. 23 Ibid., 100–1. Lesley Ellis Miller, ‘Manufactures and the Man: A Reassessment of the Place of Jacques-Charles Dutillieu in the Silk Industry of Eighteenth-Century

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

De l’Hiberderie’s text highlights the well-known world of eighteenth-century Paris shopping, in which the guild of marchand-merciers produced commodities so luxurious and sometimes mysterious that they seemed to have no recognizable maker. These marchand-merciers (who had the right to trade in numerous materials and artefacts) assembled disparate forms such as a Chinese bowl or statue with a locally made ormolu frame or mount, perhaps creating a clock or a perfume burner (brûle-parfum), to generate new uses and meanings for local and imported products. Daniel Roche notes of such merchants, including Rose Bertin (1747– 1813), the famed milliner (marchande de modes) to Marie Antoinette, that they ‘no longer actually made things but had these made for them . . . In Paris they marked themselves off from the “mécaniques”, who often had to work with their own hands.’25 That is to say, they invented new products and tastes rather than reproducing them, which is a characteristic often ascribed to modern rather than early modern fashion. The chevalier Louis de Jaucourt (1704–79) believed that the creation of such luxury goods conferred a special advantage: ‘Hands that divinely paint a carriage, that perfectly mount a diamond, that exceptionally fit a fashionable suit, such hands do not resemble the hands of the people.’26 The elite connoisseurs of European courts, such as Madame de Pompadour or Catherine the Great, sought out Japanese and Chinese lacquers, lapidary gemstones, and porcelains that were concocted into new fantasies of the East including furniture panels, ormolu-mounted perfume burners, and clocks by the specialist guild of Paris marchandmerciers (including Lazare-Duvaux, Simon-Philippe Poirier, and Madame Dulac).27 Of her Japanese lacquer the Empress Maria Theresa remarked: ‘all the diamonds in the world are nothing to me. Objects made in India, especially lacquered woods . . . are the only

25

26

27

Lyon’, Textile History, 29/1 (1998), 20. Dutillieu observed Lyon in the 1730s and 1740s and his work was unpublished until 1886. Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 44. Paola Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 8–9. Carolyn Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-Century Paris (London and Malibu, CA: Victoria and Albert Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

325

326

peter mcneil

things that give me pleasure.’28 The Japanese refinement of technique saw dewdrops in lacquer represented by various shades of sprinkled gold, parts filled with gold dust and other minerals. Michael Yonan argues that the miraculous lustre of lacquer appealed to elite European interest in alchemical properties (as had Chinese porcelain, believed by Europeans for much of the seventeenth century to have been made from materials ranging from underground liquid to shells or eggs); it was a society that valued the sheen, polish, and mirrored surfaces in materials as different as silk taffeta, satin, porcelain, glass, and silver.29 Europeans preferred the lustrous effects of the incised, white or celadon Chinese porcelains which were ‘unremarkable to Chinese eyes’, just as they preferred pale-ground chintz rather than the dark grounds generally used in India.30 Chinese and Japanese goods sometimes aroused derision in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries for their aesthetic qualities, but by the mid-eighteenth, generated fervent admiration: Who does not know and admire the lacquer-work of the Chinese and Japanese! These people, perhaps the only ones on earth over whom European industry does not have the advantages of universal superiority, design and paint vases, jewels and furniture with an intelligence, taste and patience that amazes our countries.31

chinoiserie Chinese art, which did not generally use a perspectival system to indicate spatial depth, influenced and fed into European Rococo art and design. Rococo art, as Norman Bryson clearly argued, was despised by many Academicians for its spatial dislocations and 28

29

30

31

Michael E. Yonan, ‘Veneers of Authority: Chinese Lacquers in Maria Theresa’s Vienna’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37/4 (2004), 652. Christopher L. Maxwell (ed.), In Sparkling Company: Reflections on Glass in the Eighteenth-Century British World (Corning, NY: Corning Museum of Glass, 2020). Rose Kerr, ‘Chinese Porcelain in Early European Collections’, in Jackson and Jaffer (eds.), Encounters, 51. Jean-Félix Watin, Royal residence worker, from his treatise on gilding and varnishing (1773) in Jean-Paul Desroches, ‘The Taste for China in 18thCentury Paris’, in Jean-Paul Desroches (ed.), Paris 1730–1930: The Taste for China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Art Museum/Musée Guimet, 2008), 73.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

disrupted scale of values – it unduly elevated portraiture, still life, and landscape over history or figure painting.32 One of the great exponents of European chinoiserie was the artist-engraver JeanBaptiste Pillement (1728–1808). Pillement was born in Lyon amidst a family of silk designers. A prolific illustrator, he updated the earlier grotesques of Bérain and the latter’s predecessor Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (1510–84). Du Cerceau’s much-copied prints ‘had influenced gold and silver smiths, woodworkers and weavers and promoted hybrid forms that lent themselves well to the uptake of aspects of Chinese and other Asian art forms’.33 As well as being an influential draughtsman-artist whose designs were used in myriad formats, Pillement studied new techniques of dyeing and printing of coloured designs on silks while in Vienna from 1763 to 1764. He petitioned the French state that he had invented a new way ‘to print drawings and coloured flowers on plain silk fabrics superior to anything that Indian fabrics called Pekings can offer at their most brilliant . . . the printing is much more clean, fine, and efficient’.34 Pillement had a pan-European influence with his chinoiseries and Rococo arabesques which could be applied to textile design, painted and inlaid furniture, wall murals, and a host of decorative arts such as porcelain. His work was inspired by a long back-story of important printed sources for chinoiserie designs such as engravings by Johan Nieuhof and Wenceslaus Hollar published in England in 1669, Watteau’s designs for the Cabinet de roi at Chateau la Muette from 1710 (destroyed in 1741) that was copied by François Boucher and others, English printmaker and seller Matthew (and possibly Mary) Darly who published Darly’s A New Book of Chinese Designs (1754) as well as the extensive two-volume, 1,500 illustration (900 by Pillement) publication by Robert Sayer The Ladies Amusement, or Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy, drawn by Pillement and other 32

33

34

Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 89–121. Christine A. Jones, Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in EighteenthCentury France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013), 114. Maria Gordon-Smith, ‘The Influence of Jean Pillement on French and English Decorative Arts, Part One’, Artibus et Historiae, 21/41 (2000), 171– 96; Maria Gordon-Smith, ‘The Influence of Jean Pillement on French and English Decorative Arts, Part Two: Representative Fields of Influence’, Artibus et Historiae, 21/42 (2000), 163.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

327

328

peter mcneil

masters (1758 and 1762). Pillement transferred the practical use of painted motifs such as insects and butterflies used to disguise blemishes on Chinese porcelain and wallpaper to a generic language of midcentury Rococo-influenced design which had no interest in accuracy regarding Chinese sources. It was this approach to Chinese visual culture that David Porter claims signalled ‘a delicious surrender to the unremitting exoticism of total illegibility’.35 The engravings influenced the design of textiles including painted silks and printed cottons, wallpaper, tapestry, upholstered furniture, silver, ceramics and objets de vertus (small luxury items) such as enamelled étuis (often combination tooth-pick, tweezer, needle, and miniature scissor cases), patch and snuffboxes, perfume or ‘toilet’ bottles, needle holders, gold and silver boxes, and cane handles and fans (Figure 10.3).36 Although there is a tendency today to read chinoiserie as a blatant misunderstanding of Chinese customs and behaviour, its success partly rested on a fascination with Chinese splendour and luxury. As Liza Oliver notes for India: ‘The European conflation of Indian textiles with Chinese-styled motifs was something much more than the result of an Orientalist form of othering.’ Instead, she argues for ‘conflations’ and ‘connections’ that bridge ‘the aesthetic traditions of Europe and China by way of the Coromandel textile industries’.37

materiality and visuality As Jones remarks in her study of the relationship of French porcelain and fashion, much of the power of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury courtly portraits is carried by their depiction of the materiality of textiles, trimmings and lace and that ‘the weight of meaning hangs disproportionately on the garment’, a part of ‘a larger aesthetic project that celebrated materiality’.38 Early modern elites indulged in practical investigations of materials themselves. Jean Haudicquer de Blancourt published The Art of Glass (1697) which conflated the making of glass, crystal and enamel, pearls, precious stones, porcelain and mirrors. Both porcelain and glass are enamelled in much the same 35

36 37

David Porter, ‘Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Visual Culture, 28 (1999), 28. Gordon-Smith, ‘The Influence of Jean Pillement, Part Two’, 132. Oliver, Art, Trade and Imperialism, 32. 38 Jones, Shapely Bodies, 197.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

Figure 10.3 Fan with scenes after Jean-Baptiste Pillement, French, 1760– 70, watercolour on vellum, carved mother-of-pearl stock and guards, decorated with gilt and silver foil, marcasite and paste. 27.5 cm long; open 52 cm wide; closed 3 cm wide. Victoria and Albert Museum, T 154-1978.

manner and therefore early French porcelain was sometimes identified with the glass trades within the well-known Aristotelian category ‘l’art du feu’ (art of fire). The transparency of porcelain and ability to take colours was particularly appealing.39 The duc d’Orléans and regent of France fabricated perfume, fake gems, medals, and cameos behind his protective glass mask around 1715, Louis XV privately brewed coffee with Madame de Pompadour, and Louis XVI enjoyed working at his lathe in the attic of Versailles. In the fashionable rue Saint Honoré, women bought silkworm-growing kits with mulberry leaves and instructions on how to breed them and spin their silk.40 All manner of material experiments were undertaken, including attempts to recreate Japanese lacquer, fascinating the French public who attended such scientific demonstrations.41 Entomologist René 39

40 41

Susan Miller, ‘Europe’s Enamellers: Creating China for the West’, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramics Society, 65 (2000–2), 158–9. Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment, 58, 198. Ibid., 182; Jones, Shapely Bodies, 100.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

329

330

peter mcneil

Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757) studied gold embroidery thread, glass and spider silk and investigated the thinnest possible gold thread for embroidery.42 Louis XV commissioned Jean Hellot (1685– 1766), director of the Académie Royale des Sciences to write a detailed report on Vincennes porcelain, notable for its wide range of colours, as he had done previously for the chemistry of textile dyes.43 As ceramics expert Sarah Richards writes, ‘colour really became more important than the porcelain itself, which increasingly worked to provide a lustrous surface for the enhancement of rich colour grounds’.44 The cooler, pastel palette popular in the second half of the eighteenth century was transposed by Europeans from textiles to their new locally produced porcelains at the manufactures of Vincennes and later Sèvres. The large, flat dinner plates produced by the French were something new, being difficult to fire in the kiln, and looked very different from deeper, Chinese chargers. Furthermore, they were decorated in new colours such as pea green, rose pink (later Pompadour or du Barry pink), bleue celeste (very different from Chinese cobalt blue), or yellow enamels. They therefore harmonized in new ways with the rich colours of the interiors and clothing of the French aristocracy and were in great demand as diplomatic gifts throughout Europe.45

wearing other people’s textiles As well as embracing painted and embroidered Chinese silk, Europeans occasionally wore dress silks embroidered in China with Buddhist and Taoist motifs.46 Mei Mei Rado notes that European figured silks were hardly ever worn in China before the twentieth century as their lack of auspicious, cosmological, or narrative motifs made them incongruous within Chinese visual systems. The Chinese embroidery pattern book Collection of Snipped Rosy Clouds was published in the early seventeenth 42 44

45 46

Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment, 56. 43 Ibid., 210. Sarah Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics: Products for a Civilised Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 53. Jones, Shapely Bodies, 197. European dress, Chinese embroidered taffeta c. 1760. Collection of the Ville de Lorient, Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, published in Brigitte Nicolas, ‘Robe à la française or French Sack Dress’, in Desroches (ed.), Paris 1730–1930, 46–7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

century and included typical ‘antique’ motifs that gave aesthetic and literary value to their use by contemporary craftsmen and designers.47 Silver and gold-figured (flowered) silks or ‘foreign brocades’ from sources as varied as Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, French (from Lyon), and English (from Spitalfields) are recorded in summaries of gifts and tribute from West European and Russian merchants as well as Thai emissaries to the Qing court from the late seventeenth century. The Chinese emperors owned European textiles including gold-thread bizarre silks c. 1700–20 made up into objects as diverse as horse trappings and archery cases, and a screen for a Mongolian-style campaign tent, part of Manchu martial rituals.48 European tapestries and carpets were also acceptable tribute and the Qing emperor favoured imported European gold thread (filé – smooth and frisée – spiral) over the flat gilt-paper Chinese thread used in local silk production.49 Copies of a bizarre silk were made in China but Rado notes they lack the threedimensional depth which is typical of the finest Lyon work.50 As she goes on to emphasize, such textiles had a special charge as a form of encounter. Their splendid design and novel manufacture ‘were appropriated by the Qing court for the purposes of demonstrating its global reach and technological mastery as a way of showcasing imperial power’.51 She labels these exotic textiles ‘Chinese européeneries’ that derive their significance ‘not so much from any precise geographic association but from the meanings they acquired in the context in which they were produced and experienced’.52

47

48

49

50

Jian xia ji (Collection of Snipped Rosy Clouds), preface Shen Linqi (1603–64), see Rachel Silberstein, A Fashionable City: Textile Artistry and Commerce in the Late Qing (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020), 164. Mei Mei Rado, ‘Encountering Magnificence: European Silks at the Qing Court during the Eighteenth Century’, in Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding (eds.), Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West (Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2015), 59–75. The rococo was not a term used at the time. Contemporaries called it ‘modern’ or the ‘genre pittoresque’ and from 1734 ‘rocaille’ which also refers to grotto shellwork; sometimes also called ‘la chicorée’. See Svend Eriksen, ‘Marigny and Le Goût Grec’, Burlington Magazine, 708/54 (1962), 98. Rado, ‘Encountering Magnificence’, 63. 51 Ibid., 61. 52 Ibid., 65.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

331

332

peter mcneil

fashion, urbanism, and visual acuity Textile production in urbanized cultures often revolved around the sharing of pictorial sources relayed by a variety of intermediaries including merchants and manufacturers, some of whom came from accomplished artistic circles themselves. This was the case for both Europe and Japan. Fashion in Japan was generated within specific visual codes and networks that linked textile and clothing design to other visual arts, including screen painting, porcelain, metalwork, lacquer, and architecture. As Christine Guth notes of Japanese Momoyama (1573–1615) textiles: ‘Close personal ties between artists involved in textile production and those in other media fostered much artistic cross-fertilization.’53 The urbane Ogata family of Kyoto were intermarried with famed aesthetes and held an awareness of design across the fields of ‘textiles, painting, ceramics, lacquer, and printed books throughout the seventeenth century’.54 In the Japanese Genroku period (1688–1704) the characteristics of multi-coloured Japanese Imari (the name of the port from which ceramics of this name were exported) could be found on dishes, brocades, and screens. The kinran-de (gold brocade) subcategory of Imari porcelain, embellished with gold, was directly inspired by the textiles used in Japanese ceremonial, theatrical, and fashionable life.55 All played a role in a performative enactment of luxury and aesthetics. At the same time, in Mughal India, European modes of ‘scientific’ botanical representation spread by the importation of seventeenth-century botanical prints or ‘herbals’ influencing the design of Mughal architecture, manuscript illustration, and printed and painted cottons depicting flowers.56

53

54 55

56

Christina Guth, ‘Textiles’, in Money L. Hickman (ed.), Momoyama: Japan’s Golden Age, Dallas Museum of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 276. Ibid. Wayne Crothers, ‘Imari Porcelain: Brocades of Translucent Colour’, National Gallery of Victoria (exhibition), 2018, www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/ imari-porcelain-brocades-of-translucent-colour/. Susan Stronge, ‘Europe in Asia: The Impact of Western Art and Technology in South Asia’, in Jackson and Jaffer (eds.), Encounters, 292.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, European urban centres began to demand clothes that were literally ‘easier’ to wear than those worn at court (more loosely cut, more easily bundled up for women, shorter skirts for men’s waistcoats and jackets, giving an ability to walk and to work but remaining ‘in fashion’). A concentration of workers in the ‘appearance industries’ so deftly described by Daniel Roche for Paris, permitted the skills, practices, and fashionably attuned air of mercers, tailors, hatters, milliners, wig-makers, hair-dressers, glovers, stay-makers, and domino (paper patterns for cards and linings) printers to creatively merge with the new commercialization of leisure and the public space.57 Fashion was activated by the public spaces of the theatres, assembly halls, amusement venues (Vauxhall Gardens, the Pantheon, and Ranelagh in London; the Colisée in Paris), permanent and open-air shops and markets, and parks and gardens suitable for walking, to create a dense and diverse fashion culture that could be observed by a wide range of people not permitted in the older, exclusive court circles where a fashion of magnificence had reigned. As John Styles and others have indicated, workers in the appearance industries – actors, prostitutes, street sellers, and the mobile urban poor – generated new meanings for fashionable clothes which could be registered by the artful addition of ribbons and laces, bright Indian chintzes, pinchbeck buckled shoes (in imitation of silver), or copper lace (imitation of gold).58 A similar engagement between the consumption of new textile imports, desired by fashion-conscious urban traders and often worn in leisure districts, also coalesced in contemporary Japan.

fashion and urban life in edo Edo developed when the 1635 sankin-kôtai (alternate attendance service) ordinance required all feudal barons (daimyo) to have 57

58

Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Cissie Fairchilds, ‘The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), 228–48; John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in EighteenthCentury England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

333

334

peter mcneil

a household in Edo and spend several months of the year there (rather like Louis XIV and his courtiers required to attend Versailles). The merchant class was exempt from taxation and therefore economically ascendant, becoming more daring in their aesthetic choices than the samurai elites. Edo Japan has been fruitfully compared with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France as both societies had strong and centralizing rulers, who funded large public works to transform public space and create imposing metropolises in Paris and Edo, where there were flourishing print cultures subject to state control, and precincts devoted to pleasure and entertainments.59 As Charles H. Parker notes, cities were not just more cosmopolitan and urbane because they were large, but because they ‘formed the spatial environment for exchange between foreign merchants and organizations in the early modern world . . . urban culture has, in most times, promoted a level of tolerance and cosmopolitanism to make buyers and sellers feel secure to transact business’.60 In Tokugawa Japan (1615–1868) the port city of Edo (now Tokyo) became ‘a city not of producers but of consumers’.61 Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century woodblock prints of courtesans and actors were greatly sought after by both Japanese city-dwellers and tourists and were called bijin-ga or ‘pictures of beautiful people’. Timon Screech notes that they ‘were . . . elaborate in the attention they gave to interior furnishings, personal accessories and dress’.62 Kimonos, perfume bottles, amulets, musical instruments, and letter boxes often stood in for beautiful women as a literary and artistic device. From 1765 new technology made it possible to produce single sheet prints in a whole range of colours. Polychrome woodblock printing or 59

60

61

62

James L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru (eds.), Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). A comparative study of dress or fashion was not addressed in this pathbreaking work. Charles H. Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 81. Miyeko Murase, Bridge of Dreams: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection of Japanese Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 2000), 249. Timon Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700– 1820, 2nd edition (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 55.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

‘brocade pictures’ (nishiki-e) included calendars for the lunar months. Each print required the cooperation of a designer, engraver, printer, and publisher to create what was a commercial venture by the publisher, who was also often a bookseller. This was precisely the format that developed in England, France, the Low Countries, and the Germanic states in the eighteenth century. The famous Ukiyo-e (floating world pictures) prints of the late Edo period placed ‘emphasis on the transitory indulgences available for purchase in the theatre and pleasure districts of the great cities’.63 Pleasure districts such as the Yoshiwara were well outside the main part of Edo, to protect against fires but also public modesty. Arriving after a boat journey, men often discarded their city dress for more elaborate clothing worn in the brothels.64 The Japanese made less of a distinction between clothing and bed linen and often used kimonos as bed coverings and room screens. Elaborate marriage rituals, and dowry requirements of women living within a hierarchical society subject to sumptuary laws, also supercharged Japanese fashion well into the nineteenth century. Sumptuary law in Japan was distinctive from that in the West as it required women to spend not only a certain maximum, but also minimum. Some of the spending was transient in the extreme, such as summer folding fans, which were thrown out at the end of the season, forming an ongoing iconographic reference to courtly tales of discarded fans floating down a stream. A category of art developed whose subject was clothing itself. Tagasode (meaning ‘whose sleeves?’) depicted women’s clothes draped over clothes racks which formed partitions in rooms rather like Europeans used curtains (Figure 10.4). Images of the tagasode, sometimes with the suggestive addition of women’s accessories such as sashes, perfume bags, musical instruments, and amulets, appeared on formats as different as lacquer food boxes and painted screens, recalling tenthcentury, thirty-one syllable waka poetry as well as The Tale of Genji.65 Such images provided instruction to women as to how to 63 64

65

Murase, Bridge of Dreams, 332. Timon Screech, Tokyo before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), Chapter 6. Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere (ed.), Kazari: Decoration and Display in Japan, 15th–19th Centuries (London: British Museum Press, 2002), 208–9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

335

336

peter mcneil

Figure 10.4 ‘Whose Sleeves?’ (Tagasode). Right screen, one of a pair of sixpanel folding screens, late sixteenth to early seventeenth century. Ink, colour, and gold on gilt paper. Overall (each screen): 57 1/16 × 136 9/16 in (144.9 × 346.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 29.100.493.494. H.O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs H. O. Havemeyer, 1929. Photo by Sepia Times / Universal Figures Group via Getty Figures.

best display their clothing and textiles on special stands. The particular erotic charge of women’s cloth in Japan, generally selected and made up by the wearer and therefore very identifiable with a particular individual, is emphasized by Screech, who notes that ‘buying a whose-sleeve’ was slang for hiring a prostitute.66 Tagasode, with their erotic default of disrobing and the naked body, find some parallels in the ‘it’ narratives, or object stories of eighteenth-century England, in which written and visual descriptions of clothes detached from bodies ‘become protagonists of commodity culture’ and assertions of the ‘material status of objects’.67 Concurrent with the Japanese woodblock-printed book industry there arose the genre of textile pattern books (Hiinagata-bon), printed books which depicted designs for kosode (short sleeve, referring to the opening), the precursor to the kimono (Figure 10.5). Rather like the late seventeenth-century French fashion prints published in the Mercure Galant, there is some ambiguity as to what 66 67

Screech, Sex and the Floating World, 119. Chloe Wigston-Smith, ‘Clothes without Bodies: Objects, Humans, and the Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century It-Narratives and Trade Cards’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 23/2 (2010–11), 350, 380.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

Figure 10.5 Edo period kimono design book, Japan, 1737. Paper, ink. Photo by USC Pacific Asia Museum / Getty Figures.

the images were for: ‘kosode pattern books not only provided models for prospective purchase and commissions, but also publicized current fashions, perhaps even setting trends, playing a role similar to present-day fashion magazines’.68 In the Pattern Book by Yûzen (1688), motifs from painting and calligraphy including poem cards, round and folding fans, cedar doors and bound books were transformed to create patterns suitable for textiles. Printed in black and white they also contain instructions for suitable colours: ‘scattered closed umbrellas in persimmon and navy blue against a white ground’ or ‘crest with banana leaf and garment sleeves; pattern of water plantains and gentle rills of a stream’ (1703).69 This is a similar semantic conceit to the black and white French fashion prints of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which relied on verbal 68

69

John T. Carpenter, ‘“Twisted” Poses: The Kabuku Aesthetic in Early Edo Genre Painting’, in Rousmaniere (ed.), Kazari, 204. Tomoko Sakomura, Cat. 87, in Rousmaniere (ed.), Kazari, 204.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

337

338

peter mcneil

information to convey the precise effect of cloth and clothing. A sense of fashion ‘futures’ is suggested in the text of the handcoloured book Patterns for a Peaceful Age (1696) which notes that it might be thought all patterns are now exhausted, but the book depicts styles ‘as yet unknown to the world’.70

iki: japanese chic Japanese fashion was connected to a relational network of consumption, discrimination, and urbanity that the Japanese modernist thinker Kuki Shûzô presented as a visual-philosophical system in The Structure of Iki, composed in Paris and published in 1930. Shûzô sought an aesthetic equivalence for the dandyism he had experienced living in France. Dandyism was a good fit with the quiet and effortless elegance he was able to identify in parts of Edo Japan, an aesthetic of subtlety and refinement for hiding wealth in plain sight. Iki was manifest in not only an array of bodily movements and postures, but also particular patterns and colours suggestive of nature but also the urbane world of the theatre. Sometimes translated as the French word ‘chic’ or the German ‘schick’ or ‘geshickt’, Shûzô compared it with the French concept ‘esprit’ and Italian ‘sprezzaturra’. Iki colouring was not simply about a colour preference. It might involve a contrast of colours in different tones; or a single one providing a ‘mood’: ‘the one which expresses iki certainly cannot be showy’ but it ‘asserts the relational in a whisper’.71 As in France, there were colours named after actors: Shikan (reddish deep brown), Rikan (blackish deep brown-tinged blue); a vast range of greys, grey being significant as ‘ash white is a stage of colourless sensation which shifts from white to black’, cool colours such as dark blue and blue purple, colours derived from the appearance of teas (white, cupboard greyblue, seasoned yellow, smoked, scorched, black kite, smoked bamboo, silver smoked bamboo), and the subtlety of imperfect technique or ‘dyeing in colours without them adhering’.72 The motif of the stripe 70 71

72

Tomoko Sakomura, Cat. 89, in Rousmaniere (ed.), Kazari, 207. John Clark, Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki by Kuki Shûzô, trans. John Clark, ed. Sakuko Matsui and John Clark (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997), 96. Ibid., 96–9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

was iki and yet the vertical one was more iki still – ‘In the horizontal stripe the weight of the earth’s strata rests against gravity: in the vertical stripe there is the lightness of willow branches and the light rain which gravitates.’73 Guth notes the literary allusion here in another context: many poems relate willow to women’s breezeblown hair, but ‘snow-covered willow’ refers to men’s strength instead.74 Women’s tobacco-burners with horizontal silver white and grey-blue stripes qualified as iki. Showing the nape of the neck was iki as was lifting a kimono by the left hand: ‘when she walks, the red lining of her garment and the lemon-yellow undercloth seem to flutter’ (Figure 10.6).75 Unlike the West, which by the sixteenth century was codifying academic hierarchies in the arts, all visual culture in Japan was worthy of considerable respect, earnest discrimination, and connoisseurship. The rise of a strong merchant class in the Momoyama period (1568–1600) saw a flourishing of fashionable forms including, but not limited to, dress. In Kyoto, novelty shops sold painted fans, lantern paper, seashells for games, screens, dolls, and design patterns for kimonos and the decoration of interiors.76 Tea caddies were kept in special textile bags.77 The foundation of the great Japanese department stores was laid in the Edo period when Kyoto merchandizers established retail stores selling silks to service the townsfolk of Edo.78 European trade brought stripes and checks to Japan via their trade in Southeast Asian cloth and these motifs appeared on lacquer storage 73

74 76 77

78

Ibid., 89. The stripe in Japanese culture had been associated with outsiders such as the courtesan but was rehabilitated in the Tenmei period (1781–9) as suitable for the warrior class. It later became fashionable for male dandies in the Bunka (1804–17) and Bunsei (1818–30). Stripes have a particular place in the history of European fashion and appear in formats as different as the ‘siamoises’ of the seventeenth century influenced by the embassy to the court of Louis XIV from Siam (Thailand); and the influence of Ottoman ribbons on eighteenth-century French dress. See Charlotte A. Jirousek with Sara Catterall, Ottoman Dress and Design in the West: A Visual History of Cultural Exchange (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 176. Guth, ‘Textiles’, 285. 75 Clark, Reflections, 81. Murase, Bridge of Dreams, 216. Accoutrements of the tea ceremony (Chanoyu) first date from the Muromachi period (1392–1573). Hayashi Reiko, ‘Provisioning Edo in the Early Eighteenth Century: The Pricing Policies of the Shogunate and the Crisis of 1733’, in McClain et al. (eds.), Edo and Paris, 215.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

339

340

peter mcneil

Figure 10.6 Kitagawa Utamaro, Umegawa Chubei no kihan (The Happy Companionship of Umegawa and Chubei), from the series ‘True feelings compared: the founts of love’, coloured woodblock print (ukiyo-e), 1788. 34.3 × 24.2 cm. British Museum, London, 1920,0217,0.4. Photo by Art Media / Print Collector / Getty Figures.

trays in what look startlingly modern designs.79 Kabuki aesthetics promoted ‘outlandish’, twisted forms across painting, ceramics, and textiles. A seventeenth-century black and white Illustrated Encyclopaedia for Women (Joyo kinmo zui – writer Okumura Shôhakuken, illustrator Yoshida Hanbei, 1687) depicted textiles, mirrors, equipment for blackening teeth, mending equipment, 79

Striped namban storage trays, Momoyama, illus. in Murase, Bridge of Dreams, 234. The Japanese word ‘shima’ (stripe) is a homophone for ‘island’ and refers to the Dutch East Indies. Screech, Sex and the Floating World, 120.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

bathing kit, baby clothes, the art of flower arranging and tea utensils, of wrapping objects and incense competition, as well as hairstyles for women and men.80

fashion refinement and kazari There was an enormous refinement of production and representation in Japan that can be considered in parallel with the etiolation of Rococo (c. 1720–50) and neo-classical design (c. 1760–90) at the European courts. Japanese kazari as a concept meaning an object of decoration as well as its environment of display, embraces the sweep of the early modern period from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, crosses media from textiles and potted wares to paintings, prints, and lacquer, and is an approach to objects and culture in which the everyday object or practice can be suffused with the extraordinary, with memory, imagination, and past practices. For wealthy women and men of the Momoyama period there were lacquer bookstands, portable lacquer chests of drawers for incense (commonly used to scent clothing), and lacquer comb, mirror, make-up, and writing boxes. The design by Kanô Eitoku (1543–90) for a set of late sixteenth-century taramaki-e (three-dimensional) lacquer saddle and stirrups made for the military aristocrat Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–98) survives as Important Cultural Property (Tokyo National Museum). A single stalk of golden reed dotted with inlaid-silver ‘dew’ bends and twists, and is cut with a blade, floating on a black background. The design is possibly a pun on kariho (harvested grain or cut reed-head) and ‘borrowed hut’ or a simple reed lodging.81 Blackening teeth with liquid haguro, a mixture of iron and other materials, was performed by both men and women in the pre-Nara period. Kyoto male aristocrats continued the practice until Edo, and women continued it until the late nineteenth century. The practice was not simply a matter of beauty but ‘part of the symbolism associated with the initiation ceremony for boys and girls at the age of nine’ and used by women

80 81

Tomoko Sakomura, cat. no. 87 in Rousmaniere (ed.), Kazari, 204. Andrew J. Pekarik, ‘Lacquer and Metalwork’, in Hickman Momoyama, 241.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

(ed.),

341

342

peter mcneil

Figure 10.7 Maki-e lacquer dowry box, Middle Edo period, Japan, first half of eighteenth century. A rectangular black lacquer dowry box very richly decorated on a roiro ground in various maki-e techniques, including gold and rogin takamakie, hiramakie e-nashiji, and kirigane and actual gold and silver nuggets, aogai, pewter, and stained ivory. 17 × 12 × 10.5 cm. Photo by Museum of East Asian Art, Bath, 1129/BATEA: 1125. Photo by Heritage Figures / Getty Figures.

after matrimony ‘as a mark of fidelity’.82 A fashion practice as particular as this required an elaborate set of associated objects, toiletry boxes which in the fifteenth century might be lacquer and part of a suite – square for face powder, round for incense, rectangular for haguro (lacquer was a cheaper option than expensive Chinese ceramics). Such boxes were often decorated with themes from nature which held older literary and courtly allusions and some had high mirror stands attached to them (Figure 10.7).83

dressing-up prints The representation of fashionable clothing in the West was a common form of ‘inter-media’ that crossed genres and formats including, but not limited to, history and portrait painting, the 82

Murase, Bridge of Dreams, 123.

83

Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

‘conversation piece’, sculpture, political and portrait prints, caricature (satirical prints), the fashion press, trade cards, ‘dressed prints’ (prints cut and modified with the addition of textiles), women’s pocketbooks and almanacs, crafts such as embroidery and paper rolled work (often retailed by professionals as ready-made kits), printed patterns for fashion (some designed by women), ‘it’ narratives and sketches, and drawings and marginalia from life penned by women and men. Even statues of members of the Holy Family and the saints were dressed in facsimiles of real fashion clothing in many European Catholic churches.84 Fashion drawings were often a part of eighteenth-century correspondence and contributed to the diffusion of fashion. For example, the Swede Axel de Fersen (a lover of Marie Antoinette), sent drawings of French fashion to his sister Sophie in Sweden and members of the nobility often corresponded regarding textiles and fashion via their foreign diplomats.85 The flourishing of this print culture, literacy, and education was not unilateral radiating out from city to country but enabled rural communities to forge their own definitions of desirable consumption. Much printing was local, even if scenes of metropolitan life and fashionable modes of the year dominated English ladies’ pocketbooks and almanacs. This was true in both imperial and colonial settings. The Connecticut Gazette in 1809 ran an advertisement for Mary Way (1769–1833) who was teaching in a ladies’ boarding house in New London, Connecticut (she later worked in New York). The text made explicit connections between the acquisitions of skills by young ladies in areas such as ‘painting, Tambour, embroidery, lace work on muslin, reading, writing, plain sewing etc.’, connecting female skill, refinement, sensibility, and the arts.86 As Catherine Kelly remarks, such accomplishments 84

85

86

For an extensive range of print products connected to European fashion imagery, see Peter McNeil, ‘“Beauty in Search of Knowledge”: EighteenthCentury Fashion and the World of Print’, in Evelyn Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 223–54. Françoise Tétart-Vittu, Le dessin sous toutes ses coutures. Croquis, illustrations, modèles, 1760–1994 (Paris: Musée de la Mode et du Costume, 27 April–13 August 1995), 17. William Lamson Warren, ‘Mary Way’s Dressed Miniatures’, Magazine Antiques, October 1992, 540–9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

343

344

peter mcneil

were ‘far more than a collection of desirable personal characteristics, sensibility carried broad political significance: it was both the precondition for virtuous citizenry and the best evidence of it’.87 An understanding of the wider visual culture of fashion was essential to these practices. Way and her sister Elizabeth (Betsey) Way Champlain (1771– 1825) were daughters of a mercantile family, possibly self-taught, and became accomplished women artists working in a genre generally overlooked until the 1970s. Both sisters created remarkable dressed watercolour miniatures on ivory or paper, with the addition of textiles such as silk, linen, cotton, ribbon, and sequins to depict clothing. Unlike most other miniature painters who painted the effects of cloth with their miniature brushes, Way collaged real cloth to simulate dress onto the body of her sitters, possibly even provided by the sitters themselves. Her art therefore has some links to the practice of the famous British gentlewoman creator of floral embroideries and collages, Mrs Delany (1700–88), a highly accomplished embroiderer who began creating at the age of seventy-two her ‘Flora Delanica’, nearly 1,000 superimposed cut paper ‘mosaics’ (made from dyed papers including imported Chinese ones) or the ‘hortus siccus’ realistically depicting flowers.88 Called ‘the woman of fashion of all ages’ by Edmund Burke, Mrs Delany’s mosaics were ‘the crowning glory of a long life devoted to exquisite embroidery, shellwork, gardening, flower painting, landscape sketching and the cutting of images in paper more generally’.89 Delany’s approach to materials finds another echo in the mixed-media ceroplastic (wax sculpture) portraits of members of the Savoy court and French Revolutionary figures by the Piedmontese artist Francesco Orso (also known as François Orsy, active c. 1785), who fused

87

88

89

Catherine Kelly, ‘Miniature Worlds’, Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life, 3/2 (January 2003), http://commonplace.online/art icle/miniature-worlds/ (accessed 25 April 2023). Ruth Hayden, Mrs Delany: Her Life and her Flowers (London: British Museum Press, 1980). Mark Laird, A Natural History of English Gardening 1650–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 267. The English folk-artist George Smart fabricated a series of cloth-collage pictures depicting local manners and dress around 1810.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

polychrome wax, glass, fabrics, and painted papier-mâché to simulate details of fashionable clothing and furs.90 Although dressed prints were not much mentioned by Way researchers until a recent exhibition (2022) at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum (New London), this author believes that the Way sisters might have decided on their distinctive approach by seeing or reading about what are now called ‘adorned’, ‘modified’, or ‘dressed plates’ or prints. As has been noted, they were possibly influenced by needleworkers of nearby Norwich, Connecticut, who produced very skilled graphic needlework and where Lucy Perkins Carew (1758–1832) advertised that she ‘taught Cloath and Tiffina work on Sattin’ as well as ‘drawing, painting and figure’, the ‘work on Sattin’ suggesting something akin to a collaged textile.91 Dressed fashion plates are quite common survivals in private collections (they are more scarce in museum collections, possibly because they are hybrid, incomplete, or ‘damaged’ artefacts), in which the dress was cut out and cloth inserted behind to create the illusion of a fashion garment. Dressed prints were commonly used in Catholic countries from the seventeenth century as reliquaries depicting the splendour of the saints; the print was often cut out in part and rich textiles added behind, or lace, ribbons, sand, or lichen might be affixed to the front, creating a threedimensional effect. Way charged the very considerable sum of ten to twenty dollars and occasionally twenty per portrait.92 The clothing in her miniatures likely derived from her own observation of fashion prints as well as the fashionable sitters themselves. She once invoked the language of fashion to critique the art of her niece, noting the figure should be ‘light and airy, in a loose flowing robe . . . at least, not look like a stick with corsets on and a frock tied around it’.93 David Jaffee has described her as possibly the first professional woman artist in 90

91

92

93

An example is in the collection of Italian publisher and aesthete Franco Maria Ricci: see Susan Moore, ‘True to Type’, Apollo (September 2019), 65. Carol Huber, ‘Is It This Way or That Way? The Carew-Way Connection’, Antiques and Fine Art Magazine, Autumn 2014: unpaginated version online, www.incollect.com/articles/is-it-this-way-or-that-way (accessed 25 April 2023). See Ramsay MacMullen, Sisters of the Brush: Their Family, Art, Lives & Letters 1797–1833 (New Haven: Past Times Press, 1997), 24. Kelly, ‘Miniature Worlds’.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

345

346

peter mcneil

post-Revolutionary America, and connects her to what he terms a consensual ‘village enlightenment’ in which local print culture and education transformed attitudes, industries, and portraiture and was but another product lending itself to standardization, leading in turn to the creation of a large and cohesive middle-class set of tastes and values in the nineteenth century.94 Eliza Way Champlain also painted mourning tokens and ‘watch-papers’ or small circular paintings to place inside men’s watch cases, depicting neo-classical allegories such as ‘Faith’, which added to the fashionable significance of male horology. The Ways painted many prominent sitters. Mary Way’s (1769–1833) portrait of Jonathan Devotion depicts the grandson of a leading Congregational minister from Boston. In 1793 Jonathan returned to Scotland, Connecticut, where he opened a business as a merchant and this work depicting his very determined face, long wig queue, fine linen shirt, ruffled stock, fallen collar, and fashionable frock coat likely dates from that time.95 In order to work to the correct scale, Way cut out individually and applied squares to simulate a fashionable, dotted woven-silk waistcoat (Figure 10.8).96

from the printed page to porcelain The transmission and transformation of fashion images took place across a wide variety of material formats. Many of these material forms tend to have been studied in isolation from each other and are little connected with developments in the study of the history of fashionable dress. One such material domain is the topic of porcelain, which has been connected with textile culture but less so with dress fashions.97 94

95

96

97

David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 87. Lance and Gay Myers Mayer, The Devotion Family: The Lives and Possessions of Three Generations in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (New London: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 1991), 40. Information courtesy of Cheryl-Lynn May. See also Cheryl-Lynn May, ‘The Portrait Miniature, Mary’s Way: Contextualizing Mary Way’s Dressed Portrait Miniatures’ (Unpublished Master’s Diss., University of Delaware, 2010). Occasional museum exhibitions have considered aspects of this topic, for example ‘Cross Pollination: Flowers in 18th-Century European Porcelain and Textiles’, curated by Genevieve Cortinovis, St Louis Art Museum, 2017.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

Figure 10.8 Mary Way (1769–1833), unsigned but attributed, Miniature Portrait of Jonathan Devotion from Scotland, Connecticut, c. 1790. Watercolour on paper with fabric, oval, 6 × 7 cm. Brookline Historical Society, Brookline, Mass.

Chinese porcelain was developed in the sixth century and reached Europe in the mid-fourteenth century in small quantities. Durable, impervious, and semi-translucent through vitrification, smooth and able to take a range of enamelled colours and glazes, it was inert, suited the new hot drinks of imported coffee and tea (far superior to the silver, tin, or copper vessels previously used) and could be made into myriad forms. By the seventeenth century it was in huge demand, one of the key materials transmitting visual design. Peddlers carried the cheaper ceramic wares far into the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

347

348

peter mcneil

English countryside, where it was common to trade them for second-hand clothing.98 Porcelain collecting was often associated with women in Europe, although sea captains and merchants very much desired large Chinese export-ware armorial dinner services of 200–400 pieces to assert their high status and signal ‘proximity to or membership of the prestigious enterprises that formed the East Indian companies’.99 It was not just items of local design that the Chinese manufactured for Dutch, English, French, and later American colonial traders.100 As Finlay notes: ‘Porcelain played a central role in cross-cultural exchange in the AfroEurasian oikumene, since it was the principal material vehicle for the assimilation and transmission of artistic symbols, themes, and designs across vast distances.’101 Finlay describes the multifarious decoration on a Nîmes tin-glazed earthenware platter (1736) that included a scene of Venus and Adonis, reproduced from a French engraving, circled by a border of Chinese pomegranate vines taken from the cottons printed for Dutch merchants in India.102 Dawn Odell argues that Chinese export porcelain as a carefully designed commodity ‘fashioned a “mercantile” image of China for European consumers’ in which new narratives intersected with the lives of foreign consumers.103 Fashion-related products from punch bowls painted with English caricature scenes, to figurines depicting French courtiers wearing chintz robes and based on Baroque Paris fashion plates, were made in China for export to European and North American markets, representing complex entanglements

98 99

100

101 102

103

Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics, 62. Brigitte Nicolas, ‘China Trade Porcelain and Famille Wares’, in Desroches (ed.), Paris 1730–1930, 85. The American trade dates from 1784; before that goods were trans-shipped from Holland or England. Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art’, 143. David Howard and John Ayers, China for the West: Chinese Porcelain and Other Decorative Arts for Export Illustrated from the Mottahedeh Collection (London and New York: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1978). See also V&A C94-1963. Dawn Odell, ‘Porcelain, Print Culture and Mercantile Aesthetics’, in Alden Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan (eds.), The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 142.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

of early modern global fashion and its myriad sources from West Europe, the American Republic, China, Japan, and India. The Jingdezhen potters and Canton painters were well used to creating imitations of foreign wares, having manufactured vessels designed for Southeast and Central Asian needs and tastes for centuries. They produced their European export-wares from a vast range of visual sources including drawings, caricatures, book illustration, printed bookplates and trade cards, newspapers, coins, shipping and insurance papers, seals, European-made ceramics, glass and metal objects as well as wooden pattern forms. They were influenced by, and sometimes directly copied, late seventeenth-century French prints by the Bonnarts (Nicolas, engraver 1637–1718; Robert, draughtsman, 1652–1733) and Gaspard Deshayes (publisher, active c. 1690). They produced porcelain chargers with bucolic scenes of ladies reclining, noble women embroidering, ‘The Three Graces’, ‘The Senses’, music making, gardening, reclining – scenes of ease and fashionable gallanterie (Figure 10.9). They also copied caricatures by Hogarth (The Gates of Calais, 1749, in which French and Jacobite Scots are contrasted with a plain but well-fed Englishman; on another bowl appears A Midnight Conversation, 1733, deriding import taxes) onto famille-rose punch bowls as well as historicopolitical designs including caricatures of John Wilkes.104 Such satirical ceramics appealed in England to ‘a male fraternity of consumers who had reason to view the patriciate with a critical eye’.105 Some were commissioned by European corporations, secret societies, and livery companies as unique wares reinforcing their group identities. Humbler inn-keepers and tradesmen also commissioned exportwares. Wealthy supercargo merchants were often collectors themselves, hoarded rare stock, sold it on as required and gifted unique wares to patrons.106 There is no evidence to date that such wares were used by the Chinese. 104

105 106

Emperor Kangxi had requested the Jesuits study the possibilities of enamels sent out from Europe. An outcome was the new pink colour from purple of Cassius that produced the famous famille rose porcelain associated with China. Nicolas, ‘China Trade Porcelain and Famille Wares’, 84. Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics, 197. Mieke von Brescius, ‘Private Enterprise and the China Trade: British Interlopers and Their Informal Networks in Europe, c. 1720–1750’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Warwick, 2016), 195.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

349

350

peter mcneil

Figure 10.9 Chinese export porcelain charger, c. 1750, depicting a fable by Jean de La Fontaine in which a barrel-maker’s wife dallies with a lover while her husband is working. Photo by Heritage Arts / Heritage Figures via Getty Figures.

The Chinese also modelled three-dimensional export-wares depicting Europeans in fashionable and occupational dress. The former include a pair of famille verte courtier figures depicting a man in a long wig and a woman in a fontange, both figures dressed informally in Indian chintz (Musée Cernushki, Paris). Sometimes called ‘Louis XIV and Mme de Maintenon’, they exist in several versions almost certainly copied from French fashion plates by the Bonnarts. A pair of Chinese figures catalogued in the past as Dutch or German peasants or ‘Mr and Mrs Duff’ are now believed to depict Ashkenazi Jews (indicated by the woman’s conical

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

headwear, the man’s broad-brimmed hat and beard, and ruffs) and were made for export around 1740. The figures have a close resemblance to two prints by Dutchman Caspar Luiken published in Nuremberg as part of the 101-plate costume book Neu-eröffnete Welt-Galleria (1703) indicating that older imagery often informed new products made several decades later.107 The Chinese artist has copied the wind blowing the woman’s garment but has not observed the man’s shabbad cloak, replacing it instead with a Chinese robe of much the same length decorated with Chinese clouds. It has been suggested that such wares might have been commissioned by the extremely wealthy Viennese-Jewish families invited back to Vienna (following expulsion) as court bankers after 1673 (Figure 10.10).108

from supplication to celebration The Chinese might have been more than amused by the scenes of European dress and manners on such export-wares. Depicting large numbers of foreign envoys bringing gifts to court had been a part of Chinese statecraft since the sixth century and was undertaken in order to demonstrate Chinese superiority.109 Costume or dress was considered essential to establish a visual shorthand for both Chinese and foreign peoples. The grandiose Emperor Chien-lung (also

107

108

109

Ronald W. Fuchs II, ‘European Subjects on Chinese Porcelain’, summary of lecture 18 June 2008, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, 72 (2007– 8), 40. For the print, see www.lbi.org/artcatalog/record/246113 (accessed 16 April 2021). See also Cornelia Aust, ‘From Noble Dress to Jewish Attire: Jewish Appearances in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Holy Roman Empire’, European History Yearbook, 20 (2019), 108–10. Other examples including those in the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library (Delaware), Peabody Essex Museum, and British Museum are in similar dimensions and colours, indicating an organized approach for their production. Sotheby’s New York, A Collecting Legacy: Property from The Collection of Nelson and Happy Rockefeller, Lot 321, see www.sothebys.com/en/auc tions/ecatalogue/2019/a-collecting-legacy-property-from-nelson-happyrockefeller-n10004/lot.321.html (accessed 16 April 2021). Sephardic Jews (involved with the China trade in London and Amsterdam) are known to have commissioned Chinese export armorial dinner services. Ming Wilson, ‘New Research on the Ceremonial Paraphernalia Album in the V&A’, summary of lecture given 20 April 2004, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, 68 (2003–4), 51–9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

351

352

peter mcneil

Figure 10.10 Pair of figures of a Jewish man and lady in porcelain, decorated in overglaze polychrome enamels and gold. China, Qing dynasty, Qianlong period (1736–95). Male: H 44 cm, L 26 cm, W 11.5 cm; Female: H 42 cm, L 22 cm, W 11.5 cm. © Jorge Welsh Works of Art, Lisbon/ London.

Qianlong, 1711–99) commissioned an extensive tributary book from his regional officials in which subject peoples and foreigners were depicted in detail. These were derived from European sixteenth- and seventeenth-century costume books or the marginalia of Dutch maps, in which men and women were delineated from the front with some sense of movement but little expression. Chien-lung commissioned from the court artist Xie Sui two subsequently copied scrolls or ‘Illustrations of Tributary Peoples’ (completed 1775). These were based upon a twenty-year pictorial project reworking older ‘tribute paintings’ indicating supplication, as well as reports from regional officials and a Chinese painted compendium of the dress of other nations and Chinese ethnic peoples. The new commission departed from the older tributary tradition in showing men facing outwards rather than walking in a line as supplicants, and they also depicted women. As there were hardly any foreign women in China to observe, they must have been taken from European

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

prints or drawings, and these later figures have a fluttering air akin to French gravures de mode.110 The emperor had stated that in preparing the work, if there were no opportunities for the artist to observe Western barbarians, ‘for what he does not know, there is no need of dispatching for further investigation’, artists were free to extemporize from printed sources.111 Specialist Chinese artists or ‘face-makers’ were skilled at producing extremely realistic clay portrait figurines of Europeans wearing their contemporary dress. These were generally commissioned by senior members of supercargo (mobile agent) crews and taken back to Europe.112 Susan Broomhall, writing of such figures in Danish collections, notes that the Swede Pehr Osbeck, who visited Guangzhou in 1750, observed ‘in the Porcellane-street’, in a small upper-storey gallery, the ‘famous Face-Maker was at work, who makes men’s figures, mainly in miniature . . . sometimes he hits them exceedingly well’.113 These figures were indeed small and well made, about the same height (30–40 cm) as the porcelain figures in Figure 10.10. Apart from the well-known example (Peabody Essex Museum) of the English china trade merchant Thomas Hall (1692–1748) reclining in oriental dress – a banyan and turban – most examples sit or stand in emphatically European attire. A fine example with a realistically painted face signed and dated by the artist known as Amoy Chinqua (1719) possibly represents the supercargo Captain Robert Knox (1641– 1720) of the British East India Company, who brought cannabis to London among other trading achievements. It features many painted details of his rich dress: white linen stock and shirt, coat lined in turquoise silk, embroidered or woven waistcoat painted

110

111 113

Yu-chih Lai, ‘Costuming the Empire: A Study on the Production of Tributary Paintings at the Qianlong Court in Eighteenth-Century China’, in Tara Zanardi and Lynda Klich (eds.), Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (New York: Routledge, 2019), 90–103. Ibid., 92. 112 V&A FE.32 to B-1981. Susan Broomhall, ‘Face-Making: Emotional and Gendered Meanings in Chinese Clay Portraits of Danish Asiatic Company Men’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 41/3 (2016), 448. The skill set in part rested on the tradition of Chinese figure-sculpting for tomb and religious purposes.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

353

354

peter mcneil

Figure 10.11 Amoy Chinqua, Figure of a European Merchant, signed, dated, Canton, 1719. Polychrome unfired clay and wood, 32.9 × 14.1 × 13.7 cm. Height of figure only: 29.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2014.569. Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest and several members of The Chairman’s Council Gifts, 2014. Photo by Sepia Times / Universal Figures Group via Getty Figures.

with clematis, dianthus, and tulips, buckled shoes detailed with white stitching, and ivory and Malacca cane (Figure 10.11). Supercargoes played an important role in bringing back private trade goods or special commissions from Canton separate from the speculative commodities destined to be sold at auction. They ranged from women’s shoes with European heels to the finest tea, enamelled wares, swords and embroidered textiles often purchased with very large amounts of money: in 1724–6 the Duchess

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

d’Arenberg transmitted £300 to Thomas Hall for eleven pieces of Chinese silk.114 The Chinese also copied European styles for the enjoyment of the Chinese emperor and his court: the Yongzheng emperor was painted in late seventeenth-century style European dress including a long French wig and cravat (Palace Museum, Beijing) in order to ‘signify China’s universal sovereignty’.115 Qing imperial archives mention some paintings affixed to the walls representing ‘western beauties’ and Chinese women dressed in the manner of Watteau were painted onto enamels in Canton. These are generally considered to be fantasies, and not real vestimentary practices. During the Opium Wars of the 1830s and 1840s, the Chinese made ceramic wine jugs and urinals for local consumption in the form of European men in Western trousers and hats, suggesting that the Europeans were only useful to pour them wine or deal with their waste.116 Portraits of elite Europeans wearing Western dress and painted on mirror-glass also survive. Reverse-painted mirrors (painted in reverse from the back) generally depicted Chinese courtly figures, gardens, birds, and landscapes. They were imported by most East India companies as a luxury good but the main markets appear to have been England, Sweden, colonial North America, and India where they were used in Gujarati palace design. The quicksilvered mirror-glass was sent to China where the part to be painted was scraped off. Several Swedish painters went to China in the late eighteenth century to learn ‘the Chinese way to paint on glass’, an irony as the Chinese had learned the reverse-painting technique from Europeans, likely the Jesuits.117 An observer wrote in 1851, ‘This is an art which is almost entirely lost in Europe, but is very successfully practiced in this country. This style of painting suits 114

115

116

117

Von Brescius, ‘Private Enterprise and the China Trade’, 212–13. On shoes, see ibid., 221. Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, ‘Introduction: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800’, in Jackson and Jaffer (eds.), Encounters, 9. Michael Lee, ‘Subduing the “Foreign Devils” in Shekwan Ceramics: Representations of Westerners During the Opium Wars’, lecture given by Michael Lee, 19 January 2010, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, 74 (2009–10), 35. Jan Wirgin, ‘Chinese Reverse Glass Painting on Glass in the 18th Century’, lecture given 19 June 2002, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, 66 (2001–2), 107.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

355

356

peter mcneil

Figure 10.12 Pu-quà workshop (Canton), ‘Chinese artist copying a European print onto glass’, 1790. 42 × 35 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum D.107-1898.

the Chinese very well as it exhibits the splendour of their colours.’118 The majority of sources used for Chinese mirror printings likely consisted of prints (Figure 10.12). A pair of undated Chinese mirror paintings purported to be the fourth supercargo English-born John Pike and his wife was made in Canton and has been dated by a Swedish museum to the 1740s (Figures 10.13(a) and (b)).119 As John Pike had a daughter Anna Elisabet (born Lisbon 1725) who married the supercargo Jakob Jeansson von Utfall in 1746, one might assume that this is 118

119

Toogood Downing, member of the Royal College of Surgeons, cited in William R. Sargent, ‘Asia in Europe: Chinese Painting for the West’, in Jackson and Jaffer (eds.), Encounters, 278. The identity of the sitters comes from traces of a label pasted on the reverse of one mirror by a descendent in the 1930s when they were called ‘Lord and Lady Pike’ by the family.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress (a)

(b)

Figure 10.13(a) and (b) ‘John Pike and his wife’, reverse-painted Chinese mirror, Chinese frame with locking plate, Swedish-made upper mounts, c. 1730. 104 × 62 cm. Swedish National Maritime and Transport Museums, Stockholm, S3562.

a marriage commission dating from that year or thereabouts depicting the daughter.120 Although the exact identity of the sitters is now obscured, analysis of the clothing suggests that this depicts the older generation rather than the daughter at marriage and was likely painted a little earlier, in the 1730s. This would match with the decade in which John Pike commenced his mercantile activity in China. Pike was an intergenerational tea-trader and naturalized Swede who sailed from Gothenburg for the Swedish East India Company four times between 1732 and 1745. Pike is

120

‘Det Gamla Götheborg’, https://gamlagoteborg.se/2016/09/01/jakobjeansson-von-utfall/ (accessed 9 July 2021).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

357

358

peter mcneil

depicted dressed in a woollen suit with richly trimmed waistcoat. The coat tails are long, stiffened, and highly flared with the large cuffs typical of the 1720s–1730s. His wife is dressed in a fashionable negligée with wide, rich lace-trimmed sleeves typical of the period before 1740, and holding a fan (originally a Chinese innovation). John Pike’s rich, full, but relatively plain dress reinforces the reputation of the supercargo as a man of shrewd, diplomatic, and brave skills, often with linguistic and financial expertise: Pike was assistant director of the Company.121 Both are set in fantastic Chinese landscapes with European details such as balustrades and Delft tiles. Supercargoes were unusually well educated and sophisticated and engaged with contemporary history, politics, and ideas.122 The Chinese artist has therefore conferred an appropriate genteel aura on the couple. The Pike mirrors were probably copied from a drawn or painted portrait sent out on the trip and are mounted in Chinese-made slip frames with later Swedish cresting. The reverse painting creates the effect of a European portrait silhouette.123 When fashionable imagery was attached to durable media such as porcelain and mirrors it doubly surprised and enchanted. The fashion image that we might expect to be painted or printed and that depicted short-lived fashion ‘news’ became fixed on objects which due to their materiality had a much longer life of circulation, exchange, and enjoyment. In the case of the Pike mirrors they also have an important commemorative function and likely found a place within the Pike residence in Gothenburg. Trade, taste, and technology transformed the meanings and materials of manufactures and were seen as a part of statecraft by the Qing emperor, just as they had been by Louis XIV and his ministers. Mei Mei Rado refers to the Chinese adaptation of certain European silk designs as ‘the Qing Imperial pursuit of imitating, appropriating, and developing foreign techniques and

121 122 123

Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics, 59. Von Brescius, ‘Private Enterprise and the China Trade’, 17. Wirgin, ‘Chinese Reverse Glass Painting’, 107.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

artistic styles’.124 The trade in exotic fashions, wares, materials, and technologies was a two-way street: mechanical clocks and novelties being a good example of a fashionable luxury desired by the upper echelons of the Chinese, Indian, and Turkish markets. Enamelled table snuffboxes, patch and sponge boxes, cane handles, telescopes, fan guards, and perfume bottles were fabricated in the crossroads of Geneva and retailed to Turkey, India, and China often via London. Automaton producer Jean-Frédéric Leschot (1746–1824) cautioned against trying to sell objects depicting European dress to China, as ingenious objects depicting fruit, flowers, or animals encircled with pearls as well as singing birds were always more popular.125 Watches were created for the Chinese market shaped as peonies or peaches enamelled and inlaid with diamonds to simulate the effect of Chinese painting and generally were produced in pairs, yin and yang.126 The Genevan watchmaker (horloger) and jeweller (bijoutier) trades were intertwined and the fashionable enamelled snuffboxes of the last third of the eighteenth century were derived from expertise in émigrés making French watch cases in the previous century. Clockmaking was highly significant across seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe as it was believed that horology held the answer to astronomy and navigation and the longitude required for precise navigation at sea. The special pendulum clock commissioned and designed by the Marquis de Beringhem with case by the sculptor Nicolas Le Sueur (1690–1764) and works by the clockmaker Julien Le Roy (1688–1759) for the levée du roi of Louis XV (when the king arose and was dressed for the day by courtiers) is an example of this technological priority. Many of the elaborate mechanical clocks made by English makers for export to China depicted fashionable references, such as one weighing nineteen

124 125

126

Rado, ‘Encountering Magnificence’, 64. Julia Clarke, ‘Swiss Gold Boxes: Myth or Reality?’, in Tessa Murdoch and Heike Zech (eds.), Going for Gold: Craftsmanship and Collecting of Gold Boxes (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2014), 67. See the collection of the Patek Philippe Museum, Geneva.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

359

360

peter mcneil

kilograms by clockmaker John Marriott (London) surmounted by an ormolu (gilt bronze) European boy wearing informal dress with diamond buttons, tilling a garden in the manner espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.127

conclusion Images of fashion seem to be everywhere in the past. Yet early modern audiences, with no photography or film, had a different relationship to the visual culture of fashion than nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century viewers. We are used to thinking about fashion of the early modern period through the prism of painting, print, and sculpture. The power and proliferation of print in the early modern period, whether it be for Japanese kimono design or to serve as model for a piece of Chinese porcelain, engendered new abilities to ‘read’, replicate, and generate fashion. This chapter has discussed the visual culture of fashion in the early modern period not only in terms of materiality, of textures and colours, but also in terms of technologies, formats, and media that many assume are separate from dress fashions. It has done so to reassert the connectivity of fashion and the wider decorative arts and design. It has emphasized that early modern viewers thought about material relationships that were often synergistic and not yet ‘scientific’. Fashion’s ‘intraartefact’ effect can be found in both Asia and Europe. Design often proceeded from complementary sources, approaches, and insights that were constantly remade in a global setting that went beyond the notions of copy or influence to create a supercharged environment for fashion in a world before mass consumption.

127

Pekin kokyu¯hakubutsuin hizo¯ karakuridokei seika-ten [The Beijing Forbidden City Palace Museum Treasures: Brilliance of an Automaton Clock] (Osaka: NHK Japan Broadcasting Corporation and NHK Kinki Media Plan, 1995), 52–3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

early modern visual culture of eurasian dress

select bibliography Bertucci, Paola, Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017). Clark, John, Reflections on Japanese Taste: The Structure of Iki by Kuki Shûzô, ed. Sakuko Matsui and John Clark, trans. John Clark (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997). Desroches, Jean-Paul (ed.), Paris 1730–1930: The Taste for China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Art Museum/Musée Guimet, 2008). Finlay, Robert, ‘The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, 9/2 (1998), 141–87. Jolly, Anna (ed.), A Taste for the Exotic: Foreign Influences on Early Eighteenth-Century Silk Designs (Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2007). Jörg, Christian J. A., ‘Chinese Export Silks for the Dutch in the 18th Century’, summary of a lecture given 18 October 2008, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, 73 (2008–9), 1–23. Kerr, Rose, ‘Chinese Porcelain in Early European Collections’, in Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer (eds.), Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800 (London: V&A Publishing, 2004), 44–51. McClain, James L., John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru (eds.), Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). McNeil, Peter, ‘“Beauty in Search of Knowledge”: EighteenthCentury Fashion and the World of Print’, in Evelyn Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 223–54. Murase, Miyeko, Bridge of Dreams: The Mary Griggs Burke Collection of Japanese Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, 2000). Rado, Mei Mei, ‘Encountering Magnificence: European Silks at the Qing Court during the Eighteenth Century’, in Petra TenDoesschate Chu and Ning Ding (eds.), Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West (Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2015), 58–75. Rousmaniere, Nicole Coolidge (ed.), Kazari: Decoration and Display in Japan, 15th–19th Centuries (London: The British Museum Press, 2002).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

361

362

peter mcneil Sargentson, Carolyn, Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-Century Paris (London and Malibu, CA: Victoria and Albert Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996). Wigston-Smith, Chloe, ‘Clothes without Bodies: Objects, Humans, and the Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century It-Narratives and Trade Cards’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 23/2 (2010–12), 347–80.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

11

w

FASHION AND THE MARITIME EMPIRES meha priyadarshini

Goodbye Madras! Good-bye foulard! Good-bye pretty calicoes! Good-bye collier-choux! That ship Which is there on the buoy, It is taking My doudoux away.1

These are the opening lines of a popular French song that has its roots in the Caribbean islands that were colonized by France.2 It is written from the perspective of a Creole woman who is expressing her grief as she realizes that her lover – presumably a white French sailor – has left the island. In the song there is a deliberate deployment of textile artefacts (foulard and Madras) as symbols of the loss that the woman experiences. She is not only sorry that her lover is leaving, but also lamenting that she will no longer have access to fine things like textiles and gold jewellery (collier choux), which were fashionable in the eighteenth century in the French Caribbean. While it is seemingly a simple romantic song, it also represents the many connections, tensions, and conflicts that arose due to the 1

2

Lafcadio Hearn, Two Years in the French West Indies (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890), 336. Edwin Hill, ‘Adieu Madras, Adieu Foulard: Musical Origins and the Doudou’s Colonial Plaint’, Ethnomusicology Forum, 16/1 (2007), 20.

363

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

364

meha priyadarshini

expansion of European maritime empires in the early modern period.3 Such a song exists because France had built an empire that brought slaves from western Africa to the Caribbean islands to work on plantations. The enslaved were bought with a variety of commodities, one of the most important of which were cotton textiles that were initially produced in India, where France also had an imperial presence. Cotton textiles were traded to the Caribbean and other parts the Americas, where they became an important part of the dress of the African diaspora. The forced and free movement of people, as well as the long-distance trade of goods that happened as a result of the expansion of maritime empires, gave rise to new fashions around the world, such as the Madras headwraps that were popular in the Caribbean (Figure 11.1).4 The first maritime empires of the early modern period were established in the sixteenth century by the Iberian powers, Spain and Portugal, who founded colonies and port fortifications in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In the late sixteenth century, the British and the Dutch began forays into regions where the Portuguese and Spanish had established significant presence, but also founded their own colonies in North America and formed joint-stock trading companies, which were given permission by these states to use force when necessary to expand commercial networks. The French were the last of the major Western European powers to establish colonies in North America, but along with the other four, they controlled territories in various locations around the world by the second half of the seventeenth century.5 These maritime empires built through the conquest, subjugation, and displacement of Indigenous peoples, also 3

4 5

According to Edwin Hill, the song belongs to a musical tradition of the Caribbean where Creole lyrics were set to European melodies and the themes were intimately connected with the circulation of transatlantic ships. For more on this particular song as a site of colonial subject formation in the French Caribbean, see Edwin Hill, Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 20–46. See Chapter 12 by Steeve O. Buckridge in this volume. Denmark, Sweden, and Austrian Netherlands also followed these major powers and formed their own joint-stock trading companies which conducted trade in Asia, Africa, and the Americas but their operations were smaller in scale.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

Figure 11.1 Michel Jean Cazabon, Mulatto Girl, c. 1854. Watercolour, 290 × 215 mm. The woman pictured wears a Madras headdress. Madras fabric was a type of cotton checked or plaid fabric that was made in villages in southeast India and exported from the port of Madras (Chennai), from where it gets its name. In the Caribbean, women would use it for headwraps and shoulder wraps and would sometimes calender it to give it a glazed finish. Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the Harris (Belmont) Charity.

benefited enormously from the transatlantic slave trade, both from the sale of enslaved people and from their labour in commercial ventures in American colonies, such as pearl fisheries, silver mines, and sugar plantations.6

6

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 5 and 149–84.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

365

366

meha priyadarshini

These empires and their colonies were managed in different ways, but they all had similar goals: to control the land and people who were colonized in order to make the colonies productive and lucrative for the metropoles. Proselytization and ‘civilizing’ colonized peoples were also purported goals of these empires, but they were to be accomplished alongside aims to enrich European economies. Fashion was an important tool for achieving these goals. The development of new fashions, such as for cotton textiles, was lucrative because the desires of consumers served to expand and enhance trade. At the same time, fashion also provided a means of modulating people’s behaviour and social mobility. In the early years of these empires, colonizers sought to clothe Indigenous peoples in various parts of the world whose nakedness they found troublesome and ‘barbaric’. Once colonial rule had been consolidated, authorities continued attempts to regulate people’s dress to fix their social status in a colonial hierarchy. However, the very rules that tried to contain people in race and class-based categories were often subverted through the use of dress, which meant that fashion was also used to challenge the social order that it helped create. Fashion’s ability to be contradictory in this manner has been one of its defining characteristics as a force in society. Fashion at its most basic can be understood as a ‘process that extends over time and takes on different characteristics. It often negates what had been present just a moment before in a continuous search for the new, the different and the unexpected.’7 This ‘unexpected’ attribute of fashion makes it a fruitful lens through which to examine empires since it can provide a granular view of the histories of empires that might otherwise be missed in broader histories written from the perspective of imperial governance or trade. In particular the focus on fashion can nuance our understanding of the relationship between European metropoles and their colonies. For example, an examination of the history of Madras kerchiefs reveals not only that women and men of African ancestry in the Caribbean found inventive ways to use them as accessories, but also that these 7

Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, ‘Introduction’, in Riello and McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

Figure 11.2 Jean Antoine Laurent (attributed to), Portrait of a Young Woman, c. 1795. Miniature on ivory, 63 × 73 mm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Mrs Louis V. Bell, in memory of her husband, 1925. Accession Number: 25.106.16. Photo by Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images.

fashions were subsequently adopted by women in metropolitan France (Figure 11.2).8 The popularity of Madras kerchiefs in Caribbean colonies influenced trade, production, and tastes in Europe, rather than the other way around.9 In focusing on the intersection between the history of fashion and the history of empires, the aim of this chapter is two-pronged: first, to consider how empire and fashion mutually shaped each other in the early modern period and second, to uncover histories of empire that recognize different kinds of agency in an interconnected and interdependent world.10 The agency of women in 8

9

10

Amelia Rauser, The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 139–40. Danielle Skeehan, ‘Caribbean Women, Creole Fashioning and the Fabric of Black Atlantic Writing’, The Eighteenth Century, 56/1 (2015), 108. Here I borrow from Marcy Norton’s work on the entangled history of technology in the Atlantic world. She writes that histories that recognize

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

367

368

meha priyadarshini

Caribbean colonies as consumers and arbiters of taste in the early modern world is one such example, but there are others, such as the agency of consumers in colonial Spanish America, whose fashions were responsible for the expansion of transpacific trade in defiance of the Spanish Crown. The entanglement of fashion and empire will be studied in three sections that follow a general chronology of the rise and fall of maritime empires. The first section details the role of fashion in spurring European exploration, trade, and colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and at the same time also discusses examples of new fashions that arose as a result of these empires. The second section considers how fashion was used to consolidate colonial rule and to manage the empires while also being attentive to the ways in which the new fashions that developed could subvert the colonial order that was being established. The final section focuses on more obvious examples of fashion as a tool to challenge colonial rule or to establish new cultural and national identities against imperial rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In all three sections the entanglement of fashion and empire is emphasized to reveal the agency of people whose tastes have not often been part of global histories of trade and fashion.

fashion, trade, and the making of empires It is common knowledge that when Columbus set off on his voyage in 1492, he left in search of Asian commodities that were becoming increasingly difficult to access in Iberia. Perhaps what is less well known is that chief among these commodities were pearls, which had a prominent place in

‘entanglement’, which she defines as the ‘interconnectedness of various kinds of agency in an interdependent world’ can ‘foreground the perspectives and experiences of . . . subaltern actors’. She also argues that certain groups of people whom we might not recognize as subaltern could be considered ‘subaltern actors in different contexts’, which is also evidenced in the entangled history of fashion and empire. Marcy Norton, ‘Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World’, Colonial Latin American Review, 26/1(2017), 18–38.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

European culture and fashion at the time.11 Following the Spanish conquest of territories in the Americas, pearls started coming into Europe in greater quantities and monarchs, aristocrats, and merchants began showing them off in portraits. Their use as necklaces and earrings was common, but they were also incorporated into hair ornaments and were sewn into clothes. Moreover, this taste for pearls as accessories was seen in the attire of both men and women, although it signified different things depending on who was wearing them and how they were depicted.12 There also began a new fashion for misshapen, or lumpy, pearls known as ‘baroque’ pearls. According to some sources it was these pearls that gave the name to the style that we today identify as dramatic and ornate.13 They were fashioned into elaborate pieces of jewellery, and in Spain in particular they were used for pendants depicting sea creatures, paying homage to the nation’s seafaring accomplishments of the time (Figure 11.3). The new and renewed fashion for pearls, and other jewels, in the sixteenth century is evidenced also by the fact that there was an increase in demand for jewellers who could work with such precious materials, setting them in fanciful designs or drilling them without shattering.14 Pearls served as both adornments and as a currency that could be used to finance imperial projects. While their impact as a source of funding was considerable, their symbolism as objects reflecting wealth and power cannot be overstated. Pearls would end up on the necks, limbs, and hair of monarchs who would use them to 11

12

13

14

Molly Warsh, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492– 1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 2. E. de Jongh, ‘Pearls of Virtue and Pearls of Vice’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 8/2 (1975–6), 69–97. In a seventeenthcentury portrait, Sophia of Hanover is depicted dressed as an Indigenous woman from the Americas and is shown wearing pearls in combination with Indigenous feather work. In the portrait the pearls could be signalling her wealth and social status as well as strengthening the association with the Americas. For more on this image, see Chapter 8 by Eugenia Paulicelli in this volume. Elizabeth Rodini, ‘Baroque Pearls’, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 25/2 (2000), 68. Warsh, American Baroque, 52. Rodini, ‘Baroque Pearls’, 68.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

369

370

meha priyadarshini

Figure 11.3 Pendant shaped as dragon, Spain, c. 1575–1600. Gold, enamel, and baroque pearls. 7.8 × 4.7 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Marilynn B. Alsdorf, 1992.295. Agefotostock / Alamy Foto Stock RKT2KF.

show off their affluence and the expanding horizons of their empires. This is especially obvious in the ‘Armada Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I, painted after England successfully thwarted an attack by the Spanish Armada in 1588 (Figure 11.4). Symbols projecting her imperial power abound in the portrait, which has images of a naval battle as its backdrop and Elizabeth I places her hand on a globe. Her clothes are luxurious with copious use of pearls to adorn them. This cannot have been accidental given the importance of pearls to the Spanish Empire and the recent English victory over Spain. Around this time the English privateer Francis Drake had also plundered Spanish ships, bringing back pearls for his queen.15 The bold use of pearls in the portrait to fashion Elizabeth I as ruler par excellence was to show off her access to these valuable gems as the English encroached upon the Spanish Empire. The portrait reveals both the practical and symbolic 15

Warsh, American Baroque, 104.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

Figure 11.4 Unknown artist, The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I, c. 1588. Oil on panel, 1125 mm × 1270 mm. Royal Greenwich Museums, United Kingdom. Accession Number: ZBA7719. Photo by Leemage / Corbis via Getty Images.

relevance of the fashion for pearls to empire: pearls helped fund the making of empires and were also used to project imperial prowess. There was, however, a darker side to the rise in fashion for the milky orbs. The trade and consumption of pearls depended on the labour of enslaved Indigenous and African men who were forced to dive in perilous conditions to procure them. The pearl fishing industry also caused severe environmental degradation in what is known as the Pearl Coast region, in modern-day Venezuela, which was at that time colonized by the Spanish. The violence that underpinned this industry was known and criticized even in the sixteenth century. In his critique of Spanish colonization, Bartolomé de las Casas singled out pearl fisheries as an example of the atrocities committed in the Americas. He wrote: ‘The tyranny exercised by the Spaniards against the Indians in the work of pearl fishing is one of the most

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

371

372

meha priyadarshini

cruel that can be imagined.’16 French philosopher Michel de Montaigne also referred specifically to the craze for pearls and pepper as being responsible for the upheaval in the newly conquered territories.17 If the fashion for pearls is said to have driven the colonization of the Americas, the fashion for silk can be said to be partly responsible for the expansion of the Spanish Empire into Asia. After decades of exploring routes to Asia across the Pacific, in 1571, the Spanish managed to establish a colony on the island of Luzon in present-day Philippines. Ships left the port of Acapulco on the western coast of Mexico with silver from colonial mines to buy Asian commodities in Manila, the most valuable of which was silk in various forms. Some of these commodities were taken on from Mexico to Spain, but much of the contents of the ships’ cargo remained in the colonies.18 This transpacific trade was driven to a great extent by consumer desires in the Spanish American colonies, often to the chagrin of the Spanish Crown. Merchants and manufacturers in Spain lost revenue when trade was conducted directly between the colonies. The silk industry in Spain was particularly disadvantaged by the transpacific trade as it could not compete with the Chinese silks that were brought to the colonies. Authorities in Spain saw the problems with the transpacific trade soon after it began and as early as 1590 the king tried to ban it, claiming that the silks brought to Mexico from China were inferior to the ones produced in Spain.19 16

17

18

19

Ibid., 42. See also Bartolomé de las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, trans. Herma Biffault et al. (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 99. Warsh, American Baroque, 105. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Coaches’: ‘so many cities razed, so many nations exterminated, so many millions of people put to the sword, and the richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic in pearls and pepper!’, in Essays of Michael Seigneur de Montaigne (London, 1759), 164. José Luis Gasch-Tomás, ‘Asian Silk, Porcelain and Material Culture in the Definition of Mexican and Andalusian Elites, c. 1565–1630’, in B. Aram and B. Yun-Casalilla (eds.), Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492–1824: Circulation, Resistance and Diversity (Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 156–7. ‘To the Marques de Villamanrique, my kinsman, and viceroy, governor, and captain-general of Nueva España [New Spain]. Having understood that the silks brought from China and the Philipinas Islands to your realms are quite

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

However, despite repeated decrees and various measures to control the trade, it continued till 1815. In the 250 years that the trade endured, a great deal of it was conducted outside the parameters set by the Crown, which included sending more ships from the colonies to Manila than was allowed, loading them with more cargo than was permitted, and obfuscating the value of the cargo.20 For example, silk and other textiles would be packed in a very compact manner, allowing more pieces to be exported than was officially sanctioned.21 In Mexico and Peru, the elite and clergy consumed a great deal of the Chinese silk that was brought aboard the Manila Galleons. For the most part the upper-class men and women followed European fashions, but they also developed their own ways of using silk garments that distinguished them from their counterparts in Europe (Figure 11.5). In an eighteenth-century portrait, an upper-class man is dressed in a three-piece suit of European design which has been tailored with a richly decorated silk brocade, probably of Asian origin. The contrasting red cuffs of his jacket signal a particular Mexican fashion that was not seen in Europe. Usually a jacket’s cuffs matched the waistcoat and in Europe it was rare to have two bold fabrics together. However, in Mexico, combining textiles with such vibrant patterns was common, suggesting that a local fashion had developed for such pairings, often using Asian textiles.22

20

21

22

worthless, but that nevertheless, because of the low price set upon them, they are sold and distributed; and because, if that trade continues, the trade in cloth exported from these realms [Spain and Portugal] would cease or be greatly decreased . . . therefore, having carefully considered this as well as other inconveniences set forth, it has seemed best to discontinue this trade with the Philipinas Islands and China . . . ’, from ‘ Decree Regarding China Trade’, in The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, vol. vi, trans. and ed. Emma H. Blair and James Robertson (Cleveland: The A. H. Clark Company, 1903–9), 282–3. José Luis Gasch-Tomás, The Atlantic World and the Manila Galleons: Circulation, Market, and Consumption of Asian Goods in the Spanish Empire, 1565–1650 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 121. Meha Priyadarshini, ‘Long Distance Trade and its Contents: The Making of a Transcultural Trade Network in Manila’, in Florina Capistrano-Baker and Meha Priyadarshini (eds.), Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation, and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires (1565–1898) (Makati City, Los Angeles, and Florence: Ayala Foundation, Getty Research Institute, and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, 2022), 170–1. James Middleton, ‘Reading Dress in New Spanish Portraiture: Clothing the Mexican Elite, circa 1695–1805’, in Donna Pierce (ed.), New England/New

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

373

374

meha priyadarshini

Figure 11.5 Unknown artist, Portrait of Man with Clocks (Retrato del hombre de los relojes), eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 105.20 × 198 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Mexico. Reproduction authorized by the National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Silk yarn and fabric were also available to other members of colonial society, including Indigenous elites, who adopted silk clothing and incorporated silk into local weaving practices for making Indigenous clothes, such as the Andean wedding mantle, known as lliclla, pictured in Figure 11.6. The mantle is made of cumbi cloth, which was high-quality cloth made for Incan elite. Before conquest, cumbi cloth, made with native camelid fibres,

Spain: Portraiture in the Colonial Americas, 1492–1850 (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2016), 123; Rachel Kaplan, ‘Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder: Fashion in 18th-Century Mexico’, LACMA Unframed, 1 February 2018, https://unframed.lacma.org/2018/02/01/beauty-eyebeholder-fashion-18th-century-mexico (accessed 16 July 2021).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

Figure 11.6 Wedding mantle (lliclla), Peru, sixteenth–seventeenth century. Silk, cotton, camelid hair, and metallic yarns, 92.7 × 127 cm. Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York. Previously owned by Antonio Vivês y Escudero (Spanish, 1859–1925). Gift of John Pierpont Morgan, 1902-1-782.

was used for rituals or stately purposes.23 In the colonial period, the tradition of making this type of cloth continued but there was a significant decline in quantity. In this period the weavers also had new materials to work with, such as silk and metallic threads. Andean weavers incorporated these new materials into their craft along with new motifs from Europe and Asia that were introduced to the colony. For the weavers of cumbi cloth, silk was particularly desirable because it was able to absorb bright native dyes and offered a new level of luxury. Sometimes silk fabric brought from

23

Elena Phipps, ‘Garments and Identity in the Colonial Andes’, in Elena Phipps, Johanna Hecht, and Cristina Esteras Martin (eds.), The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork 1520–1820 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004), 21. See also Gabriella Ramos, ‘Los Tejidos y la sociedad colonial Andina’, Colonial Latin American Review, 19/1 (2010), 117–22.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

375

376

meha priyadarshini

Asia would be unravelled for its yarn, which was often already dyed with bright colours.24 People of lower classes too, had access to silk yarn and clothes, which was remarked upon by several travellers to these colonies.25 An early seventeenth-century memorial on the trade between China and colonial Mexico remarks on the wide consumption of silk in the colony, where slaves, Indigenous peoples, and labourers in the mines all had access to what was known as ‘ropa de china’ (clothes from China), which referred to a wide variety of garments and textiles from Asia, including silk.26 A seventeenth-century Portuguese traveller to Peru remarked on the great amounts of silk that came to Peru from Mexico and the fact that even the poor could dress in it because it was cheap.27 Sumptuary laws tried to control who could wear luxurious clothes, but silk was nonetheless available widely and the demand for the fabric and the yarn from a variety of consumers ensured that the transpacific trade continued despite efforts by the Spanish Crown to stifle it. As early as 1604 trade between Mexico and Peru was banned as a means to control the amount of silver used for the transpacific trade, but despite the ban, material and textual evidence shows that Asian goods, and in particular Chinese silk, were entering Peru well into the eighteenth century. The consumers in the colonies had more agency in the matter than the Spanish Crown would have liked.28 Demand for another fibre, cotton, helped make and expand the Portuguese, Dutch, and British empires in the sixteenth century. Indian cotton textiles were an important commodity 24 25

26

27 28

Phipps et al. (eds.), The Colonial Andes, 190–1. Gridley McKim-Smith, ‘Dress’, in Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills (eds.), Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 113. Mariano Bonialian, ‘La Seda China en Nueva España a Principios del Siglo XVII. Una Mirada Imperial en el Memorial de Horacio Levanto’, Revista de Historia Económica, 35/1 (2016), 160. Ibid., 161. Katherine Bjork, ‘The Link that Kept the Philippines Spanish: Mexican Merchant Interests and the Manila Trade, 1571–1815’, Journal of World History, 9/1 (1998), 25–50; Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”: The Origins of World Trade in 1571’, Journal of World History, 6/2 (1995), 201–21.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

in the long-standing and vibrant trade of the Indian Ocean world, which spanned from sites on the eastern coast of Africa to islands in Southeast Asia. Inhabitants in these various places had developed tastes for particular types of textiles from the Indian subcontinent, putting them to use in a variety of contexts ranging from ceremony to everyday dress.29 To give an idea of the prevalence of Indian fabrics in Southeast Asia, by the sixteenth century textiles coming from the subcontinent were the biggest import, especially in the Indonesian archipelago, and personal adornment and clothing were the main items of non-essential expenditure for the elites.30 In the sixteenth century the Portuguese realized the lucrativeness of the trade in the region, in particular the trade of textiles for spices, and joined other groups of merchants who were conducting trade across the Indian Ocean world. Eventually, through mastery of consumer preferences and the use of force, the Portuguese became a dominant power in Indian Ocean trade. The preexisting taste or fashions for Indian textiles in the various sites within the Indian Ocean world was therefore vital to the making of the Portuguese Empire as well as the other European powers who came after them. The Dutch were particularly successful at entering into and dominating the trade of textiles for spices in the South China Sea region. Already very early in the seventeenth century, Dutch merchant Augustijn Stalpaert described the types of cloth that had to be acquired from different regions of the Indian subcontinent for trade with the Maluku islands, also known as the Spice Islands since they produced mace, nutmeg, cloves, and pepper. The merchant calculated that 85 per cent of the cloth traded in the islands was Indian. Consumers there had very specific tastes and merchants had to procure the right textiles from the Coromandel coast, Gujarat, and Bengal. Knowledge of such consumer preferences and the strategic use 29 30

See Chapter 19 by Sarah Fee in this volume. Kenneth Hall, ‘Textile Reorientations: The Manufacture and Trade of Cottons in Java’, in Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell (eds.), Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 185.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

377

378

meha priyadarshini

of violence helped the Dutch dominate this trade and establish their empire in Asia, which was controlled from Batavia, modern-day Jakarta.31 European powers were able to further build on their wealth and expand their empires by trading Indian textiles in greater quantities to places where access had previously been scarce, such as the west coast of Africa, Japan, and Europe. When the Portuguese first arrived on the Guinea coast in the 1470s, they initially traded North African-produced cloth and European fabrics, such as woollens and linens. However, by 1505 they were beginning to bring Indian textiles, which proved to be quite popular.32 In subsequent decades the Dutch, the British, and the French also traded Indian textiles in West Africa, and they eventually became currency for the transatlantic slave trade, which further bolstered the power of these European maritime empires.33 Unlike in Japan and Europe where the newness of Indian textiles contributed to their increased demand, on the west coast of Africa consumers often preferred Indian textiles that looked similar to what was already produced locally, such as plain, piece-dyed, or loom patterned cloth with stripes and checks.34 As with their counterparts in Southeast Asia, West African consumers were discerning and meticulous about the cloth they consumed and European merchants knew that it was imperative to adhere to their tastes in order to trade profitably. When the English Royal African Company tried to have English weavers copy particular types of Indian-made Guinea cloths, consumers in West Africa

31

32

33

34

Anthony Reid, ‘Southeast Asian Consumption of Indian and British Cotton Cloth, 1600–1850’, in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (eds.), How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 36. Stanley Alpern, ‘What Africans Got for their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods’, History in Africa, 22/1 (1995), 6. Kazuo Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa: African Agency, Consumer Demand and the Making of the Global Economy, 1750–1850 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 9. Colleen Kriger, ‘“Guinea Cloth”: Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles in West Africa before and during the Atlantic Slave Trade’, in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (eds.), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 112.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

could easily distinguish between them and consistently refused to purchase the European imitations.35 Even though the cloth preferred by West African consumers was not necessarily very different from what was already available locally, the uses of the imported cloth could be novel. The Kalabari people, from today’s Nigeria, were particularly fond of the striped and checked Madras fabric made in south India, which men and women wore as wrappers.36 In addition to incorporating the foreign-made fabric into their attire, they also began transforming it to create a new type of textile, known as pelete bite (meaning cut-thread cloth), which began to be used for special occasions (Figure 11.7).37 The process of refashioning the textiles started with the maker choosing a piece of Madras fabric and with a needle picking up an individual thread, which was cut on two ends and pulled out. This step was repeated over the whole cloth until various shapes emerged from the openings in the original checked fabric. The designs of these fabrics depended on the maker’s imagination and the possibilities were many, although certain patterns, such as ‘tiger’s paws’, tortoise shell, and cane became popular. The origin of this process is not known but many extant examples are historical, including one made in the early nineteenth century.38 In fashion history there is a debate about locating the origins of fashion as a system both in time and place.39 It was routinely argued that fashion began in Europe and many scholars agree upon a time in the late middle ages. However, the search for such origins has also been criticized and it is certainly true that fashion, 35

36

37

38 39

Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 39. According to reports from Senegal, consumers could differentiate between the two types of textiles based on the smell, which was possibly due to the indigo used to dye the cloth in India. See Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles, 85–6. M. Catherine Daly, Joanne Eicher, and Tonye Erekosima, ‘Male and Female Artistry in Kalabari Dress’, African Arts, 19/3 (1986), 48. See also Susan Torntore, Cloth is the Center of the World: Nigerian Textiles, Global Perspectives (St Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Joanne Eicher, ‘Kalabari Peoples of Nigeria’, in Joanne Eicher and Doran Ross (eds.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 1: Africa (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 329–30. Eicher, ‘Kalabari Peoples of Nigeria’, 329. Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun, Fashion History: A Global View (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 2. See also Chapter 2 by BuYun Chen in this volume.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

379

380

meha priyadarshini

Figure 11.7 Osana, wife of John Bull, pelete-bite wrapper, Buguma, Nigeria, c. 1860. 203.8 cm × 124.0 cm. Fowler Museum at UCLA, X84.600. Photo by Don Cole.

as defined by change, can be found in most places where one might look for it. For the purposes of thinking about the intersection between fashion and empire, it must be recognized that European maritime empires built their Indian Ocean trade networks on the backs of pre-existing linkages that stretched both towards Southeast Asia and East Africa and in which demand for Indian cottons, often used as clothing, was a central feature. Even in West Africa, where European merchants were responsible for introducing Indian cottons, the consumers dictated what was traded rather than merely accepting what was brought to their shores.40 This brief survey of the making of European maritime empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows that the fashions for particular goods, such as pearls, silks, and cotton textiles, were important for fuelling maritime exploration, colonization of new territories, and expansion of empires. Demand for these goods in European metropoles was not always the deciding factor that drove commercial ventures; the tastes and desires of consumers in colonies

40

Kriger, Cloth in West African History, 39.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

or markets in the Americas, Asia, and Africa also influenced what was traded and produced. As new webs of exchange were created by these empires, new fashions developed, such as baroque pearl jewellery in Europe, the novel use of silk by elites and non-elites in Spanish America, and the use and modification of Madras fabric in West Africa. These new fashions could not only strengthen imperial rule as they stimulated trade, but they could also undermine it, as was the case with the fashions for silks in colonial Spanish America where the transpacific trade served not only to expand the Spanish Empire’s reach but also subsequently weakened it.

fashion as a tool to manage empires Once European powers had established colonies in different locales, they needed to manage their vast empires. Authorities in the metropoles had to think about ways to administer the people sent to rule over the colonized territories as well the colonial populations. Regulating people’s fashion was one tool through which European powers could project imperial authority and work to create a social order that favoured the rulers. This usually meant that rulers expected Europeans living in the colonies to dress in European fashions and follow the mandates from the metropole about appropriate decorum. However, merchants and colonial officials did at times take on local garb against the preferences of the authorities in the metropoles, either because it was more comfortable or because it helped them conduct their business more efficiently, although they did so cautiously. For example, the Portuguese in Goa only wore Indian clothes in the privacy of their own homes lest they run afoul of the Inquisition.41 41

Robert Ross, Clothing: A Global History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 39. In the case of the British, seventeenth-century British traders were quite willing to take on elements of local male dress and wear loose-stitched garments of cotton and silk to which they might add European elements such as buttons or shoes. Adopting Indian attire in this manner was mostly tolerated up to the eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth century as the British consolidated their rule in India, such cross-dressing was increasingly discouraged to maintain the desired separation between ‘European’ and ‘Indian’. See Emma Tarlo, ‘British Attitudes to Indian and European Dress’, in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 386–98.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

381

382

meha priyadarshini

Figure 11.8 Jacob Coeman, Pieter Cnoll, Cornelia van Nijenrode, their Daughters and Two Enslaved Servants, 1665. Oil on canvas, 132cm × 190.5cm. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam SK-A-4062.

There were also situations in which Europeans living in the colonies did not necessarily adopt Indigenous dress but they adopted cultural behaviours that were a cause for concern. In Dutch Batavia the ostentatious display of wealth by Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), Dutch East India Company operatives in the region raised alarm bells for officials at home who saw it as an unnecessary expenditure. Colonial officials and merchants based in Batavia were known to show off their wealth, donning expensive textiles decorated with jewels, and generally going against the sober dress that was usually expected of the Dutch. Such display can be seen in a famous seventeenth-century painting of a VOC upper merchant, Pieter Cnoll, and his family (Figure 11.8). Cnoll is dressed in the European manner with his three-quarter length coat and pantaloons. The offending aspect of his attire are the golden buttons which are an example of the flashy display that Dutch authorities were trying to ban. His Eurasian wife is also shown wearing European dress, as are his daughters, all three of whom wear pearls around their necks. One daughter is shown holding an ivory betel box, an

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

accessory particular to the Dutch Batavian context that was also eventually regulated because it was yet another object through which the Dutch could show off their wealth and status as these boxes could be made with expensive materials.42 Such practices were seen as problematic by those sitting in Amsterdam and within a few years after the painting was made they outlawed gold buttons and pearls for much of the Dutch population abroad.43 The new regulations stipulated who could wear what kind of jewellery, including the exact value of the pearls that wives of Dutchmen could wear.44 We know that these rules were not always followed and this is partly because dressing in finery was too tempting and if one did it, others followed. Yet it is also true that such display was not just frivolous; it served a purpose in a colonial site that was the base of Dutch operations in Asia. The men who ran the Dutch enterprise from Batavia needed to look the part as authoritative figures and merchants with lucrative goods to sell, especially since this mattered to the people of Asia with whom they did business. The governing body in the Netherlands deemed such displays a waste, but to company officials living in Asia they were necessary to rule over a diverse population and to be able to deal with local merchants.45 Governing vast overseas empires often also required the subjugation and cooperation of Indigenous elites. If the elites of a society agreed to adopt Christianity, speak a European language, and dress in European clothes, they could become colonial intermediaries who could help enforce the colonial hegemonic social order by persuading the rest of the population of the superiority of Europeans and their culture. In colonial Spanish America, soon after the conquest, many Indigenous families married their daughters to the conquistadors. 42

43

44

45

Adam Clulow, ‘“Splendour and Magnificence”: Diplomacy and Sumptuary Codes in Early Modern Batavia’, in Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 321. Marsely Kehoe, ‘Dutch Batavia: Exposing the Hierarchy of the Dutch Colonial City’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 7/1 (2015), 3. Jean Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 97–8. Clulow, ‘“Splendour and Magnificence”’, 309–10.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

383

384

meha priyadarshini

Figure 11.9 Unknown artist, Portrait of Sebastiana Inés Josefa de San Agustín, India cacique, 1757. Oil on canvas. Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City, Mexico.

The new mixed-race lineages that were created from these unions were Catholic, spoke Spanish, and dressed in European fashions. A portrait of a young Indigenous noblewoman, probably made before she entered into religious service, provides an example of the Hispanicization of Indigenous elites (Figure 11.9). Sebastiana Ynés Josepha de San Agustín is shown adorned with jewels and luxurious textiles much in the manner of European fashions. Pearls are used to decorate her hair and clothes and she carries a fan in her hand, a fashionable accessory of the period. The lace, too, is European but above it she has donned a woven Indigenous huipil, a pre-Hispanic garment worn by Indigenous women. We cannot know if these jewels and accessories were her own or if they were borrowed, but we can surmise that she, or whoever commissioned the portrait, wanted to project an image of her that showed her having access to worldly goods of the time while also maintaining a connection to her

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

Indigenous roots.46 Other paintings from the eighteenth century show a similar combination of European attire with the use of Indigenous huipil suggesting that this was a fashion for elite Indigenous women in colonial Mexico.47 In the colonial Andes too, men and women combined Indigenous garments with European fashions, most notably the unku, which was a traditional Incan tunic for elite men. It continued to be worn into the colonial period but was designed and fashioned in new and distinct ways that incorporated European styles (Figure 11.10).48 In terms of the design of the garment, pre-Hispanic unkus were decorated with geometric patterns, known as tokapu, that were used sparingly. Colonial unkus on the other hand, could have decorations on the entire garment and the motifs included flowers, insects, and European heraldic symbols, among others. In the colonial period unkus were also worn with lace sleeves and breeches, both of which were adopted from European attire.49 Traditionally unkus were worn over loincloths which allowed for freedom of movement, but the breeches actually restricted movement if the unkus were too long. To deal with this issue unkus made in the colonial period were shorter or made with slits on the sides. The unku worn with breeches might resemble the Spanish camiseta (long, loose-fitting shirt) which made the entire ensemble recognizable in Indigenous and Spanish circles.50 46

47

48

49

50

Dana Leibsohn and Meha Priyadarshini, ’Indigenous Portraits and Casta Paintings in the Spanish Americas’, in William Beezley (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia: Latin American History, online resource (26 April 2019), https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory (accessed 24 July 2021). The artist Frida Kahlo, one of the most famous fashion icons of Mexico and the world, often wore huipiles in an effort to tie the Indigenous Tehuana dress to Mexican national identity. Another example of this phenomenon from Spanish America is the use of chopines, European women’s footwear that was adopted by Andean elite women in Peru, who also continued to wear Indigenous garments and were encouraged to combine elements from the two cultures by the famed Andean author Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. See Sara Vicuña Guengerich, ‘Unfitting Shoes: Footwear Fashions and Social Mobility in Colonial Peru’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 14/2 (2013), 159–85. Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 125–6; Christine Beaule, ‘Andean Clothing, Gender and Indigeneity in Colonial Period Latin America’, Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, 2/1 (2015), 67. Dean, Inka Bodies, 126.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

385

386

meha priyadarshini

Figure 11.10 Tunic (unku), Peru, seventeenth century. Camelid fibre, silk, metallic thread. 67.9 × 78.7 cm. The decoration on the tunic has both Indigenous and European elements. The lowest band is made of tokapu rectangles with abstract patterns, which were worn by the highest Indigenous elites. Other imagery includes European-style shields and rampant lions. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Ernest Erickson Foundation, Inc., 86.224.51.

The examples of the huipil in Mexico and unku in Peru suggest that Indigenous elites had conformed to European dress to an extent but not completely. These forms of elite dress can be seen to be upholding the colonial order but also had the potential of being subversive, as was the case with the unku, which became an important symbol of the Túpac Amaru rebellion of the eighteenth century discussed later in the chapter. Indigenous elites in colonial Spanish America were generally allowed more leeway in their dress than lower-class mixed-race

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

peoples. Colonial society was organized along ethnic lines and many laws were created to ensure people did not cross these divisions, including laws that governed dress, which was one way to fix people’s race and class status.51 For example, mestiza, mulata, and Black women were formally forbidden to wear Indigenous clothing and expected to use European dress.52 Even within the options for European dress, they were also meant to stay within their racial and class categories and were forbidden from wearing luxurious fabrics such as silks.53 The existence of such laws does not necessarily tell us much about how people actually dressed, but it does tell us that dress and fashion were important to the colonial government. Regulating the outward appearance of people was a means to maintain a sense of control over the society in general. Unsurprisingly, this sense of control was more of a mirage as people used dress to skirt the rules when they could. Thomas Gage (c. 1597–1656), an English traveller in colonial Mexico, described the dress of Black and mixed-race women in the following manner: a blackmore or tauny young maid and slave will make hard shift but she will be in fashion with her neckchain and bracelets of pearls, and ear-bobs of some considerable jewels. The attire of this baser sort of people of blackmores and mulatta’s (which are of a mixt nature, of Spaniards and Blackmores) is so light, and their carriage so enticing that many Spaniards even of the better sort (who are too too prone to venery) disdain their wives for them.54

Gage’s description of the way some Black women and women of colour dressed in colonial Mexico is precisely what would have made colonial authorities uncomfortable. The fashions that these

51

52

53

54

Rebecca Earle, ‘Race, Clothing and Identity: Sumptuary Laws in Colonial Spanish America’, in Riello and Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress, 332. Rebecca Earle, ‘Clothing and Ethnicity in Colonial Spanish America’, in Riello and McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History Reader, 383. Mariselle Meléndez, ‘Visualizing Difference: The Rhetoric of Clothing in Colonial Spanish America’, in Regina Root (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 25. Thomas Gage, A New Survey of the West-Indies: Or the English American His Travel by Sea and Land (London: A. Clark, 1677), 124.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

387

388

meha priyadarshini

women followed allowed them to defy their prescribed social status and negotiate new or alternate identities for themselves.55 In colonial Spanish America skin colour was not always the best indicator of one’s race, which is why clothing became a ‘visual parameter with which to categorize race’.56 Clothing was used by colonial authorities to create a race-based social order, but at the same time it was also used by colonial subjects to fashion identities that afforded them status and privilege in the same social order. Transgressions of racial boundaries were not always without consequence, however, and men and women could be fined or worse, be subjected to physical violence when dressing in ways that were deemed beyond their station in society.57 Yet such fears were not always a deterrent because appropriating these fashions allowed women and men to have more power in their societies, just as forbidding them to wear certain clothes allowed the colonial government to wield power over them. The many examples of the regulation of the dress of the people living in colonies suggests the importance of fashion to the managers of empire. Imperial rule was predicated on hierarchies that could be preserved by attempting to direct the way people dressed and looked in public. However, the new fashions that arose as a result of the contact between the colonizers and the colonized also threatened to destabilize that aspirational social order and posed a challenge to the presumed superiority and authority of the metropole. The example of the dress adopted by Dutch officials in Batavia shows that there were times when colonial officials blatantly disregarded orders related to decorum, suggesting that uneasy power dynamics existed between the rulers in Europe and officials in the colonies. Indigenous elites’ adoption of European fashions or adherence to European mores also led to the creation of new fashions, such as the use of the Indigenous huipil or unku with European dress. These new fashions, on the one hand, signalled the tolerance of European rule by the Indigenous elite while on the other they represented native agency to adopt foreign dress on terms amenable to them. 55 56

Earle, ‘Race, Clothing and Identity’, 332. Meléndez, ‘Visualizing Difference’, 27.

57

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Ibid., 26.

fashion and the maritime empires

fashion and resisting empires The dependence on Indigenous elites as colonial intermediaries did not always work in favour of the empire, as was seen in the case of the Túpac Amaru rebellion in the Andes in the late eighteenth century. Túpac Amaru II (1742–81), who was born José Gabriel Condorcanqui Noguera, was an Indigenous chief who became the leader of a movement in colonial Peru to protest unfair taxation, increased tribute quotas, and the establishment of monopolies.58 These and other measures were implemented during the Bourbon Reforms, a programme of political and economic reorganization that was carried out both in Spain and in its colonies in the eighteenth century. As leader of the uprising, José Gabriel took on the Indigenous name of Túpac Amaru to indicate that he was a descendent of Túpac Amaru I, who was the last Inca king in the sixteenth century. Although the rebellion eventually became primarily an Indigenous rebellion, Túpac Amaru did not necessarily intend it to be that way. He imagined that as an intermediary he was in a particularly good position to convince the Spanish authorities of their misrule but was not agitating to get rid of Spanish rule altogether.59 His role as an intermediary can be seen in the way he chose to fashion himself as the leader of the movement. Several contemporary sources commented on his dress, which was mostly European but with important Indigenous elements that were significant for galvanizing the Indigenous population. One newspaper from 1781 published an eyewitness account of Túpac Amaru’s arrival into the province of Azangaro to recruit more members to his cause: dressed in blue velvet [embellished] with golden braids; his cloak in the same style was scarlet . . . with golden braids on the front. [He also wore] . . . a three-cornered hat, and over his attire a shirt or ‘unco’, like a bishop’s rochet [a close-fitting linen vestment], sleeveless and richly embroidered; and around his neck there was 58

59

Sergio E. Serulnikov, ‘The Túpac Amaru and the Katarista Rebellions’, in Beezley (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia: Latin American History (3 March 2016), https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory (accessed 24 July 2021). Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

389

390

meha priyadarshini a gold chain and hanging from it a sun of the same metal; insignia of the princes, his ancestors.60

The description mentions that Túpac Amaru wore an unku, which as discussed earlier, was a tunic worn by elite Indigenous men in both pre-Hispanic and colonial times. He combined the unku with fine European clothes, signalling that he also belonged to elite colonial society, who he wanted to convince of the wrongdoings of the colonial government. Dress was important to the rebellion in other ways too. Túpac Amaru suggested an informal uniform for the men who were following him. He was a deeply religious man and so asked the men to wear a cross in their montera, a type of Indigenous headwear. They were also instructed to wear unkus and slings across their chests.61 The cross indicated that these men believed themselves to be following the Christian path and it was the colonial authorities who because of their indiscriminate policies were acting outside of the teachings of the church.62 In 1781 Túpac Amaru was caught and executed by José Antonio de Areche, a representative of the king who was sent to monitor colonial officials. At this time Areche announced a series of measures to ‘de-Incanize’ the masses, which included prohibiting Indigenous clothes that had by that time become a symbol of challenge to colonial rule. He also asked that schools have strict dress and language codes so that pupils might ‘renounce the hatred that they have conceived against the Spaniards’.63 Areche’s execution of Túpac Amaru did not quell the rebellion immediately and uprisings in other parts of the Andes continued until 1782. His other efforts also could not restore colonial authority to its previous state; the foundations of colonial rule had been irreparably weakened by the rebellion.

60

61

62 63

Ward Stavid and Ella Schmidt (eds.), The Tupac Amaru and Catarista Rebellions: An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), 2. Charles Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 98. Ibid., 106. José Antonio de Areche, ‘All Must Die!’ in Orin Starn, Carlos Iván Degregori, and Robin Kirk (eds.), The Peru Reader: History, Culture and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 172.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

In other colonial contexts, resistance to colonial rule took more subtle forms than seen in the Túpac Amaru rebellion. Earlier in the chapter it was argued that Indian cotton textiles were instrumental in the making of several European maritime empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Records from the late seventeenth and eighteenth century show that once colonial rule had been established, Indian cottons could also be used to resist empires in places like the French Caribbean. In 1685 Louis XIV of France passed a decree, often called the Code Noir, which defined the conditions of slavery in the French Empire. One of the articles of the Code, Article XXV, defined the items of clothing – two outfits of canvas or four ells of canvas – that enslavers were expected to provide to the people they enslaved.64 It was believed that these articles ensured the minimum amount of clothing that should be provided and that it codified clothing practices that already existed.65 While the enslaved probably did wear a standardized outfit made of rough cloth on most occasions and especially while at work, on days of rest and festivals, they broke the monotony of their usual dress and wore colourful, elaborate apparel, and thus momentarily challenged the enslavers’ hegemony. These outfits incorporated a variety of Indian cottons and other commodities that were brought to the Caribbean colonies. Women wore coloured underskirts under white cotton or muslin overskirts with short jackets that matched the skirts and accessorized with bracelets, rings, and necklaces. Men wore wide, pleated skirt-like trousers over tight drawers and doublets over puffed-out shirts and embellished their outfits with silver buttons, coloured stones, earrings, and hats.66 For both men and women, kerchiefs were also an important accessory for these ensembles. Kerchiefs in a broad array of styles were a worldwide commodity, initially exported in great quantities from India but later produced in Europe as well. In Black communities in the Caribbean and North America, plain and rougher cloth kerchiefs 64

65

66

An ell was a unit of measurement that was equivalent to 1.88 metres. Robert DuPlessis, ‘What Did Slaves Wear? Textile Regimes in the French Caribbean’, Monde(s), 1 (2012), 176. Ibid., 181. See also Robert S. DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). DuPlessis, ‘What Did Slaves Wear?’, 182.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

391

392

meha priyadarshini

Figure 11.11 Agostino Brunias, Dance, Dominica, West Indies, 1770s. Stipple engraving and etching with hand colouring, 33.4 x 40 cm. The image shows men and women using kerchiefs in a variety of ways, tied around their heads, shoulders, and across the torso. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Photo by Sepia Times / Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

were for everyday use, but the more colourful ones were reserved for special occasions, such as dances and celebrations. In these gatherings, men used the kerchiefs to adorn themselves and as accoutrements to aid them in their dance movements. These patterned square pieces allowed enslaved men to present themselves as suitors and to make themselves more attractive (Figure 11.11). In a context where their bodies were reduced to the labour they provided to sustain the empire, the coloured kerchiefs allowed them to change this image of their bodies. A vibrant swathe tied on the head, neck. or the waist and poking out of the pocket added flair and brought attention to the body in a different way. A kerchief swaying in the air

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

during a dance allowed one to show off what else the body was capable of other than the brutal labour it endured on most days.67 Black women in the Caribbean also used kerchiefs in creative ways to be fashionable, most notably as headwraps. When enslaved women tied their hair up with cloth, they were continuing a tradition from their homelands in Africa and as such found a way to maintain a connection to the culture and traditions from which they had been severed. They took the kerchiefs that might have been provided by their owners or that they were able to buy in the market and often modified them by processes such as dyeing or calendering to suit their tastes. In addition to combining different colours and patterns on kerchiefs, they also had various ways of tying them on their head to create different types of headwraps that could even be used to signal their age, occupation, ethnicity, or marital status.68 As with the men who used their kerchiefs to express their sexuality, women too used them as a tool for flirtation, indicating their sexual desires through the ways they tied their headwraps.69 The prevalence of Madras fabric in these elaborate costumes meant that it became a de facto national symbol in many of the francophone Caribbean countries. In Mexico the national costume is based on a dress from the eighteenth century that was recast and reimagined as a national symbol in the nineteenth century. This dress is known as the china poblana, so named after the mestiza women (chinas) of small towns (pueblos) to whom it is attributed (Figure 11.12). The outfit consists of full skirts, which according to some were derived from Spanish models but were probably made with Indian or Indianimitation cotton fabrics that were combined in ways that followed Indigenous tastes.70 The white embroidered blouses were inspired 67

68

69 70

Sophie White, ‘“Wearing Three or Four Handkerchiefs around His Collar, and Elsewhere about Him”: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans’, Gender & History, 15/3 (2003), 528–49. Steeve O. Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2004), 88. Ibid., 89. Kimberly Randall, ‘The Traveler’s Eye: Chinas Poblanas and EuropeanInspired Costume in Postcolonial Mexico’, in Root (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader, 54; Araceli Tinajero, ‘Far Eastern Influences in

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

393

394

meha priyadarshini

Figure 11.12 Carl Nebel, Poblanas, colour lithograph, 1836. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC, USA, Illus. in F1213.N34 (Case Z).

by Spanish, Moorish, and Chinese influences and the rebozo, or shawl, had Indigenous, Spanish, and Asian antecedents.71 While the exact origins of the dress are difficult to pin down, in the nineteenth century it was made a symbol of Mexican national identity and erroneously attributed to a woman from India who was brought to Mexico in the seventeenth century on a Manila Galleon. This woman was baptized as Caterina de San Juan and was a well-known figure in the city of Puebla during her lifetime and beyond, and was popularly known as the China Poblana, the Asian

71

Latin American Fashions’, in Root (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader, 72. Virginia Davis, ‘Resist Dyeing in Mexico: Comments on its History, Significance, and Prevalence’, in Margo Blum Schevill, Janet Catherine Berlo, and Edward Dwyer (eds.), Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes: An Anthology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 312. See also Chloe Sayer, Costumes of Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

woman from Puebla. Even though the attribution of the national dress to Caterina de San Juan was false, it was compelling in part because of the historic importance of the transpacific trade to colonial Mexico. In the colonial period the direct trade between Spanish American colonies and Asia had at various points challenged the authority of the Crown, and after independence this connection was celebrated in the form of a national dress that had elements derived from Asia but also whose founder was claimed to be an ‘Indian princess’. The history of the china poblana costume does not end with its nineteenth-century iteration as the dress of common mestiza women. In the twentieth century, after the Mexican Revolution, the archetypical china poblana, who used to be a mestiza woman, was reimagined as an Indigenous woman. This was due to efforts by scholars and local leaders to promote a Mexican national identity that recognized Indigenous culture.72 In the nineteenth century, after independence, she had been imagined as a mestiza woman because the Indigenous voice and culture was largely left out of the national project.73 The china poblana costume of the nineteenth century could be used to challenge Spanish rule while still reinforcing a social hierarchy in which Indigenous people were at the bottom. It represents both the subaltern status of mestiza women in the colonial context as well as their higher social rank in a racebased social order.

conclusion The examples of early modern fashions discussed in this chapter show that fashion and maritime empires were deeply intertwined. Fashion as a force was important for the making and maintaining of maritime empires. Desire for particular goods, such as silks and cottons, fuelled European exploration, trade, and colonization. In some instances, Europeans created new trade networks, which 72

73

Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 29. Rebecca Earle, ‘Nationalism and National Dress in Spanish America’, in Mina Roces and Louise Edwards (eds.), The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 174–5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

395

396

meha priyadarshini

introduced new goods to places, such as the baroque pearls brought to Europe from the Americas or Madras fabric introduced to West Africa from India. In other instances, European empires were built on pre-existing trade networks, such as the ones in the Indian Ocean region, where pre-colonial fashions dictated trade. By dominating the trade between distinct locales in East Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British amassed considerable wealth which helped them establish their empires. Over the course of imperial rule, contact between European colonizers and the colonized peoples led to the creation of new fashions, such as the use of the Indigenous huipil and the Indigenous unku with European dress in colonial Mexico and colonial Peru respectively. On the face of it, these new fashions seemed to be upholding colonial rule as colonial authorities encouraged these fashions or at the very least allowed them to persist. Yet, at the same time they also had the potential to challenge the social order, a potential that was harnessed by Túpac Amaru, leader of one of the largest Indigenous rebellions against Spanish authority in the Americas. The ability of certain fashions to both represent and challenge the empires that created them is evidenced through several examples discussed in this chapter. The dress of women from francophone Caribbean and the china poblana dress from Mexico can both be seen as symbols of the maritime empires that were responsible for their creation. For example, the disparate elements of the Caribbean women’s costume, the skirt, the wrap, the headdress, and the jewellery represented the global reach of the French Empire. Similarly, the china poblana dress from Mexico borrowed much from Spanish fashions, but also had Indigenous, Moorish, and Asian influences and could be seen as an embodiment of the Spanish Empire. There are, however, other, contrary, interpretations of these dresses, which portray them as symbols of resistance to these empires. The Caribbean women’s dress did bring together different elements from places where France had a colonial presence, but the way the women used these commodities could be seen as a form of resistance to colonial rule. The choice of textiles and the ways they were wrapped around their bodies allowed enslaved women to

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and the maritime empires

maintain links to their homelands in Africa but also defied their enslavers’ control over their lives. Through these textiles they could express their agency, which is why they continued to be important symbols in the post-independence period. The eighteenth-century china poblana costume can be seen as evidence of the Hispanicization of the mixed-race population in colonial Mexico. However, its reimagined history in the nineteenth century as having Asian antecedents was a challenge to the Spanish heritage in the former colony. The contradictions manifested in these dress choices reveal one of fashion’s most potent characteristics as a social force, which is its potential to unravel that which it helped to create.

select bibliography Bonialian, Mariano, ‘La Seda China en Nueva España a Principios del Siglo XVII. Una Mirada Imperial en el Memorial de Horacio Levanto’, Revista de Historia Económica, 35/1 (2016), 147–71. Clulow, Adam, ‘“Splendour and Magnificence”: Diplomacy and Sumptuary Codes in Early Modern Batavia’, in Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 299–324. Daly, M. Catherine, Joanne Eicher, and Tonye Erekosima, ‘Male and Female Artistry in Kalabari Dress’, African Arts, 19/3 (1986), 49–51 and 83. DuPlessis, Robert, ‘What Did Slaves Wear? Textile Regimes in the French Caribbean’, Monde(s), 1 (2012), 175–91. Earle, Rebecca, ‘Race, Clothing and Identity: Sumptuary Laws in Colonial Spanish America’, Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 325–45. Flynn, Dennis and Arturo Giráldez, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”: The Origin of World Trade in 1571’, Journal of World History, 6/2 (1995), 201–21. Hall, Kenneth, ‘Textile Reorientations: The Manufacture and Trade of Cottons in Java’, in Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell (eds.), Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 181–208.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

397

398

meha priyadarshini Kriger, Colleen E., Cloth in West African History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Norton, Marcy, ‘Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World’, Colonial Latin American Review, 26/1(2017), 18–38. Phipps, Elena, ‘Garments and Identity in the Colonial Andes’, in Elena Phipps, Johanna Hecht, and Cristina Esteras Martin (eds.), The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork 1520–1820 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004), 16–39. Riello, Giorgio and Peter McNeil (eds.), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). Root, Regina (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005). Skeehan, Danielle, ‘Caribbean Women, Creole Fashioning and the Fabric of Black Atlantic Writing’, The Eighteenth Century, 56/1 (2015), 105–23. Warsh, Molly, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). White, Sophie, ‘“Wearing Three or Four Handkerchiefs around His Collar, and Elsewhere about Him”: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans’, Gender & History, 15/3 (2003), 528–49.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.013 Published online by Cambridge University Press

12

w

GARMENTS OF SERVITUDE, FABRICS OF FREEDOM Dress of Enslaved and Free Diaspora African Communities in the Mid-Atlantic, c. 1700–1840 steeve o. buckridge

[The immigrants to the New World had the] opportunity not only to be born again, but to be born again in new clothes . . . The new setting would provide new raiment’s of self . . .1

introduction The Atlantic Basin was the centre of vibrant commerce that included vast quantities of essential commodities such as textiles and clothing that influenced dress and consumer goods consumption throughout the region. The dress customs of the Atlantic world were characterized by enormous variety and complexities born out of commingling and migration of diverse groups of people. This blending was also part of a globalizing world in which capitalism and transformation in consumer culture gave rise to new identities and styles. Atlantic dress depicted differentiation and overlapping cultural influences that were by-products of local and global trade systems connecting people across several colonial empires. In the Atlantic Basin, for instance, many colonies relied on large imports of Indian cottons that were also traded in West and Central Africa in exchange for slaves needed to provide labour in plantation zones of the Americas. Consequently, the Atlantic world was influenced by wider intercontinental patterns and a burgeoning global economy. Historian Robert DuPlessis has 1

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 34.

399

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

400

steeve o. buckridge

argued that the Atlantic region was ‘not simply an aggregate of places but an increasingly integrated community; a new world created by encounters, fusions, and transformations of old worlds; an entity particularly characterized and joined by intercontinental and transnational flows of people, objects, and concepts’.2 This type of cultural contact eventually gave rise to early peaceful coexistence in some regions but also led to cultural conflict, particularly between Europeans, Indigenous people, and Africans due to the terms set by the European conquerors who enslaved Africans and exploited Native American people for their labour and land. Despite this, for the early colonial settlers of the Atlantic region and Native Americans, dress and adornment mattered. Beyond the personal use of dress as social expression and utility, diverse communities saw colonial officials in several areas controlling populations by restricting their dress practices.3 Furthermore, dress and cloth were not only valuable commodities but also highly desirable among colonized people. African slaves, in particular, became the largest consumer market for textile manufacturers and clothing distributors.4 In this chapter, images, material belongings, and archival documents are used to move the discourse around the enslaved body to the actual material of clothing, to see the clothed black body not merely as a site of discursive analysis, but also as a particularly material one. This is essential as dress in all societies is inextricably connected to the body, in that ‘dress and the body exist in dialectic relationship to one another. Dress operates on the phenomenal body; it is a very crucial aspect of our everyday experience of embodiment, while the body is a dynamic field which gives life and fullness to dress.’5 2

3

4

5

Robert DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 17. Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1680–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 3. Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 126. Joanne Entwistle, ‘The Dressed Body’, in Mary Evans and Ellie Lee (eds.), Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002),

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

There are several questions central to this study. How did dress customs differ or remain the same across the Atlantic world? Or, did dress convey the inequalities and distinctions within the racially segregated colonial society? Did fashioning the black body and its self-representation within the colonial society articulate modes of resistance, hybridization, and globalizing influences among populations of the Atlantic world? I argue that dress among enslaved and free communities in the African diaspora was part of a heterogeneous culture that reflected a synthesis of various styles that combined African, Asian, Native American, and European influences. This synthesis gave rise to a multiplicity of new fashions and unique styles in each region, a type of dress that embodied the process of creolization and the rise of a vibrant Creole culture among diasporic African people. Dress styles in the Atlantic Basin changed over time, and fashion trends did overlap and reciprocate between classes, races, and ethnicities. The diversity of the enslaved and free diaspora African communities was reflected in the dress of the people. The subjects of this study are slave and freed people who were African or of African ancestry living in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The chapter focuses on specific continental plantation zones or systems within the wider Atlantic Basin whose border meets the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea as well as a few plantation economies with a closely related history such as the islands of the British West Indies (Caribbean), and territories such as Suriname, Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Carolinas of the mid-Atlantic North American coast (Maps 12.1 and 12.2). This chapter relies on several written sources and incorporates visual records to provide some semblance of the dress objects and textiles adopted in certain areas of the Atlantic region. Apart from protecting and adorning the body, dress was used by enslaved and freed African people in the African diaspora to demonstrate remarkable courage, to physically and symbolically resist 134, republished in Linda Welters and Abby Lillethun (eds.), The Fashion Reader, 2nd edition (New York: Berg, 2011), 134–44.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

401

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Map 12.1

The Evening Post map of the West Indies, 1898. Photo by Buyenlarge via Getty Images.

dress of diaspora african communities

Map 12.2

A map of the original thirteen states, 1782. Photo by Archive Photos / Stringer via Getty Images.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

403

404

steeve o. buckridge

oppression, be culturally expressive, and at the same time convey that they too could be as smart or even smarter by outwitting enslavers and pro-slavery bounty hunters with their disguise and were as sophisticated and refined as their European enslavers. I have taken an eclectic theoretical approach to the study of enslaved and free African peoples’ dress in the Atlantic world. By attempting to investigate the role and uses of dress within the colonized society, I found the most useful theoretical framework to be symbolic interaction, particularly in the area of visual art and the construction of identity. In other words, the way identities are conveyed by dress as it reveals the social position of the wearer to both wearer and observer within a specific interaction situation.6 Material objects such as dress are considered semiotic because they convey meaning within social and cultural contexts. In other words, ‘all objects exist in context’ and function as signifiers in the production of meaning.7 Cultural theorist Stuart Hall asserted that ‘We give things meaning by how we use them or integrate them into our everyday practices.’8 But how do we analyse the dress of the enslaved and free Africans in the diaspora? The objective here is to investigate the beliefs of these individuals, going beyond what seems a surface unawareness, to identify the hidden or submerged expressed in what they did, said, wore, and made.9 I use the term ‘dress’ throughout this study as it is more inclusive than terms such as apparel or garments. Dress includes not only garments, jewellery, and hairstyles, but also body decoration like tattoos, dyed skin, scarring, and even branding or any sort of ‘assemblages

6

7

8

9

Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne Eicher, ‘Dress and Identity’, in Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins, Joanne Eicher, and Kim Johnson (eds.), Dress and Identity (New York: Fairchild Publications, 1995), 7–12. Henry Glassie, ‘Studying Material Culture Today’, in Gerald L. Pocius (ed.), Living in a Material World: Canadian and American Approaches to Material Culture (St John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1991), 256. Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Open University, 1997), 3. Steeve O. Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004) 4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

of modification added to the body’ to create a total image of the self.10

early colonial america and involuntary migrants Before the arrival of the Spanish in 1492, Indigenous cultures throughout the Atlantic world competed for supremacy and resources, borrowed from each other, traded between communities, and developed sophisticated cultures. Amidst the gradual process of European conquest, Indigenous people continued to trade with each other and engaged in economic activities with colonial settlers. Across the Atlantic Basin, each Indigenous group had their own distinctive dress custom shaped by the geographical diversity of the region, from Louisiana and the Carolinas of the North American mid-Atlantic coast, where native people adorned themselves with moccasins, draped hide, and breech clothing made from a variety of animal skins, to the feather headdress, artistic nudity, and brightly painted bodies of the Taínos and Caribs of the lush Caribbean islands.11 The commingling of dress customs continued during contact between Indigenous people and Europeans and later with the arrival of enslaved Africans. The European invaders brought many habits with them, not least their customs in dress and Judaeo-Christianity which required the covering of bodies and ‘appropriate’ attire. Many Europeans considered their dress customs superior to those of Africans and Native Americans and regarded dress as the most visible sign of civility and progress. Therefore, dressing the body and abandoning ‘nakedness’ was ‘tantamount to becoming a civilized Christian’.12 Early

10

11

12

Roach-Higgins et al., ‘Dress and Identity’, 7–8; Buckridge, Language of Dress, 3. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, ‘Clothing in Colonial Spanish America’, in John Michael Francis (ed.), Iberia and the Americas: Culture, Politics and History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 240. Diana Dipaolo Loren, ‘Orthodoxies and Practices of Dressing in the Early Colonial Lower Mississippi Valley’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 1/2 (2001), 180–2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

405

406

steeve o. buckridge

European conquerors sought to facilitate this in several ways. By means of the growing global trade that linked the Americas and Europe they imported sheep to provide wool and new technologies, such as the treadle loom, textiles and European clothing which was primarily constructed by hand. Missionaries and government officials provided clothing and knowledge about appropriate dress and civility and persuaded or required Indigenous people and African slaves to adopt European dress customs. In seventeenth-century French Louisiana in the lower Mississippi Valley, for example, Native Americans were ‘supplied with clothes that mimicked French dress but without the same quality such as dyed wool (Limbourg) coats, skirts and breeches rather than velvet and taffeta ones and linen shirts rather than silk ones’.13 Some Native Americans adopted European dress customs as they provided the opportunity for them to move freely between various social and economic communities.14 Native American dress also influenced European fashions as in the case of Louisiana in the seventeenth century. Some French émigrés for instance began tattooing themselves to look like Louisiana Native Americans. In 1697, the Italian born North American traveller Henri de Tonti remarked, ‘They [European settlers] take great pleasure in having themselves tattooed and there are many who have them all over their body save on the face.’15 Although dress styles did reciprocate between classes and ethnicities, European dress customs replaced Indigenous dress in many areas of the plantation zones or were combined with preColumbian and Hispanic styles. Archaeological evidence reveals that Indigenous people in the lower Mississippi Valley wore European brass buttons, buckles, and metal jewellery, thus reflecting mixed Indigenous and French dress styles. These artefacts also suggest cloth, jewellery, and clothes including hats, shirts, and coats were important trade commodities in local communities and were commonly traded between settlers and Indigenous people in the Mississippi Valley.16 Native Americans also produced valuable commodities for European settlers. A fine example is that of the Creek Indians who were major participants 13

Ibid.

14

Ibid.

15

Ibid.

16

Ibid., 182–3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

in the eighteenth-century commercial trade with the English of South Carolina and Georgia and provided large amounts of deerskins to English tanners.17 Africans were among the earliest newcomers to arrive in the Atlantic world in great numbers, first under Spanish occupation of the Caribbean beginning in 1498 and then during the period 1670 to 1808 under British colonization of several Caribbean islands, including Jamaica and Barbados. Africans were forcibly taken from their homelands and brought to the plantation zones of the Americas as slaves by means of the transatlantic slave trade also known as the Triangular Trade. Enslaved Africans came from diverse backgrounds and cultures, predominantly from the regions of West and Central Africa and included the Igbo, Coromantee, Congo, Papaws, the Chamba, and Mandingo people among others.18 For these Africans, the horrific conditions of transit across the Atlantic Ocean did not provide for a coordinated transfer of any entire African culture. Rather, the transatlantic slave trade was based on the economic necessity of cheap, inexhaustible labour and profitable commerce and was not designed for the aid, comfort, or community of the involuntary migrants.19 Nevertheless, Africans brought with them aspects of their culture, the things they could remember, such as, folklore, music, religion, and customs in dress. These customs and beliefs enabled Africans to maintain a vital link with their ancestral homeland. As enslaved people, Africans modified and adapted these cultural elements based on their experiences, needs, and circumstances and passed them on to their descendants. The growth in the slave population and increased alliance between enslaved Africans and Indigenous slaves in colonial America led the French in Louisiana to offer rewards in the form of goods including European clothing to Native Americans for the 17 18

19

Braund, Deerskins and Duffels, 61–103. Mervyn Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1988), 28, 52. Franklin Knight and Margaret Crahan, ‘The African Migration and the Origins of an Afro-American Society and Culture’,in Margaret E. Crahan and Franklin W. Knight (eds.), Africa and the Caribbean: The Legacies of a Link (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 11.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

407

408

steeve o. buckridge

capture and return of runaway slaves.20 Clothing was not only a valuable trade commodity but also an important material object used to entice and solicit aid in reinforcing enslavement. The vast territory of Louisiana was under the administration of two successive European powers, France (1699–1763), then Spain (1763–1800), before being sold to the United States in 1803 by the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1724, the French enacted the Code Noir or Black Code to further limit the influence of Africans in Louisiana and legislate consequences when Africans ran away. The Code Noir restricted the movement of slaves and required slave owners to provide clothing, food, flour, fish, and other provisions; however, these provisions were not always enforced and African slaves did seek their freedom.21 Throughout the period of Atlantic slavery, enslaved Africans resisted the institution of slavery and continued to reject their status as slaves and subordinates.22 In many areas of the Atlantic world, enslaved Africans engaged in numerous resistance activities from feigning illness to sabotage and rebellion. What is termed Maroonage was a key feature of slavery and occurred in several areas of the African diaspora. Some enslaved persons chose to escape from the oppressive routine of plantation life by running away and establishing sovereign and free independent African communities in the mountains like in Jamaica or deep in the interiors of the rainforest as in the case of the free African communities in Brazil and Suriname. Free African communities were often inaccessible to outsiders, and their freedom fighters became known as Maroons who kept much of the African traditions alive including dress.23 20

21

22

23

Kathryn E. Holland Braund, ‘The Creek Indians, Blacks and Slavery’, Journal of Southern History, 57/4 (1991), 606–10. Gilbert C. Din, Spaniards, Planters and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana 1763–1803 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1999), 8–10. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Kingston: Savacou Publication, 1974), 13; see also Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer, ‘The Caribbean: A Regional Overview’, in Knight and Palmer (eds.), The Modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 6–8, for more on the slave trade and demographics. Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998), 133–49.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

Even though the Maroon communities challenged slavery with flight, not all slave fugitives sought to join these refuges. More common, according to historian Michael Craton, were the multiform phenomena of short-term, short-distance running away by individuals and very small groups. Untold numbers of fugitives were ‘seeking an outlet for grievous psychic repression or an alternative life not necessarily outside the slave system, while others were not necessarily running away, but rather running to a lover, spouse, or other family members on neighbouring estates’.24 In Jamaica, for example, a few slaves ran away in search of employment opportunities like the 1791 slave fugitive, Isaac, a skilled carpenter by trade who ‘removed his clothes [from the plantation] and told his wife that he meant to go to Kingston where he was offered employment’.25 Across many areas of the colonial Atlantic, diasporic Africans used their skills to build local economies and vitalized local industries including those based on clothing. In Louisiana, for instance, the work of free people of colour was critical to the development of the territory especially in New Orleans. Free people of colour held a number of vital occupations including shoemakers, seamstresses, laundresses, retailers, and wig-makers.26 Clothing mattered in many contexts.

dress of servitude: british caribbean and mid-atlantic coast Slave society in the British Caribbean was diverse and ‘consisted of ordering of separate groups all held together within a social structure’.27 Enslaved individuals were divided based on class, ethnicity, and occupation, as well as urban and rural slaves or those who worked on plantations, farms, and in pens. Slave society consisted of 24

25 26

27

Michael Craton, Empire of Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997), 188–9. Royal Gazette, 14 November 1791. Kimberly S. Hanger, ‘Almost All Have Callings: Free Blacks at Work in Spanish New Orleans’, Colonial Latin America Historical Review, 3/2 (1994), 141–64. Quoted in Edward Brathwaite, ‘Jamaican Slave Society: A Review’, Race, 9/3 (1968), 331–42. See also Buckridge, Language of Dress, 26–7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

409

410

steeve o. buckridge

various social groups across the plantation economies. Some were coloured slaves who were of African and another ancestry. Miscegenation in Jamaica, for instance, gave rise to gradations of coloureds based on lightness of complexion. The more common term for this group was mulatto. Some coloureds had special privileges granted by private acts, and they considered themselves to be a distinct group of higher social standing and separate from enslaved Africans, absorbing some of the strictures of the racialized society. Consequently, they distanced themselves from African slaves. Meanwhile, Creole slaves or those locally born also viewed themselves as distinct from the ‘unseasoned’ or newly arrived slaves from Africa. The largest group comprised enslaved Africans and their descendants. Europeans used two kinds of generalization to refer to this group, Negro and slave; the terms were synonymous until abolition.28 These differentiations were often reflected in the dress of both male and female slaves and fugitives.29 Unlike the Danish West Indies that regulated slave dress and forbade slaves from wearing certain clothing, such as silk and lace,30 Jamaica and other British Caribbean colonies had no sumptuary laws that regulated slave dress. However, enslavers were required by local statutes to provide their slaves with minimum clothing, and those enslavers who refused could be fined.31 The steady growth in the slave population due to natural increase and the continuous importation of enslaved Africans made it too costly and impractical for slave owners to distribute ready-made garments to the large enslaved population.32 Hence, by the latter half of the eighteenth century, the trade in cloth increased as many slave owners resorted to the importation of inexpensive, coarse European textiles and Indian cottons to be made into slave clothing. According to the eighteenth-century Jamaican resident and author Edward Long, slaves received ‘a large abundance of checqued linen, striped hollands, sustain blanketing, long ells, and baize, kendal cottons, Oznaburg [sic], canvas, coarse hats, 28 30

31

Ibid., 9. 29 Ibid., 26–7. Barry Higman (ed.), Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 116, 149. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 129. 32 Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

woollen caps, cotton and silk handkerchiefs, knives, scissors, razors, buckles, buttons . . . thread, needles and pins’ to sew their own clothes.33 Long’s account provides some examples of the various textiles and clothing accessories imported into the region. The annual cloth ration per slave was ‘as much Oznaburg as will make two frocks, and as much woollen stuff as will make a great coat’.34 Other types of ‘Negro cloth’, like Welsh Plains cloth,35 were more prevalent in the American South in places like the Carolinas. Oznaburg, a coarse cotton named after Osnabrück in Germany, was the most common fabric distributed to members of the enslaved population in Jamaica and other British colonies as it was cheap, durable, and ideal for rigorous field work. On the Windsor Lodge and Paisley estates in Jamaica between 1833 and 1837, for example, approximately 2,676 yards of flax Oznaburg were purchased by the estate owners and distributed among their slaves on the estates.36 Skilled slaves who were seamstresses and tailors sewed for members of the slave community and their families as well as their owner’s family. On some estates, the manufacture of slave clothing was supervised by the white mistress of the plantation or wife of the slave owner.37 Several British Caribbean colonies, such as Barbados, did provide for the minimum dress. However, these slave codes were also vague and inconsistent. Consequently, dress styles and clothing allowances varied considerably. The Barbados slave law of 1825, for example, required that slave owners provide each year, ‘decent clothing according to the custom of the island’. The Bahamas law 33

34

35

36

37

Edward Long, The History of Jamaica or General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of the Island: With Reflections on Its Situation, Settlement, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws and Government, 3 vols. (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), ii, 493. J. Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica with remarks on the moral and physical condition of the slaves and the abolition of slavery in the colonies (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1823), 269. Welsh Plains cloth was made by Welsh wool producers, an activity which was controlled by the English as evident in the Wool Act of 1699. National Library of Jamaica (NLJ), Manuscript collection, 32: Invoices, Accounts, Sales of Sugar etc. Jamaica Windsor Lodge and Paisley Estates (1833–7). Buckridge, Language of Dress, 30–1. There are several spellings of the term Oznaburg. Here I use the more common spelling of the day as reflected in the primary sources.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

411

412

steeve o. buckridge

of 1824 called for ‘two suits of proper clothing and sufficient clothing’ per annum; and the Trinidad ordinance of 1800 stipulated, ‘two shifts of clothing complete’.38 British West Indian plantation owners were not only committed to maintaining slavery, but they also believed that their plantations were profit-seeking enterprises and therefore sought to narrowly restrict expenditure on slaves. Slave owners did this by providing the minimum clothing allowances to non-skilled labourers, and to maximize profits they rewarded skilled workers. Throughout the British Caribbean it was common for tradesmen, slave drivers, and similarly privileged slaves, to receive the same fabrics or clothing as other slaves, but in somewhat greater proportions. As a result, ‘inequalities’ and ‘distinctions’ existed in each territory.39 Historian Barry Higman reveals the minimum clothing that enslaved people usually received: ‘men most often having a jacket, shirt, trousers, and hat or cap; and women a jacket, petticoat, and hat. Handkerchiefs were generally used by the women as head ties, while men wore Kilmarnock caps.’40 In many areas of the British Caribbean, slave women received less clothing than male slaves even though they laboured side-byside with the men in the fields. That being so, some enslaved women sought alternative means of finding additional apparel. Some women stole clothing from their enslaver, and others received extra dress in exchange for sexual favours with European men. Still others purchased additional clothing with money they saved up from selling their produce at markets harvested from their vegetable gardens.41 Cloth was a valuable commodity in the slave community and was used at times to entice and forge romantic relations and kinship ties between slave women and white men, particularly in the absence of marriage.42 Many slaves with resources purchased extra clothing and textiles in linen markets 38

39

40 41 42

Barry Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean (Kingston: The Press University of the West Indies, 1995), 223. Jerome S. Handler and Frederick W. Lange, Plantation Slavery in Barbados: An Archaeological and Historical Investigation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 78. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 224. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 38–40. Danielle C. Skeehan, ‘Caribbean Women, Creole Fashioning, and the Fabric of Black Atlantic Writing’, The Eighteenth Century, 56/1 (2015), 113–14.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

Figure 12.1 Agostino Brunias, Linen Market, Dominica, 1770s. Oil on canvas, 21 5/8 × 30 in (54.9 × 76.2 cm). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B2009.12.3.

that bustled with activity and were dominated by women traders of colour as in West Africa (Figure 12.1). Linen markets existed throughout the Caribbean, and market vendors sold a variety of textiles, including striped Holland, check or Guinea cloth, cotton muslin, Oznaburg, Penniston, and a few local items such as lacebark cloth and bark fibres spun and twisted from local plants.43 Across plantation economies of the British Caribbean, slave dress reflected a multitude of styles based on circumstance and opportunity. Urban slaves occasionally received cast-off clothing from their enslavers; thus, they tended to be better dressed than field or rural slaves, and their clothing reflected their occupation and elite status within the servile community.44 Urban slave women preferred long, brightly coloured skirts made from refined cloth, such as muslin or cotton, instead of Oznaburg, accessorized with beads and gold jewellery.45 43

Buckridge, Language of Dress, 38–42.

44

Ibid., 46.

45

Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

413

414

steeve o. buckridge

Among rural and field slaves, the standard slave dress for men included an Oznaburg or checked frock or smock, a pair of Oznaburg or sheeting trousers, and a coarse hat, and for women an Oznaburg or coarse linen shift. Shoes were not common and were usually reserved for special occasions, such as dances, festivals, and carnival.46 Enslaved women in the rural areas who laboured in agriculture wore their long skirts pulled over a cord tied around their hips, thus exposing their legs as high as the knees. The ‘pull-skirt’ was not only functional and innovative; it was designed for labour and efficiency and was popular in other Caribbean plantation economies, such as St Vincent and Barbados. The style of dress enabled enslaved women to move easily and with more comfort while carrying out their daily tasks, and kept their skirts dry when crossing rivers and streams. Hence, the pull-skirt was an expedient and essential garment, including for a successful escape from enslavers and bounty hunters. Female fugitives could swiftly secure their long flowing skirts above the knees with ease and move with great agility when running across fields and rocky terrain and through forests to evade capture. During field work, the pull-skirt was often complemented with a headwrap, and occasionally a broad-brimmed hand-woven straw hat, pulled over the headwrap to shield the face from the hot sun while toiling in the fields.47 By the end of the eighteenth century, imported Madras cloth from India became popular among slaves and freed women across the Caribbean. The brightly coloured Indian fabric with its chequered pattern gradually replaced the plain white cotton cloth used by many women for headwraps. The Madras headwrap was called a bandana in Jamaica, Barbados, and other British colonies. In Agostino Brunias’ painting of Servants Washing a Deer (Figure 12.2), the artist pays close attention to dress in the Eastern Caribbean and provides visual evidence of a synthesis in European and African dress customs and the impact of the global cloth trade in the African diaspora community. The painting

46

Ibid.

47

Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

Figure 12.2 Agostino Brunias, Servants Washing a Deer, 1775. Oil on canvas, 12 1/2 × 11 1/4 in (31.8 × 28.6 cm). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B2009.12.2.

portrays multiple subjects adorned in clothing and textiles of international origin. As customary of house servants and urban slaves, the main subject in the foreground is dressed in a brightly coloured long skirt with floral prints and a lace-trimmed shawl called a fishu which was typical of European women’s fashion at the time. Her outfit is complemented by a brightly coloured Madras fabric head-covering. Madras cloth was widely used in Dominica, St Lucia, and the French West Indies to make dressup clothes called the ‘Creole Dress’ and became the fabric of choice worn on special occasions such as rituals, festivals, and carnival. In St Lucia, a former French settlement taken over by the British, dress among slaves and freed women was influenced by French fashions and included a white blouse known in French

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

415

416

steeve o. buckridge

Creole as chemise decoltee made of cotton or poplin and trimmed with broderie anglaise and red ribbon for special occasions. A formal version of this dress, called the Wob Dwiyet (a Creole term from the French robe douiette), was introduced in the eighteenth century and was cut from a single fabric with a train made of bright coloured fabric. The folds of the dress were usually elegantly carried over the arm thus exposing the long petticoat underneath. A triangular scarf made of satin material called foulard was worn around the shoulders with the apex at the centre of the back and held in place with a decorative pin or brooch in front. The Wob Dwiyet was also popular in Dominica.48 As in Africa, trade beads were prevalent among slave women throughout the Caribbean islands. The Jamaican planter Matthew Gregory Lewis stated that slave women were ‘[d]ecked out with a profusion of beads and corals, and gold ornaments of all descriptions’.49 A similar observation was made by the estate owner William Beckford, who stated that: ‘They [slave women] are particularly fond of beads, coral, glass and chains with which they adorn their necks and wrists.’50 The eighteenth-century portrait of the Haitian slave woman Marie-Thérèse-Zémire by François Beaucourt provides some evidence of the popularity of beads in African diaspora communities (Figure 12.3). The subject with still life is dressed in a white blouse draped off the shoulder to expose her right breast. The painting is loaded with complex meanings and evokes a sense of the erotic. Her outfit is complemented by a headwrap of Madras plaid and accessorized with gold earrings and a single strand of cascading seed beads of various sizes. Slave women obtained beads for their dress by various means, purchased or traded in the local markets. Beads were also smuggled over on

48

49

50

Steeve O. Buckridge, ‘Over View of the Caribbean’, in Margot Blum Schevill (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: Latin America and the Caribbean (London: Bloomsbuty, 2010), 248–50. In parts of the Caribbean, the term Madras was used interchangeably with bandana or to mean the same thing. Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of A Residence among the Negroes of the West Indies (London: J. Murray, 1845), 74. William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, 2 vols. (London: T. J. Egerton, 1790), ii, 386.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

Figure 12.3 François Beaucourt, Portrait of a Haitian Woman, 1786. Oil on canvas. Height: 69.1 cm (27.2 in); Width: 55.6 cm (21.8 in). McCord Museum M12067 / François Beaucourt. Public domain, via Alamy Stock Photo, MNX8B1.

slave ships and some enslavers provided their slave women with manufactured European beads. Edward Long also mentioned that slave clothing rations included ‘small glass, ribbons, beads, thread . . . all or most of them of British growth or manufacture’.51 Sadly, the importance and impact of trade beads as adornment throughout the Atlantic region has been largely overlooked. In fact, beads were traded between diverse communities and were a popular commodity in global trade and a highly prized possession among many colonized people. Beads were also considered a valuable trade object both by numerous Indigenous people and enslaved Africans. Glass beads originally from Italy and Amsterdam arrived early in North America and were among the original items traded with Native Americans. The beads were of various colours 51

Ibid., 493.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

417

418

steeve o. buckridge

and forms including pressed, moulded, and blown glass. Beads were worn for decorative purposes and even used in rituals. Notably, there were specific beads for trade and these had a heterogeneous appeal with some incorporated into larger pieces of jewellery worn by European women.52 In the Caribbean, slave owners realized that enslaved women in particular were fond of beads and sought to provide them for slave women’s adornment. Slave holders hoped that this would ‘pacify’ these women, thus making them better workers and less likely to rebel. Similar to some Native American cultures, African slaves in Barbados used glass beads in communal and personal rituals and placed them in slave graves. The large number of colourful glass beads found during an archaeological dig at Drax Hall plantation in Jamaica suggests that beads were as valued among African slaves as other items of personal adornment.53 Beads were worn by both men and women as well as children and were popular trade items in slave communities across the Caribbean. Some diasporic Africans reserved their valuable trade beads for special occasions; others substituted manufactured and imported glass beads with less valuable beads that were easily accessible in their environment. In the Caribbean, beads for adornment were also made from cut shells, bone, carved wood, terracotta, and dried seeds like those of the thorny acacia tree. Although beading practices varied, glass beads were widely considered more valuable. In several territories of colonial America, glass beads were important because of the connection between bodies and beads; beads were closely associated with eyes or light and were considered to reflect aspects of an individual’s identity.54 Beads in Jamaica were also used as part of slaves’ religious practices. Among some believers of the Afro-Jamaican religion called Obeah, red beads were worn as protection from duppies (ghosts) who might harm the living. As well, in Suriname some enslaved 52

53

54

Diana DiPaolo Loren, The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 62. Douglas V. Armstrong, The Old Village and the Great House (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 176–81. Loren, The Archaeology of Clothing, 57.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

and free persons wore beads as a form of protection or to ward off evil spirits, and this custom has continued today among several Maroon descendant communities. Africans brought their customs in dress to the Americas, particularly religious symbols fashioned from various materials including beads. In French Louisiana and other parts of North America, as in the Caribbean, free and enslaved Africans used their knowledge to create charms and amulets of support, resistance, and power to help them cope and survive in an oppressive society. Amulets and charms were made from a variety of materials including pierced coins and thimbles.55 Beads took on meaning by how they were used within the cultural context. Among diasporic Africans, for example, the use of beads demonstrated the survival and power of African faith systems materialized in beads. In many communities, beads were usually strung with strings, hair, cords, plant fibres, thread, and even wire – forms and practices that continue in some places to the present.56 Dress customs among slaves in the Carolinas of colonial North America were similar to those of the British Caribbean, but there were also some differences. Between 1619 and 1808 an estimated 400,000 African slaves were brought to the British mainland of North America later to become the United States of America. Many newly arrived slaves were hastily dressed in European clothing so they could be ready for the auction block and suitable in appearance to attract a potential buyer. A few South Carolina slaves were described in 1736 as wearing only an ‘Arse-cloth’, a type of loincloth, but this was not common during the period.57 As in the Caribbean, dress in the Carolinas reflected class and status. The dress of the genteel and white upper classes of South 55 56

57

Ibid., 66–8. Martha Warren Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (New York: Negro Universities Press, [orig. ed. 1929] reprint 1969), 144. In the spring of 1998 the author visited a Maroon community in Suriname. Many children were observed wearing waist beads for protection against evil spirits. Shane White and Graham White, ‘Slave Clothing and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Past & Present, 148 (1995), 151.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

419

420

steeve o. buckridge

Carolina, as in Europe, wore well-cut sewn garments that were unsoiled and smooth in texture and made from silk, chintz or fine cotton, and superfine wool rather than plain or coarse cotton and poorer grade of wool. The garments of the genteel South Carolina classes consisted of tailored shirts, stylish coats, and velvet breeches while the poor and slaves wore loose shirts ideal for physical labour and short jackets and trousers made of Oznaburg cloth.58 The South Carolina Negro Act of 1735 sought to make a distinction between the classes by prescribing specific textiles suitable for slave dress and permitted only the cheapest fabric to be used for enslaved people. In 1776, local newspapers and retail stores such as Hill and Guard in Charleston specified ‘White Welsh Plains’ textile as suitable ‘Negro cloth’ for slave dress. Despite this, slave owners were indifferent to the law and cared little about such sumptuary legislation. Simultaneously, slaves refused to be restricted in their dress and, thus, the Negro Act of 1735 was unenforceable. Furthermore, there were no guidelines for the benefit of slave owners that stated how slaves of the eighteenth century should dress or look. Due to the lack of law enforcement, slaves had much more freedom in their choice of clothing and appearance, and some enslaved women and men were able to obtain large quantities of clothing for themselves including refined dresses of silk and crimson velvet.59 Advertisements for runaway slaves in South Carolina reveal an array of dress styles and refined textiles worn by them. The slave owner Alexander Warfield reported that when his slaves Dick and Lucy ran away they had in their possession, ‘a green cloth coat, with crimson velvet cape . . . a deep blue camblet jacket, with gold lace at the sleeves, down the breast’. Lucy also had with her ‘two calico gowns, one purple and white, the other red and white, a deep blue moreens petticoat’.60 These items of clothing reflect the slaves’ fashion sensibilities and elegance as they considered themselves as worthy of fashionable attire as their subjugators. Dress was not only a valuable commodity within the slave society, but also the most popular item carried by slave fugitives on the 58

Ibid., 150–3.

59

Ibid., 172.

60

Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

run. Some of these clothes were purchased when affordable and accessible with money saved up, or dress items were stolen from their enslavers when the opportunity was provided. During Tacky’s Rebellion of 1760 in Jamaica, for instance, Great Houses were attacked by rebel slaves and European clothes were plundered. The local plantation owner, Thomas Thistlewood, also revealed that a ‘plunder [of] ruffled shirts, laced hats, shoes, stockings, cravats, and fine mahogany chests full of clothes’ was recovered.61 In 1757 in French colonial Louisiana, an investigation into stolen goods revealed an extraordinary assortment of material objects were taken, pawned, traded, and purchased in an illicit exchange. Stolen goods by enslaved Africans provided compelling evidence of the character of slave utilization and the complex circulation and movement of clothing across diverse communities and colonial empires. Historian Sophie White suggests that these stolen items reflect the complex ‘geographies of slave consumption’ and that ‘theft was an act of consumption’.62 Slave fugitives frequently disguised themselves by dressing as free or freed people and as a consequence, they were able to evade being caught. Others carried an abundance of dress, or a bundle of clothing, for disguise like the Jamaican fugitive Will, who fled his place of enslavement in 1783 and carried with him ‘a small trunk with linen . . . a red coat with black spots, a blue great coat lined with red baize and a cutteau [large knife] mounted with brass and buff belt’.63 Like many slave fugitives, Will’s clothing items were his ‘alternate currency’ as clothing was infinitely tradable and saleable. Such activities were popular throughout the African diaspora as passing as a free person became a viable means of obtaining one’s freedom, or at least of being publicly perceived as such, even when chances of attaining freedom through self-purchase or manumission were ruled out or such attempts failed.

61

62

63

Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750– 1780 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 101. Sophie White, ‘Geographies of Slave Consumption: French Colonial Louisiana and a World of Goods’, Winterthur Portfolio, 45/2–3 (2011), 230–4. Cornwall Chronicle, 20 August 1783. See also White, ‘Slave Clothing’, 160 for more examples of runaway slaves and their clothing.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

421

422

steeve o. buckridge

In South Carolina, enslaved people received extra clothing materials and dress by various means. As seen earlier in the British Caribbean, some slaves stole clothing from their owners and others received second-hand dress from masters or mistresses. Although the South Carolina legislature decreed in 1735 that slaves should not wear the cast-off clothing of their owner, this was ignored by enslavers. Many slave holders got delight out of seeing their slaves well dressed. Several enslavers considered a well-dressed slave as a reflection of their own wealth and status in colonial society.64 Some slaves purchased additional clothing and textiles with money saved up from hiring out their skills on neighbouring estates, or selling their produce and poultry from their small plots of land not used by their enslaver for commercial farming. Accordingly, a local trade in textiles and clothes developed as in other plantation zones, and those slaves with financial means could spend their money on extra dress. Many enslavers did not mind their slaves’ extravagant spending on dress as they thought this would make their slaves less likely to rebel. Other owners preferred their slaves to buy dress rather than alcohol.65 Unlike the rural areas in South Carolina, urban centres such as Charleston became a showplace for slaves to display their finery and sophistication in dress.66 Enslaved Africans made a clear distinction between dressing-up clothes and work clothes, and many slaves reserved their best outfits for special occasions such as festivals and rituals. At these events slaves could be expressive and creative in their dress and appearance. Some slaves, for example, refashioned the secondhand clothing and discarded outfits they received from their enslavers to make them ‘fit better’ and to suit their own taste and circumstances.67 Several slave women used the skills they acquired in Africa or learned from their ancestors to make beautiful patchwork garments and quilts from scraps of material. After long days of labouring in the fields, enslaved women spent countless hours in dimly lit slave cabins working on these patchworks of rhythmic design to create beautiful pieces of decorative and 64

White, ‘Slave Clothing‘, 159–65.

65

Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

66

Ibid.

67

Ibid.

dress of diaspora african communities

functional art. The skills were retained and nurtured among free women of African ancestry in South Carolina and other plantation economies of the Atlantic region, and passed down to their descendants and continue today.68 As slave economies in colonial North America such as South Carolina grew and moved away from reliance on textiles from Britain, slaves became increasingly self-reliant and depended on their own skills to spin, weave, knit, and sew their own clothes. This gave enslaved people the opportunity for greater freedom of expression in their dress and their appearance. Some female slaves and freed women were able to use their skills as seamstresses to enhance their livelihood and defy the constraints of a racially segregated and oppressive society. Elizabeth Keckley was born a slave in Virginia in 1818 who went on to become a talented dressmaker and fashion designer of renown with some twenty employees of her own. She catered to the wives, daughters, and sisters of Washington’s political elite including Mary Todd Lincoln, who became her friend, and was the wife of the president of the United States.69

bark cloth and natural lace Apart from the vibrant transnational trade in clothing and cloth in the Atlantic world, non-European skills and technologies of subaltern people provided colonial settlers with knowledge and material goods essential for sustaining settler communities. Historian Marcy Norton affirms that the early technologies in the colonial Atlantic were part of an ‘entangled early modern world in which Europeans and settler-colonists were dependent on subaltern actors not only as laborers but also as knowledge producers’.70 One such technology that demonstrated this

68 69

70

Ibid., 170. Ibid., 173. See also Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868; repr. East Ford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2017), 1–3. Marcy Norton, ‘Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World’, Colonial Latin American Review, 26/1 (2017), 20.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

423

424

steeve o. buckridge

entanglement was the production of bark cloth and natural lace. Several enslaved peoples across the Caribbean who came from bark cloth-producing areas of West and Central Africa utilized the skills they had acquired in their homeland to obtain suitable raw materials for clothing within their new environment. They attained important knowledge of native plants and trees from the Indigenous people, the Taínos, and they built on this knowledge and developed it further.71 Although linen markets existed throughout the Caribbean, some enslaved Africans could not afford the cost of imported European and Indian textiles. Hence, they looked for a less costly and more viable means of obtaining comfortable and fashionable dress. Enslaved and freed women with the knowledge and expertise produced bark cloth in their free time, as their ancestors had done in Africa, and passed these skills down to their descendants in the diaspora. This required a process of trial and error, of experimentation and invention until they learned to ‘make fashion’ with what was available and accessible to them. For enslaved women, particularly rural slaves, the nurturing of an African aesthetic in their dress enabled them to ‘dress up’ or ‘nice up’ the drab and plain clothing they received from their owners, to transform their appearance from a slave aesthetic to a more pleasing and familiar African mode of dress. Enslaved and freed Africans looked for forest plants that could be used to make bark cloth, and roots, berries, and leaves for dyes to colour the fabrics they received from their enslavers. Slaves’ use of dyes was not unique to the Caribbean. For example, in South Carolina some slave women boiled a combination of roots to extract dye solutions for colouring garments and creating visually stunning textiles that were attractive to both slaves and colonial settlers.72 Even though very little is known about this early cottage industry in the Caribbean, the evidence suggests that the Jamaican bark cloth industry was extensive and significant to the livelihood of enslaved people. Edward Long recorded that enslaved Africans in Jamaica made clothing with plant fibres from coratoe leaf (Agave morrisil 71

72

The skill of making hammocks was passed on to Africans by the early inhabitants. White, ‘Slave Clothing’, 167.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

Baker), mahoe bark (Hibiscus elatus Sw.), mountain cabbage (Roystonea altissima), and the down tree (Ochroma pyramidale) among others.73 However, the most popular form of bark cloth was produced in Jamaica and derived from the lacebark tree.74

the wonder tree The Lagetta lagetto, or lacebark tree, is one of three species of the genus Lagetta, including Lagetta valenzuelana and Lagetta wrightiana which belongs to the Thymelaeaceae plant family.75 The tree was found only in Cuba, Hispaniola, and Jamaica. The lacebark tree was widely known in Cuba and the Dominican Republic as daguilla.76 In Haiti, the lacebark tree was called ‘lacewood’ or bois dentelle in French, or bwa dantèl in Haitian Creole, and in Jamaica, the tree was simply known as the lacebark tree. The non-domesticated Lagetta lagetto was the more common species and most prevalent in Jamaica. In the seventeenth century, the lacebark tree grew in the central regions of Jamaica where entire forests of lacebark trees existed in abundance.77 The tree has laurellike leaves of ovate shape, rounded at the base, and ranged in height from six to thirty feet. The trunk can be as wide as two feet and takes fifteen to twenty-five years to reach full maturity. The tree blossoms in April and May, and the sweet-scented flowers are white and produced in terminal racemes (Figure 12.4). The bark of the lagetto tree was valued by both colonists and colonized people in Cuba and Jamaica for the raw materials it provided. 73

74

75

76

77

Long, History of Jamaica, iii, 858. See also Sir Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christopher and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-Footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles, Etc. of the Last of Those Islands, 2 vols. (London: B. M. 1707–25), ii, 22–3, and the Appendix. Long, The History of Jamaica, iii, 858. See also Georgina Pearman and Hans D. V. Prendergast, ‘Plant Portraits: Items from the Lacebark Tree [Lagetta lagetto (W. Wright), Nash; Thymelaeaceae] from the Caribbean’, Economic Botany, 54/1 (2000), 4–6. C. D. Adams, Flowering Plants of Jamaica (Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 1972), 454. Dr Juan Tomás Roig y Mesa, Diccionario Botanico de Nombres Vulgares Cubanos (La Habana: Editorial Cientifico – Tecnica, 1988), 363–4; Correspondence, Sergio Valdés Bernal, 29 July 2014. Pearman and Prendergast, ‘Plant Portraits’.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

425

426

steeve o. buckridge

Figure 12.4 Lagetta lintearia, from Curtis’ Botanical Magazine, vol. 76, 4502 (1850). Biodiversity Heritage Library, 2,119 × 3,484 pixels, file size: 453 KB / Walter Hood Fitch (1817–1892) del. et lith. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Strips of inner bark from the lagetto tree were used to make ropes, hammocks, and baskets. In fact, lacebark ropes were used in the Cuban shipbuilding industry and on Jamaican farms to restrain farm animals. Some Jamaican plantation owners twisted strips of the outer bark into whips that were used to flog their slaves as punishment, and as horsewhips to drive cattle, goats, and other farm stock. The use of lacebark fibres within the colonial context was complex. It was used by pro-slavery practitioners to subjugate and support the oppressive colonial systems and simultaneously by enslaved Africans to resist servitude especially at a time when the Caribbean became an important zone of nature enquiry and colonial bio-prospecting.78 78

Adams, Flowering Plants of Jamaica, 454. Sir William Jackson Hooker, David Prain, and Otto Stapt, ‘Lagetto lintearis; Jamaica Lace-bark’, Curtis’

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

During his visit to Jamaica in 1687, the European physician and natural historian Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) was introduced to Jamaican lacebark. He became fascinated with the plant, explaining in 1725 that ‘What is most strange . . . is that the inward bark is made up of about twelve coats, layers, and extended by the fingers, the filaments or threads . . . form a web not unlike gauze, lace, or thin muslin.’79 The intricate texture of the lacebark fibres made it a highly desirable commodity among numerous people and an ideal material for use in the production of household items and for the manufacture of clothing (Figures 12.5 and 12.6). Lacebark production in Jamaica was gendered; female and colonized women produced the cloth and controlled the trade and distribution in lacebark.80 The technology of producing lacebark involved several stages. The inner bark of the lacebark tree trunk is of a fine texture, almost elastic, and very strong, but can be divided into a number of thin filaments, which after being soaked in water, can be drawn out and teased out with the fingers, thus spreading the lacy fibres more than five times wider than the original width of the bark strip. The fibres can be rolled into large

Figure 12.5 Lagetta lagetto. Field Museum of Natural History, Botany Department EMu IRN: 52198 / Chicago © Field Museum.

79 80

Botanical Magazine, 76 (1850), 4502. See also G. F. Asprey and R. G. Robbins, ‘The Vegetation of Jamaica’, Ecological Monographs, 23/4 (1953), 383. Sloane, Voyage to the Islands, ii, 22. Buckridge, The Language of Dress, 49–57.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

427

428

steeve o. buckridge

Figure 12.6 Lagetta lagetto. Field Museum of Natural History, Botany Department EMu IRN: 52198 / Chicago © Field Museum.

puff balls and left to dry. Once dried, the puff balls can be stretched out in bright sunlight to be naturally bleached white. The end product resembles fine white lace, linen, or gauze. Among enslaved and freed people, Jamaican lacebark was alluring for several reasons. Similar to linen fabric today, the lightweight and airy lacebark material kept the body cool in the hot tropical climate. Lacebark was also appealing to enslaved Africans, European settlers, and international visitors for its natural beauty, versatility, and resemblance to manufactured lace. Enslaved Africans in Jamaica did not have access to refined fabrics such as lace. Rather, European manufactured lace was limited, expensive, and considered a highly prized commodity out of the reach of most slaves and even some poor whites. Therefore, natural lace was an ideal substitute for those who desired rare and desirable fabric like lace and was more appealing because it was strong and durable. Lacebark was washable with ordinary soap, and the fibres could be dyed. Some women wore natural lace as a means of elevating themselves within colonial society. For centuries, lace represented not only status and wealth, but also the social mores and attitude of the wearer in that ‘The apparent fragility of its delicate design suggested the refinement and

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

gentility of its wearer.’81 African women in Jamaica, like slaves in South Carolina, adorned themselves with exquisite lacebark clothing, conveying to their oppressors that they too could be as elegant and beautiful in their dress as their European enslavers. Enslaved and freed women of African ancestry liked the idea that as producers and distributors of lacebark they were rewarded with some financial independence by producing exquisite lace materials for members of the community. Lacebark was also appealing because it was not strenuous to produce and did not require long hours of continuous, noisy pounding of tree bark with heavy mallets like other forms of bark cloth. Instead, lacebark could be processed in the quiet of the home after a long day in the fields, in gendered spaces that enabled women to strengthen bonds of solidarity. Several colonized women were attracted to the entrepreneurial opportunities lacebark production provided and were interested in profit-making and engaging in the market economy as ‘commodity producers and distributors’.82 Seamstresses and tailors found lacebark desirable because it could be stitched into various styles and was durable, soft, versatile, and equal to the best linen lace.83 Edward Long recalled the versatility and wide use of lacebark, stating that ‘The ladies [slaves and freed women] of the island are extremely dexterous in making caps, ruffles, and complete suits of lace with it; in order to bleach it, after being drawn out as much as it will bear . . . It bears washing extremely well . . . with common soap . . . and is equal to the best artificial lace.’84 Lacebark was traded and circulated between various classes and ethnicities and was desired as well by European settlers in Jamaica. A superb example of lacebark clothing is the intricate lacebark cap and the empire-style nightdress of lacebark once owned by the Marchioness of Cornwallis whose father-in-law resided in Jamaica (Figures 12.7 and 12.8). Besides clothing, enslaved and freed women used the lacebark fibre to make doilies 81

82

83

Catherine Richardson, Shakespeare and Material Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 67. Hilary Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995), 140. Long, The History of Jamaica, iii, 747–8. 84 Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

429

430

steeve o. buckridge

Figure 12.7 Lacebark cap from Jamaica, donated in 1833 by the Marchioness Cornwallis. Saffron Walden Museum, Essex [no. 1833.60]. Photograph: © Saffron Walden Museum, Essex.

or ‘fern mats’ and runners to decorate tables and home furniture. It was used for window curtains and space dividers in the home as well as a sieve in cooking. Long’s account provides a fascinating sketch of clothing made from lacebark. The descriptions of the various clothing styles and fashions made with lacebark reflect the creativity and sophistication in design on the part of Jamaican women. Other types of clothing and accessories made from lacebark included bonnets, fans, wedding dresses and veils, shawls, and slippers overlaid with natural lace. Lacebark was also used as mosquito netting, bandages, and protective covering for cradles to shield babies from gnats.85

85

Steeve O. Buckridge, African Lace-Bark in the Caribbean: The Construction of Race, Class, and Gender (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 75–78.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

Figure 12.8 Lacebark dress from Jamaica, donated in 1833 by the Marchioness Cornwallis. Saffron Walden Museum, Essex [no.1833.59]. Photograph: © Saffron Walden Museum, Essex.

Lacebark was a great substitute when manufactured European lace was scarce or too expensive. It was also used to make ‘dress-up’ clothes for special occasions, while both men and women used the lagetto linen for mourning and church dress.86 The lace produced was so exquisite that Sir Thomas Lynch, governor of Jamaica from 1671 to 1674, presented the king of England, Charles II (1660–85) with a cravat made of lacebark.87 The presentation at the royal court brought the lacebark industry some official recognition and praise for African women’s excellent craft skills. The significance of the lacebark industry is undeniable. The industry contributed to the development of an informal slave 86 87

Ibid. Pearman and Prendergast, ‘Plant Portraits’; Sloane, Voyage to the Islands, ii, 22–3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

431

432

steeve o. buckridge

economy and the emergence of a unique group of female entrepreneurs who obtained some wealth within the colonial plantocracy for the fashions they made. It is important to recognize that the lacebark industry did not develop in a vacuum, but was part of a larger global phenomenon that saw an interest in plants. Ecologists Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosemoff remind us that the Atlantic Basin was part of a globalized and connected world, and an agricultural revolution was taking place simultaneously where the knowledge systems brought to the Americas by diasporic Africans were shaping worlds and new identities, including of diasporic African peoples.88

eastern caribbean dress as seduction Slave clothing in some areas of the Caribbean included coded covert expressions and were based on individuals’ relationships with each other and their experiences within their environment. Coded fashions allowed for the transmission of subversive texts to other members of the subordinate community under the very eyes of the oppressor for whom these messages were either inaccessible or inadmissible.89 Hence, dress, with its coded messages, provided enslaved persons with the opportunity to express themselves in such a way that reinforced their commitment to their African heritage, and their fellow enslaved Africans. One example of coded dress was the African headwrap which was very popular among slave women throughout the colonial Atlantic and wider African diaspora. The headwrap was also called a tie-head or a tignon (tiyon) and consisted of a large piece of cloth folded, twisted, and tied in knots around the head to create a headcovering like a turban. Among some enslaved women, headwraps were used to make a statement to signal their objection and resistance to colonial institutions and oppressive policies. In 1786, for instance, Governor Don Esteban Miro of Louisiana 88

89

Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 1–5. Joan Radner (ed.), Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

issued the Tignon Law to prevent women of colour from displaying excessive attention to dress in the streets of New Orleans. According to the Tignon Law, women of colour had to wear a scarf or handkerchief over their hair as a visible sign of their subordinate status and belonging to the slave class, whether they were enslaved or not. Prior to the proclamation, tignons were usually plain and considered by whites as a badge of colonial subjection. In response, the women refused to allow the law to dampen their fashion sensibilities; instead, they continued to cover their hair, but with more inventive and elaborate headdress. Exquisite fabrics fashioned into intricate styles bedecked with jewels made bold and sophisticated fashion statements. Without breaking the law, the women of colour in New Orleans reinterpreted the decree to maintain and enhance their own standards of beauty and at the same time resist the colonial institution that sought to control their bodies and their dress.90 Headwraps in the Caribbean were diverse in style and colour, and could be very ornate in ways that reflected the creativity of the wearer as portrayed in Brunias’ linen market in Figure 12.1 and the portrait the Haitian woman in Figure 12.3. However, in some cases, these headwraps had specific and diverse meanings. Among the Yoruba people of West Africa for example, during Gelede ceremonial performances celebrating women, women wore elaborate headwraps of bright colours.91 African women who arrived in the Americas as slaves were able to maintain and nurture certain styles reflected in colour, materials, and method of tying the headwraps that were distinctive or unique to their particular ethnic group. In some situations, the style of a headwrap was the product of a woman’s own creative and ingenious capabilities. Such distinctiveness in headwraps, combined with the ability to dye fabrics, would have contributed to a multiplicity of ornamental styles and myriad colours within the colonial setting. Figures 12.2, 12.9, and 12.10 highlight the globalization of material in the Atlantic 90

91

Gerilyn Tandberg, ‘Decoration and Decorum: Accessories of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana Women’, Southern Quarterly, 27/1 (1988), 12. Henry John Drewal and Margaret Thompson Drewal, Gelede: Art and Female Power among the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 120.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

433

434

steeve o. buckridge

Figure 12.9 Anon., Portrait of a Young Woman, late eighteenth century. Pastel. Height: 40.6 cm (15.9 in); Width: 32.4 cm (12.7 in). Formerly attributed to Jean-Étienne Liotard. Saint Louis Art Museum 186:1951. Public domain.

region and the array of textiles used to create exquisite headwraps in African diaspora communities. In Figure 12.10, for instance, the nursemaid Neky, from the Danish West Indies, is dressed in servant attire complemented with an ornate headwrap of vibrant colours and matching shawl. Neky’s headwrap captivates the viewer due to the height, fabric, and the design of the headdress and reconfirms the sophistication and vibrant dress customs among Africans in the colonial Atlantic region. In some areas of the Caribbean, as in parts of West Africa, head-ties (headwraps) were fixed by tradition because they were coded. The way the head was tied or how the scarf was styled on the head actually conveyed specific messages about the wearer to the knowledgeable observer. In the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

Figure 12.10 N. P. Holbech, Little Marie on Neky’s Arm, 1838. Oil on canvas, 2,543 × 3,407 pixels. National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen. Photograph by Peter Danstrøm, Licence CC BY-SA 2.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0.

Guadeloupe, for example, headwraps conveyed a woman’s occupation. There were specific headdresses for the cane-cutter, the laundress, the nurse, the midwife, the house servant, and the field worker. In St Lucia, the style of a headwrap reflected the marital status of a woman. Personal style and individual creativity allowed for subtle variations in each design.92 Overall, these codes or 92

Based on a series of discussions with Antonia McDonald-Smythe and other women from St Lucia in 1996. See also Halima Taha, ‘Under Cover’, in Juliette Harris and Pamela Johnson (eds.), Tenderheaded: A Comb-Bending Collection of Hair Stories (New York: Pocket Books, 2001), 141–2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

435

436

steeve o. buckridge

meanings varied from colony to colony and even between regions within a specific colonial territory as material cultures developed and evolved. Perhaps the most fascinating coded messages associated with secular headwraps had to do with love and romance. These headwraps were considered a ‘formal art of flirtation and seduction’. Oral histories recall that in the plantation zones of the French West Indies, a headwrap indicated whether a woman was available and single; it could also mean that she was engaged but might change her mind; or that she might be unfaithful if she liked you well enough!93 These coded headwraps were so widespread that uninitiated male travellers to these regions were warned not to misinterpret the signals they conveyed.94 Headwraps, like other aspects of Atlantic dress custom, were symbolic of a connected globalizing world. Namely, cottons from across Europe and India, silks from the East and batiks from the Dutch East Indies which were traded across European empires and eventually fashioned into colourful and elaborate headwraps across several colonial areas of the Atlantic region. In Suriname, formerly a Dutch colony, coded headwraps were aesthetically pleasing, ornate, and diverse. They often consisted of several different fabrics of bright colours tied together and each style had a specific name and meaning. Some of these meanings were also quite humorous. The headwrap (also known as angisa in Suriname) called ‘Watch me op de hoek’ was worn on special occasions such as a woman’s birthday. This headwrap was tied in such a way that after the head was wrapped closely with a scarf; the loose folds were then gathered and twisted together to stand out from the head. The result of this creative process was a phallic symbol that was meant to evoke a sense of the erotic. When a woman wore this headwrap it meant that she was going to meet her lover. The style called ‘Feda let them talk’ consisted of wrapping the head closely with a scarf in a manner so as to leave three corners of the scarf loose and sticking out. Each corner represented the human tongue and all three 93

94

Derek Walcott, ‘When Love Comes Along: The Ends of the Head-Tie Give a Cue to Your Chances’, with sketches by Derek Aleong in Trinidad Guardian (8 December 1961). Unfortunately, this is no longer practised. Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

tongues implied a lot of chatter, idle talk, or gossiping. When this was worn, the woman sent a message to her admirers and observers – including her rivals or those who enjoyed gossiping about others – that ‘you can chat about me as much as you wish, I do not care!’95 Occasionally, though rarely, some of these headwraps can be seen today at national festivities held in Suriname, where the headwrap is often worn with matching kotomisi or traditional dress (Figure 12.11). As in other parts of the Atlantic world, these dress customs reflected the resilience, dynamism, and persistent creativity of the African diasporic populations using local and globalized materials, dress styles that persisted through the 1800s.

conclusion Europeans failed at the complete deculturation of colonized people as a means of maintaining control. Indigenous people and enslaved Africans, for example, maintained and nurtured aspects of their dress customs, and incorporated globalized material in their everyday wear, even as these evolved. Sumptuary laws did not necessarily stifle creativity, while their absence gave colonized communities and enslaved Africans some flexibility in dress, thus facilitating more individual expression and the rise of new fashion sensibilities. In areas of the Atlantic world, colonial judicature did not guarantee all slaves sufficient clothing. In fact, slave women who received less clothing than men were compelled to find alternative means of securing needed dress. Some were able to buy extra clothes with money they had saved up from selling their produce in the local market. Others received clothes in exchange for sexual favours with white men. Other enslaved African women got involved in clothing manufacture, working as seamstresses and stitching garments from lacebark cloth. Such economic activity led to a cottage industry based on sewing and provided enslaved 95

In Suriname, the women always wear a matching dress (dress = koto) with their headwraps, and the colours of the outfits are based on the woman’s age. Each year there is also a ‘Miss Alida’ contest, where women compete against each other for the best koto and angisa. See also Ilse Henar-Hewitt, Surinamese Koto’s en Angisa’s (Paramaribo: Offsetdrukkerij Westford, 1997), the text includes an English translation.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

437

438

steeve o. buckridge

Figure 12.11 Dressed Surinamese Woman, photograph by Julius Muller, c. 1885. 27.2 × 22.1 cm. 60005631. Tropenmuseum (Royal Tropical Institute), part of the National Museum of World Cultures, Amsterdam, Licence CC BY-SA 3.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0.

women with their own income and the opportunity to provide for their families. Throughout the Atlantic region, members of African diaspora communities appropriated the fashions of their colonizers and adapted European standards of beauty to suit their needs and circumstances. A fine example of cultural appropriation can be seen in the lithograph ‘Sunday Morning in Town’ (Figure 12.12). In the illustration set in Trinidad, the main subjects are portrayed in fine Romantic fashions of the 1830s in Europe. While the man strikes a dashing pose in his coat and a straw hat with umbrella, the woman’s Romantic inspired outfit is complemented by the African-style headwrap and her dress adorned

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

Figure 12.12 Richard Bridgens, ‘Sunday Morning in Town’, from Sketches Taken during a Voyage to, and Residence of Seven Years in, the Island of Trinidad, 1836. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, 38 cm/T 680 (Folio A). Published, London: R. Jennings [1836].

with a necklace of layered beads. Numerous colonized Africans of financial means embraced European dress and globalized fashions to socially elevate themselves in colonial society and simultaneously resist the stereotypes long associated with African people. However, acculturation did not eradicate racism and Africans in diasporic communities continued to face discrimination long after slavery and into the present. As seen in Bridgens’ lithograph, enslaved and freed Africans manipulated globalized materials to create fancy dress and magnificent fashions across the African diaspora. Arguably, for enslaved diasporic Africans who blended European styles with their customary dress practices, this was not merely a merger of these two elements, but is best understood as having a distinction between ‘deep’ and ‘surface’

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

439

440

steeve o. buckridge

structure. In Jamaica, for instance, deep structure was African while surface structure was influenced by other cultures with which Africans had been in contact.96 This analogy, according to Mervyn Alleyne, provides the opportunity to go beyond the mere mixing of African and European elements to an understanding of the ‘process’ or the ‘movement’ in all aspects of Jamaican culture including dress.97 Furthermore, the survival of African customs in dress required creativity and ingenuity and the principal transmitters of these customs in dress were African women. In fact a distinctive characteristic of African societies in the Americas was the role women played as the principal exponents and protectors of African culture.98 Proslavery practitioners were not concerned when slaves retained an African aesthetic in dress or combined it with other cultural influences, which emphasized the differences between Africans and whites; they also did not wish to provide more expensive clothing. Women field slaves returned to their cottages at the end of their day and had some autonomy to pursue their tasks as seamstresses, dyers, lacebark makers, quilt makers, spinners, and weavers; and simultaneously taught their children culturally appropriate content including customs in dress. Across the colonial Atlantic region, dress customs were shaped by local and global trade that bridged international clothing and textile manufacturers and distributors with large consumer populations in the Atlantic world. Clothing as material objects and other adornment modifications mirrored not only diverse and personal taste, style, culture, and identity, but also the complex movement of dress items across borders and colonial empires to clothe, protect, and reimagine African Atlantic bodies. In this sense, the clothed body became an expression of multiple geographies and the beginning of new identities with new raiment of self. 96

97 98

Mervyn Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1988), 149. Ibid. Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (London: Heinemann, 1990), 153.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

dress of diaspora african communities

select bibliography Adams, Charles Dennis, Flowering Plants of Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1972). Barclay, Alexander, A Practical View of the Present State of Slavery in the West Indies (London: Smith and Elder, 1826). Binder, Pearl, Dressing Up and Dressing Down (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986). Bradley Foster, Helen, New Raiments of Self: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Berg, 1997). Buckridge, Steeve O., The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004). Carmichael, A. C., Domestic Manners; and Social Conditions of the White, Colored and Negro Population of the West Indies, 2 vols. (London: Whittaker, Treacher, 1833). Din, Gilbert C., Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, 1763–1803 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999). DiPaolo Loren, Diana, The Archaeology of Clothing and Bodily Adornment in Colonial America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010). DuPlessis, Robert, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Hall, Stuart (ed.), Representations: Cultural Representations Signifying Practices (London: Open University, 1997). Holland Braund, Kathryn E., Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1680–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). Lemire, Beverly, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Long, Edward, The History of Jamaica or General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of the Island: With Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws and Government, 3 vols. (London: T. Lowndes, 1774). McDonald, Roderick A., The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Slave Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

441

442

steeve o. buckridge Sloane, Sir Hans, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christopher and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-Footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles, Etc. of the Last of Those Islands, 2 vols. (London: B. M., 1707–25).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.014 Published online by Cambridge University Press

part iii Many Worlds of Fashion

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

13

w

‘BLACK CLOTH’ Status and Identity in Islamic West Africa, c. 1500–1900 colleen e. kriger For centuries, a singular cotton textile known as ‘black cloth’ was produced, traded, and proudly worn by elites in Muslim societies across West Africa. Created and developed alongside Islam’s early global expansion south of the Sahara, garments made of indigo-dyed ‘black cloth’ were a prestigious fashion among ruling and scholarly elites by at least the sixteenth century. Named for and identified by its unusual and distinctive colour, ‘black cloth’ was saturated with indigo dye and finished with a shiny glaze. When ‘black cloth’ became an important item of Atlantic global trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attempts by European merchants to displace it with imitations failed in the eyes of Africa’s merchants and consumers. Instead, ‘black cloth’ manufactured and exported by the Sokoto Caliphate, a prominent reformist Muslim state in the nineteenth century, captured demand in markets all over West and North Africa. This chapter analyses a variety of historical evidence documenting ‘black cloth’ as a major global textile, stately art form, and elite fashion of Islamic West Africa.1 I would like to thank the Pasold Research Fund for research support, Rogier Bedaux for clarification of recent Tellem dating, Beverly Lemire for her editorial suggestions, and Paul Lovejoy for several corrections. I dedicate this chapter to the memory of Philip James Shea. 1 Islamic art does not recognize the European division of art vs. craft and appears in many forms and materials, especially textiles and garments. See S. Baier and J. Bloom, ‘Art and Architecture: Themes and Variations’, in John L. Esposito (ed.), The Oxford History of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 218–21.

445

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

446

colleen e. kriger

Figure 13.1 Rev. A. W. Banfield with Nupe mallam, Pategi, Sokoto Caliphate, 1903. Photograph A. W. Banfield Collection. © The estate of Frank Banfield, St Catharines, Ontario, Canada.

An example of ‘black cloth’ appears in a carefully arranged photograph taken in 1903 in what was becoming colonial Nigeria (Figure 13.1). The image shows two prominent styles of elite dress made and worn by high-ranking Muslim men in the Sokoto Caliphate. In both cases, characteristic features of the clothing identify the man who wears it as accomplished, well mannered, and worthy of respect. On the left, a recently arrived Canadian missionary has adopted the riga saki, an elaborately embroidered Caliphate robe associated with prominent Muslim men and government officials, as a sign of status and in proper deference to his Muslim hosts.2 He sits facing his ‘Nupe mallam’ – the learned Muslim teacher who was instructing him in the local Nupe language. The mallam himself wears a white cotton litham, or turban with veil, carefully wrapped in the special style for covering the mouth, and two cotton robes together – an indigo-dyed and glazed ‘black’ one over a white one – indicating the distinction he has achieved as a respected Qur’ā nic scholar. Regional terms in the Hausa language for this scholarly tradition of pairing ‘black’ and white

2

Colleen E. Kriger, ‘Robes of the Sokoto Caliphate’, African Arts, 21/3 (1988), 52–7, 78–9, 85–6; Colleen E. Kriger, ‘Textile Production and Gender in the Sokoto Caliphate’, Journal of African History, 34 (1993), 361–401.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

robes – ri’biye (Sokoto), ha’di (Kano), and gami (Katsina)3 – suggest it had been well established as an elite mode of Islamic dress for men in the Hausa kingdoms before the founding of the greater Sokoto Caliphate in 1808 (Map 13.1). The nineteenth-century Caliphate era was a remarkable time of economic expansion, achieved in part by an enormous increase in the manufacture and export of cotton textiles, especially ‘black cloth’. European visitors to the Sokoto Caliphate took note of ‘black cloth’ and in some rare cases purchased or were given examples of it. The nineteenth century was a time of transition in Euro-African relations and commerce as the Atlantic slave trade was being replaced by an altogether different trade in tropical commodities and raw materials for industrial production in Europe. Increasing numbers of Western geographers and adventurers travelled to inland areas of Africa to gather information and map out major riverways and overland trade routes. And in the case of Great Britain, locating sources of cotton and cotton textiles was a matter of concerted interest. The estimable German geographer Heinrich Barth, aware of Kano City’s reputation as a major production and trading hub in the Sokoto Caliphate, made it a point to reside there twice during his British-sponsored expedition from 1849 to 1855. Barth’s richly detailed journals display his deep interest in observing the wide range of goods and products in Kano’s markets and his keen eye for assessing the qualities of materials and workmanship of local manufactures. Barth attributed Kano’s prominence in West Africa’s interregional trade to the cotton cloth that was woven and dyed in surrounding towns for export markets, noting the variety of distinctive robes and body wrappers and singling out two items of ‘black cloth’. One was a rectangular shawl or wrapper worn by women and the other, the ‘black’ turban/veil worn by men. Barth himself, on the advice of his official guide, purchased a ‘black’ robe to wear over a white one as they were passing through the Saharan city of Agades on their way towards Kano. He began to appreciate the high prestige value of these robes when it was 3

George P. Bargery and Diedrich Westermann, A Hausa-English Dictionary and English-Hausa Vocabulary (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 852. For a Sokoto Caliphate ‘black robe’ (kore), see the British Museum website, www.bri tishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Af1843-0311-53 (accessed 20 October 2022).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

447

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

100

50

0

0

Ibadan

100 mi

200 km

Bight of Benin

Lagos

Cities and Towns

Kaiama

RA

Idah

Lokoja

Bauchi Gombe

Garua

Marua

Dikwa

Bight of Biafra

Calabar

TIV Banyo

Chad

Lake Kukawa

Tibati

Ngaundere

Koncha

Wase e JOS nu Yola P L AT E A U . Be Muri R A D A M AWA Nassarawa

Abuja

Zaria

RAM

Katagum B O R N O

AGA

Hadejia

DAM

Zinder

NI NG I

Kano

Katsina

Maradi

Map 13.1 The Sokoto Caliphate, c. 1895.

Ilorin

NUPE Raba Bida

Kontagora

Yauri

Jega

BORGU Bussa Nikki

GOBIR

A MF Z A Gusau Gwandu

Birnin Sokoto Gaoure Argungu

Sokoto Caliphate

GURMA

Dori K O A P T Torodi Say LI

Ni

ge r

Sokoto Caliphate (c.1895)

a ol

iger

ng

R. N

R.

Go R.

BAGIRMI

N

status and identity in islamic west africa

rumoured he had received them from the Sultan of Agades. Barth’s journal provides a general map and estimate of the consumer markets for Kano’s textile exports, based on his many well-informed contacts and his own travels in the Sahara and around the Caliphate. Cloth from Kano went north across the Sahara to Tripoli, was in heavy demand in the city of Timbuktu, travelled west all the way to the port of Arguin on the Atlantic coast, and could be regularly found in nearby entrepôts east and southeast of Kano City. In other words, the textile merchants and manufacturers of the Sokoto Caliphate were supplying cotton cloth to consumers across West Africa and beyond.4 Barth’s assessment was echoed in 1895 by Charles Robinson, an explorer and member of Britain’s Hausa Association, who returned from a three-month residence in Kano City calling it the ‘Manchester of tropical Africa’. Although lacking Barth’s technical knowledge, Robinson noted that the greater part of Kano’s cotton cloth production was dyed with indigo and confirmed that the Sokoto Caliphate was manufacturing and exporting cotton textiles on an impressively large scale.5 ‘Black cloth’ was a major item in West Africa’s pre-colonial commerce.

islam and cotton in west africa The most prestigious and widely known ‘black cloth’ garments – the litham and tailored robe for men, and shawl or body wrapper for women – share long and complex histories. Skills and techniques for producing their distinguishing features were adopted and refined gradually over the eleventh to sixteenth centuries, in tandem with the introduction and expansion of cotton growing, processing, and manufacture in areas across sub-Saharan Africa. This global process, the domestication and dissemination of annual varieties of cotton throughout much of the Afro-Eurasian world, was an important part of the religious, political, economic, and cultural expansion of Islam. However, establishing cotton production was neither simple nor 4

5

Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 1849– 1855 (1857; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1965), i, 316, 510. Charles H. Robinson, Hausaland or Fifteen Hundred Miles through the Central Soudan (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1896), vi, 113.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

449

450

colleen e. kriger

smooth. Cultivation of cotton was beset with difficulties in adapting it to varying climates, and equally problematic were the attendant technical problems of how to treat and process cotton fibre for spinning and how to create suitable thread for weaving cloth. Although it took several centuries for the new plant to gain acceptance, estimates are that by the early second millennium cotton was being grown throughout the Muslim world.6 What is known about the West African case fits well within this historical schema, from the arrival of early Muslim merchants crossing the Sahara trading salt for African gold, to the growing influence of Islamic law and scholarship in sub-Saharan towns and cities, and the rise and florescence of Muslim states and empires during the second millennium. Cotton textile manufacture was established in West Africa as an integral feature of the globalizing civilization of early Islam. Evidence from major West African languages shows the Arabic word for cotton, qutn, introduced perhaps as early as the ninth or tenth century, as Arabic-speaking merchants began to dominate the major trans-Saharan trading networks, some settling permanently in entrepôts south of the desert.7 It was mainly through contacts with trans-Saharan merchants that the basic agricultural and technological foundations for making cotton cloth were successfully introduced into West Africa. But how ‘black cloth’ developed into distinctive and widely known Muslim garments was a largely undocumented historical process. A probable contributing factor would have been the prestige of political leaders and their formal exchanges of official or rare textiles, a long-standing practice among Muslims worldwide. Another likely factor was the association of ‘black cloth’ with Muslim scholars, jurists, and literacy. Over time, ‘black cloth’ came to be associated with a range of individuals among or connected to West Africa’s Indigenous Muslim elites. Early examples of trans-Saharan Islamic influence were observed in the state of Ghana, conveniently located between western 6

7

Andrew Watson, ‘The Rise and Spread of Old World Cotton’, in Veronica Gervers (ed.), Studies in Textile History (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1977), 359–60. Colleen E. Kriger, ‘Mapping the History of Cotton Textile Production in Precolonial West Africa’, African Economic History, 33 (2005), 109–10.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

Sahara trade routes and the richest gold fields farther south. Mideleventh-century Arabic texts described Ghana’s capital as two separate but conjoined towns, one where the king and his subjects resided, the other inhabited by Muslims. A respectful coexistence had been reached within the religious sphere. In the Muslim town, there were said to be twelve mosques, including one specifically for Friday prayers, with many resident scholars and jurists among the population. Similarly, in the king’s town, there were numerous shrines and religious adepts devoted to local beliefs and practices. Nevertheless, there was a growing Muslim presence at court, where the king’s treasury official, interpreters, and many of his ministers were Muslims. Clothing in cotton or silk was being adopted by Indigenous office holders and the king himself wore a fine cotton turban wrapped around his gold-encrusted cap. Tailored garments, however, were prohibited to all but the king and his chosen heir. By the end of the century, the king of Ghana was said to have converted to Islam and on that basis Arabic chroniclers deemed Ghana a Muslim state. In West Africa, however, conversion meant accepting the Muslim faith and welcoming Muslim believers while allowing the practice of local religions to continue.8 Around this same time, cotton cultivation and manufacture of cotton textiles were underway in two areas of West Africa, each in proximity to a major axis of trans-Saharan trade. One of them was in the west, and included Ghana, while the other was located in the vicinity of Lake Chad, where central Saharan routes led across the desert to Tripoli or eastward to Cairo.9 Arabic sources provide 8

9

N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds. and trans.), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 79–80; Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 34–9; Nehemia Levtzion, ‘Islam in Africa to 1800’, in Esposito (ed.), The Oxford History of Islam, 477–479. Kriger, ‘Mapping’, 95–7; Colleen E. Kriger, ‘“Guinea Cloth”: Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles in West Africa before and during the Atlantic Slave Trade’, in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (eds.), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford: Pasold Research Fund, 2009), 105–26. For early Muslim transSaharan trade, see Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xxv, 56–63.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

451

452

colleen e. kriger

important evidence attesting to cotton development in these areas, based on information from Muslim travellers who had visited towns and cities in and around the Sahara and sub-Saharan regions. Summaries of this evidence follow, for the western cotton area first, and then the cotton area linked to the central Sahara. Al-Bakri’s account, written in 1067–8, brings together a rich and wide variety of oral and written descriptions. One section focuses on a place called Takrur, an area located in the vicinity of the Senegal River and the most important gold deposits in Saharan trade. There were towns inhabited by converted Muslims, and one ‘king’ was said to be at war with neighbouring ‘pagans’. Money in Takrur took the form of sorghum, salt, copper rings, and fine cotton cloth called shakkiyyat, and further on is a description of Sila, a town where weavers manufactured shakkiyyat currency into units measuring four spans square (approximately 36 inches). The few details given suggest labour in currency production was specialized and weavers were producing fine cotton fabric, presumably according to specific standards. Other references suggest a similar cloth (shegga) was preferred for making the litham, or turban/veil, worn by the Muslim Berbers who controlled the trans-Saharan gold trade and were known as Mulaththamun, ‘people of the litham’.10 Threads for making such cloth would have been of high quality, both finely spun and strong in tensile strength, but the work of spinning, presumably by women, was either located elsewhere or simply not observed or recorded. A later compilation written in 1337–8 by al-Umari focused mostly on information about the Mali Empire and the famous pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 by its leader, Mansa Musa. Easily overlooked, however, is a brief but important section of anecdotes about cotton clothing and manufacture far to the east of Mali in the Muslim state of Kanem, located on the central Saharan trade routes linked to Tripoli and Cairo. Kanem’s government supported an army of camel-mounted soldiers who wore the litham and special 10

Levtzion and Hopkins (eds. and trans.), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources, 77–8; Lloyd C. Briggs, Tribes of the Sahara (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 99–105; Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 99–105. For Sila as an entrepôt, see Gomez, African Dominion, 35–8.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

workshops where artisans manufactured cotton cloth currency known as dandi. These currency units were woven into lengths measuring 10 cubits (180 inches), with purchases calculated in smaller units from 1/4 cubit (4½ inches) on up. Other currencies – cowries, beads, round copper pieces, and silver coins – originated in places far beyond Kanem but all of them were reckoned in units of the locally made cotton cloth.11 Specialized skills necessary for weaving the high-quality fabric of ‘black cloth’ may have been developed and promoted initially by artisans associated with cotton currency workshops. Described in major entrepôts where foreign travellers were able to observe them, there could have been other such workshops in operation, also presumably under careful management and control. Precise specifications for these currency units were not given, but standards would have been necessary to ensure they were accepted in economic transactions. Hence a well-trained workforce was key in maintaining those standards. Related to this point, there likely were some gradual cultural consequences to the circulation of cotton currencies. People engaged in marketing and trade would have become more familiar with cotton cloth by handling it on a regular basis. Some might even have acquired special expertise in examining and verifying the qualities of cotton textiles. In short, it is hard to imagine ‘black cloth’ being envisioned or produced without a highly skilled labour force and a market of knowledgeable consumers. An extraordinary archaeological trove of cotton cloths, some dated as early as the eleventh century, offers another perspective on cotton manufacture and consumption in West Africa during this time. Over five hundred fragments of textiles and garments were excavated from burial graves in a remote area of the middle Niger valley. Technical analyses of the fabrics provided detailed evidence that cotton was being grown, processed, spun, woven, 11

Levtzion and Hopkins (eds. and trans.), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources, 259– 60, 265. There is no reference to the colour of the litham, or the social status or ethnicity of Kanem’s soldiers. Studies of the central Saharan Tuareg peoples have noted men’s deeply dyed indigo robes and turban/veils but historical analysis of this distinctive clothing in a larger social and economic context has not yet been done. See Brett and Fentress, The Berbers, 200–24.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

453

454

colleen e. kriger

dyed, and tailored by local artisans using their own distinctive tools and equipment. They produced two main types of fabrics: textiles for clothing, made with a balanced weave of warp and weft threads; or heavier blanket cloth, woven with weft threads covering the warp threads entirely.12 Also significant is the special location of the burial caves, known as the Bandiagara Escarpment. Legendary as an area of refuge partly because of its rugged terrain, it was a place where individuals and peoples who wished to maintain their traditional beliefs and institutions could do so beyond the reach of outsiders. Researchers received permission to excavate in certain select burial caves primarily because the Dogon people who lived in the area associated those caves with their predecessors, whom they called the Tellem. Most of the textiles came from seven caves which yielded dates covering a 500-year period from the eleventh to fifteenth century. Hence the many specimens of cotton cloth found preserved in the cool dry caves of Bandiagara show that cotton clothing and tailored garments were worn in rural West Africa from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and by people who continued to practise their own customs and religion. Most importantly, the Bandiagara textiles provide evidence of the skills in cotton textile manufacture that were established in West Africa during this period. The fabrics have been firmly identified as locally made rather than imported, based primarily on the type of loom used in making them. Systematic technical analyses of the woven fabrics – their widths, structures, and patterns – made it possible to gauge the loom’s specific features and limitations. Woven widths were relatively narrow, generally between 7½ and 10 inches, and the regularity of weave structure indicated use of a reed and separate patterning shafts. Together these features are consonant with the narrow horizontal treadle loom used by male weavers across West Africa, specifically associated with Muslim trade networks and large-scale manufacture and marketing of cotton textiles. Several styles of men’s tunics, the most frequently found tailored garments, were made of patterned cloth pieced and 12

This paragraph and the two following summarize the works of scholars cited in the following footnote.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

Figure 13.2 Man’s cotton indigo-dyed bonnet, Tellem Cave C, eleventh to fifteenth century. H 23 cm; W 19 cm. MNB C 71–180, National Museum of Mali, Bamako. Photo by G. Jansen. Copyright Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, The Netherlands.

sewn together in either a straight or flared fashion. There were no cotton cloths among the burial goods for women. Many of the garment fabrics were patterned in a variety of ways using alternating threads of undyed yellowish cotton contrasting with threads dyed in shades of indigo blue. Indigo dyeing of woven fabrics was also practised, a forerunner of the ‘black cloth’ piece-dyeing technique but not yet producing the most intense depth of colour (Figure 13.2). These richly informative archaeological specimens, which document the baseline skills and standards reached in cotton and indigo technologies by the eleventh century, are of vital importance, though they have not yet been acknowledged in narratives of West African social and economic history.13 Similarly, the extraordinary corpus of Islamic art and material culture in Africa demands much more scholarly study and appreciation by historians. 13

Rita Bolland, Tellem Textiles: Archaeological Finds from Burial Caves in Mali’s Bandiagara Cliff (Leiden: Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, 1991), 11, 14–23, 52–77; Rogier M. A. Bedaux, ‘Les plus anciens tissus retrouvés par les archéologues’, in J. Devisse et al. (eds.), Vallées du Niger (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), 456–63.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

455

456

colleen e. kriger

west african ‘black cloth’ Relatively little has been written about textiles in the history of Islamic West Africa. It is probable, however, that there are more references to clothing and garments in West African Arabic sources than are briefly presented here. An ‘enrobing’ vignette attributed to fifteenth-century Songhay will provide an introductory example of formal garment ceremonies, showing that they were known and practised in early West African states. The rest of this section focuses on the earliest known evidence of ‘black cloth’ as a textile genre, dating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When and where ‘black cloth’ was first created will probably never be determined, its multi-faceted social and cultural history leaving scant surviving evidence. One important question to pursue is the possible role of Qur’ā nic scholars in the early history of ‘black cloth’, given that instructors in sixteenth-century Timbuktu supported their schools by managing tailoring workshops with their students working as apprentices.14 Pairing ‘black’ and ‘white’ robes to mark distinguished Muslim scholars (see Figure 13.1), a practice having specific regional terms in the Hausa language, is also of interest on this score. As will be shown in the next section, these linguistic data tie in with the Sokoto Caliphate case, where scholars organized and managed the production and export of ‘black cloth’. An important Arabic text for West African history is Ta’rı̄ kh alfattā sh, a chronicle of the Songhay Empire written by Timbuktu scholars. Included are examples showing when, why, how, and to whom robes and other garments were formally awarded or given as gifts. One robing ceremony attributed to the state of Mema during the fifteenth century is useful for illustrating garment exchange as a visual statement about political relations. Among Mema’s twelve great chiefs was one, the Tuki-firi-soma, who officially represented the region’s Indigenous people and to whom the king of nearby Masina owed a solemn oath of loyalty. Protocol required the king to stand humbly covered in dust, facing the Tuki-firi-soma, to recite 14

Gomez, African Dominion, 287; Elias N. Saad, Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 86–7, 92, 104, 229–30.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

his official declaration. Then he removed his robe and bestowed it upon the Indigenous leader, thereby sealing the oath and completing the ceremony. In the French translation of the text there is an interesting note where the translators call attention to problems in textile nomenclature. In translating the term for the king’s garment, they chose the word boubou instead of chemise (qamī ş , shirt), preferring the vernacular term for the large loose-fitting robes worn by Muslim men in West Africa. Their choice was certainly more appropriate than shirt, an unceremonious undergarment, and it underscores the importance of cultural context in descriptions of garments and textiles.15 A detailed historical example of formal garment exchange comes in an episode of Ta’rı̄ kh al-fattā sh surveying official policies in Songhay, where two items of ‘black cloth’ were specified as part of a high-level customary payment. In this case the episode is set in the Songhay Empire during the reign of Askiya Dawud (1549–82). It appears in a description of agricultural lands (plantations or fiefs) controlled by the central government, with a documented historical example given to demonstrate how and by whom they were administered. The Abda plantation was located in Dendi province, situated astride the Niger River south of Gao. Yearly harvests due to the government were set at one thousand sacks of rice and crop production was carried out by slave labour, managed by overseers. Abda’s field slaves numbered 200 with four overseers, all managed by a royal slave official called the Misakul Allah who reported directly to Askiya Dawud himself. For preparing and delivering the crop, the Askiya supplied each plantation with seeds as well as leather for making the rice sacks. His personal messenger delivered to the Misakul Allah the customary payment of 1,000 kola nuts, a bar of rock salt, a ‘black robe’ for the Misakul Allah, 15

Mahmoud Ka’ti, Tarikh al-fattash, ed. and trans. O. Houdas and M. Delafosse (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, [1913] 1981), 80–1; Nehemia Levtzion, ‘A Seventeenth-Century Chronicle by Ibn al-Mukhtar: A Critical Study of “Tarikh al-fattash”’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 43/3 (1971), appendix, 592–3. This passage is among those Levtzion identified as belonging to ms. C and I use it only as a generic example of robe ceremony. On garments as gifts and in ceremonies in Muslim societies, see Yedida Stillman, Arab Dress: A Short History from the Dawn of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2000).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

457

458

colleen e. kriger

and a large ‘black wrapper’ for his wife.16 The significance of kola and rock salt as valuable items of external trade suggests the same may have been true for the garments. In any case, this description provides evidence of ‘black cloth’ moving through high official channels in sixteenth-century Songhay. During this same period, ‘black cloth’ was made and worn over a thousand miles away along the upper west coast of Africa, the region where Takrur’s cotton currency was described in the eleventh century. A new era of Atlantic trade had begun in the fifteenth century with the arrival of traders and settlers from Portugal. André Álvares de Almada, an Afro-Portuguese native of the Cape Verde Islands, grew up speaking Crioulo and several other local languages. After working as a merchant in and around the cosmopolitan trading zones of the lower Senegal and Gambia Rivers in the 1560s and 1580s, Almada compiled a detailed record of his experiences and observations. Of special interest to him were the local cotton textiles produced and worn all along the coast and inland since the heyday of the Saharan gold trade. In towns north of the Gambia River, for example, Wolof men dressed in Muslim-style tailored garments – loose-fitting tunics and trousers – made of fine cotton cloth woven into black and white patterns (i.e. indigo-dyed and undyed threads). Almada was unusually knowledgeable about indigo, having seen imported dye tablets used in the islands, so he was keen to observe the way indigo was produced and used on the mainland. In his estimation the Wolof indigo dye was of superior quality – dazzling to the eye – and it was traded regionally. Almada summarized the indigo dyeing process systematically, starting with the plants it came from, when and how the leaves were gathered and processed into dye, the important fermentation stage of the dyebath proper, and the dipping and drying, into and out of the dye pots. He noted the dyers were also skilled in dyeing full lengths of woven cloth, colouring them deep black or blue like satins, and that this same indigo dyeing was practised in Sereer communities. There was no mention of the glazing and polishing process, which would have been done by specialists in another workshop. In one kingdom of 16

Ka’ti, Tarikh al-fattash, 179–80; Levtzion, ‘Chronicle’, 579, 589; Gomez, African Dominion, 340–54.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

Wolof and Sereer people, Almada witnessed indigo ‘black wrappers’ (pano preto in Crioulo) worn as a special fashion among elite women. Characterizing the cloths admiringly as elegant, he was especially taken by the way some women wore them draped over their elaborate braided hairdos. He also noted the graceful way these women carried themselves, and singled out the ‘queens’ among them, presumably royal women, whose manner conveyed an impressive air of calm and refinement. Almada made no reference, however, to mosques or formal Muslim practice.17 How could such a technically challenging and visually singular textile as ‘black cloth’ be worn in two places so far away from each other? Long-distance trade is much more likely than independent invention; but by way of what trade routes? These two sites of ‘black cloth’ – the locales and their peoples – had been part of the Mali Empire during its peak period in the fourteenth century. In the far west, Wolof kingdoms had become tributary to Mali when their kings converted to Islam. But with Mali’s power weakening towards the end of the fourteenth century, the Wolof kingdoms broke away to form their own independent alliance, still considered Muslim by their rulers’ profession of the faith. The city of Gao and Dendi province to its south, geographically and culturally distant from the Mande heartland, were incorporated into Mali’s successor, the Songhay Empire, some time in the fifteenth century.18 It is therefore possible that the Wolof kingdoms and Gao received ‘black cloth’ in interregional Muslim trade and/or official ceremonial exchange during the fourteenth-century Mali Empire. Styles and fashions of Muslim dress for men and women would have circulated widely at this time, especially among political authorities as well as prominent Muslim scholars, teachers, and merchants. 17

18

P. E. H. Hair (trans.), André Álvares de Almada’s Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea (Typescript, Department of History, University of Liverpool, July 1984), ch. 2, 18–19; ch. 3, 29; ch. 4, 36. For indigo, see Colleen E. Kriger, ‘“Our indico designe”: Planting and Processing Indigo for Export, Upper Guinea Coast, 1684–1702’, in Robin Law, Suzanne Schwarz, and Silke Strickrodt (eds.), Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013), 104–6. Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6–11; Gomez, African Dominion, 125–32, 179–83.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

459

460

colleen e. kriger

The oldest known surviving ‘black cloth’ was brought to Europe before 1659, by way of Euro-African trade on the west coast of Africa. This unusual man’s robe (Figure 13.3) was acquired by a German merchant in the kingdom of Allada, in what is now the Republic of Benin. It is one-of-a-kind, made up of over sixty pieces of two types of cloth – ‘black cloth’ and a well-known type of blanket – both the products of workshops in the interior regions of West Africa. On the coast at Allada, such cloth would have been considered highly valuable and prestigious as a long-distance trade item from the Muslim north. Where the robe originated cannot be determined but it was probably a gift from merchants or officials representing a trading partner and when taken to Germany it joined the treasures in the Kunstkammer of Christof Weickmann. It survives today among the collections of the Ulmer Museum in Ulm, Germany.19

Figure 13.3 Man’s robe, collected before 1659. H 129 cm, W 196 cm. Weickmann Collection, Museum Ulm. © Museum Ulm, Ulm, Germany.

19

For provenance of the Weickmann Collection, see Adam Jones, ‘A Collection of African Art in Seventeenth-Century Germany’, African Arts, 27/2 (1994), 28–43, 92–4. For analyses of the robes (omitting the ‘black cloth’), see Brigitte Menzel, ‘Textiles in Trade in West Africa’, in Textiles in Trade: Proceedings of the Textile Society of America Biennial Symposium (14– 16 September 1990), 83–93, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsacnf/611/ (accessed 4 June 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

Focusing attention on the construction and features of the garment yields important information about textile manufacture, levels of skill, and consumer tastes in West Africa. Where and why these two distinctly different types of textile – garment and blanket cloth – were pieced together to make this unusual robe is not known. And it is not surprising that on the few occasions this robe has been studied, the focus was primarily on the blanket cloth and its bold colour contrasts, woven patterning, and varied textures. Viewing ‘black cloth’ casually or for the first time, there seem to be no distinctive visual features. The understated beauty of ‘black cloth’ comes from the dazzling intensity of its colour – the deep, strong, vivid indigo blue – and the unusual glazed finish. However, achieving these particular qualities of colour and glaze is highly skilled, labour-intensive, and technologically complex work, and in West Africa the finest ‘black cloths’ (pano preto) could be priced as highly as the most elaborate brocade-patterned textiles (obra or pano d’obra).20 How and why ‘black cloth’ was so widely admired and singled out as a special fashion can be better understood by viewing these two fabrics side by side and systematically comparing them (Figure 13.4). The cloths share two fundamental features: they are both woven of cotton and both have an average density of about 74 to 81 threads per square inch. However, their threads are spun and woven in completely different ways, creating completely different fabric structures. ‘Black cloth’ is made of very fine, evenly spun white threads, each woven singly, making a fabric light in weight, yet sturdy, and with a very smooth and regular texture. It was woven this way to be dyed in one piece in an indigo dyebath, taking the time and attention to impart a uniformly deep blue hue. In contrast, the cotton threads of the blanket are not as finely or evenly spun. Paired white threads make up the length-wise warp, covered entirely by the cross-wise threads. The latter are mainly white or indigo blue, alternated by the weaver to create striking patterns and textural effects. The blanket fabric is obviously much heavier in weight and structure than the ‘black cloth’. 20

António Carreira, Panaria Cabo-Verdiano-Guineense (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1968), 88, 95, 127.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

461

462

colleen e. kriger

Figure 13.4

Detail, Weickmann robe. Photo by the author with permission. © Museum Ulm.

Juxtaposing these cloths also allows a comparison of the shades of indigo blue and what they indicate about the labour and skill of the dyer, and the time involved in dyeing. The dyed threads of the blanket are a lighter more uneven shade of blue compared to the dyed ‘black cloth’ fabric. This difference has much to do with the basic challenge of indigo dyeing on cotton. Dyeing cotton, a plant fibre, is more difficult than dyeing animal fibres such as wool or silk, which receive and absorb dyes more easily. And dyeing with indigo is chemically very complex. Two chemical changes must take place: one, to make the indigo dyestuff soluble in water; and two, to make the dye turn blue. Dipping a white cloth into an indigo dyebath does not make it turn blue. Instead, the cloth must be stirred and aerated in the dye because only through oxidation does indigo turn blue. Blue colour becomes fixed on the thread or cloth after it leaves the dyebath. Once dry, the thread or fabric may be returned for more dipping and aerating if deeper colour is desired. These two fabrics exhibit striking differences in the quality of indigo blue. The lighter blue threads in the blanket fabric may have had only several dippings in the dyebath. And the colour is uneven – the cotton fibres were not as carefully processed for receiving the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

dye and the threads are not as finely spun as those in the ‘black cloth’. A present-day viewer used to industrially manufactured textiles may prefer the uneven hues and textures of the blanket. ‘Black cloth’ must be appreciated, however, for its time and place. The smooth and uniform weave of this fabric was achieved with threads spun on a thin wooden hand-held spindle with a ceramic weight at one end. Control was extremely challenging and threads this fine were not the norm. Moreover, the woven cloth has had longer and repeated dyebaths, building up the shades to achieve the deepest, richest, most fully consistent colour – almost black. Then a glazing substance was rubbed onto the right side of the fabric to give it a glossy, sometimes coppery-coloured sheen. This investment of skill, labour, and judgement created an intensely rich, glowing, and uninterrupted expanse of the bluest indigo blue. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ‘black cloth’ became an item in Euro-African trade along the Senegambian coast. French and English merchants eager to obtain supplies of gum acacia (gum arabic) to ship to their textile and paper manufacturers back home, quickly learned that they had to have supplies of ‘black cloth’ on hand in order to close a deal. However, they were entirely dependent on the Moorish (Muslim) merchants who specialized in the export gum trade, created inland bulking centres for it, and organized its transport to the coast. Always included among the goods Moorish merchants demanded in exchange for their gum was a certain number of prestigious ‘black cloths’, necessary either for their own purposes or for satisfying the demands of their gum suppliers.21 Over the course of the eighteenth century the Senegambia gum trade grew exponentially. The need for regular supplies of ‘black cloth’ in greater volume sparked efforts on the part of French and English merchants to have imitations made, especially after 1750. Imitation ‘black cloth’ thus became an important commodity in global trade. Called by a variety of names in French and English – toiles bleues, toiles noires, guinées, pièces de guinées, blue cloths, blue bafts, black bafts – the most successful of the imitations were 21

Philip Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), i, 215–18, 237, 260–1, 322–3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

463

464

colleen e. kriger

made in the vicinity of Pondicherry, a port on India’s Coromandel coast. European merchants seeking supplies of ‘black cloth’ imitations were careful to monitor quality and price, as a letter between merchants spelled out vividly in 1819. It had to be finely woven and even in texture and the colour had to be a deep indigo blue with a coppery-coloured glowing sheen like the feathers on a pigeon’s breast. Cloths not meeting these requirements were deemed unsuitable for the gum trade and would have to be shipped elsewhere.22 Interestingly, the small swatch of Pondicherry ‘black cloth’ imitation attached to the letter differs markedly in its thread count from those of the five surviving examples of West African ‘black cloth’ I have examined. The proportion of weft to warp in the African ‘black cloths’ is around 7 or 8 to 10, while the Indian example is around 4 to 10, the latter a proportion that in comparison would make a slightly heavier fabric. It is also noteworthy that the sample cloth is not glazed, suggesting that the Pondicherry imitations were shipped in what West African buyers would recognize as a semi-finished state. Meanwhile, new industrializing cotton manufacturers in Europe were being encouraged to make their own imitations of Africanmade and Indian-made ‘black cloth’ and other textiles for carrying out commerce on the Guinea coast. A British sea captain, veteran of ten trading voyages to Africa between 1786 and 1800, wrote that the so-called ‘blue bafts’ made in India were superior to the imitations then being made in England. He noted that merchants and consumers in Africa could easily tell the difference and in choosing between the two would always decide in favour of the Indian version. What effect these imitations were having on production of ‘black cloth’ in West Africa, especially around the Senegambia region, is still open to question and further study.23 While it might 22

23

Letter from Havre, 21 October 1819. Lee Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA. John Adams, Sketches taken during ten voyages to Africa, between the years 1786 and 1800 (1822; repr. New York: Johnson, 1970), 253, 258. For the most comprehensive research on cotton textiles produced in India and France for the African market during French colonial expansion in West Africa, see Richard Roberts, ‘“Guinea” Cloth: Linked Transformations within France’s Empire in the Nineteenth Century’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 32/128 (1992), 597–627; Richard Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton: Colonialism and

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

be assumed a growing influx of Indian- and European-made imitations of ‘black cloth’ and other cottons had a negative impact on textile manufacture in West Africa, there was instead a major expansion of cotton textile production in the Sokoto Caliphate, geared specifically for export to West African markets.

making ‘black cloth’ The foundation of the Sokoto Caliphate in the first decade of the nineteenth century was part of a succession of Islamic political movements in West Africa beginning much earlier in the 1670s, far to the west in the Senegal River valley. Envisioned and led by Muslim scholars linked together as Sufis and members of the Qadiriyya brotherhood, their social and political grievances and goals were guided by rigorous and critical readings in Muslim law. A series of ten armed conflicts broke out between 1670 and 1850 which in varying degrees transformed political, economic, and social conditions from the Atlantic coast all the way to Lake Chad.24 In the Sokoto Caliphate case, the core area expanded to become the largest state in West Africa and generated the cotton textile export trade that so impressed Barth and Robinson in the nineteenth century. Organizing and managing the manufacturing of textiles and long-distance trading were mallams – Muslim scholarteachers – many of whom themselves had training and experience in one or another of the many specialized occupations involved. Among the most important Caliphate textiles were their own versions of ‘black cloth’ in the form of tailored robes and turban/ veils for men and wrappers for women – in the Hausa language: kore; laima; Dan Kura; bakin rawani; turkudi; and others. This lustrous woman’s wrapper, turkudi (Figure 13.5), was a gift from an emir of the Sokoto Caliphate to the Scottish geographer William Baikie (intended for his wife) while he was reconnoitring up the

24

the Regional Economy in the French Soudan, 1800–1946 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Paul E. Lovejoy, Jihā d in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016), 36–67. This synthesis of the jihā d movements in their larger global context makes it an invaluable resource for Atlantic and world history.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

465

466

colleen e. kriger

Figure 13.5 Detail, woman’s wrapper (turkudi), collected c. 1856. H 120 cm, W 178 cm. Baikie Collection. Photo by the author with permission. © Economic Botany Collection, Kew Garden Museum, Kew, Richmond, UK.

Benue River in 1854.25 Of the specimens of ‘black cloth’ I have examined it is the finest in weave, averaging 114 threads per square inch. The sheen of its glaze is stunning, and in natural light does indeed reflect colours resembling the feathers of a pigeon’s breast. It also demonstrates very well how ‘black cloth’ is clearly defined visually as a genre of cotton textile. It exhibits mastery at all stages of manufacture: high-quality cotton fibre, carefully prepared; finely spun threads, specialized as warp and weft; controlled weaving of fine fabric – light yet sturdy – with as many as 90 to 100 or more threads per square inch; the highest quality indigo dyestuff; properly fermented and managed dyebath; repeated and longer dyebath dipping and airing to achieve the deepest and consistent colour; and rubbing and beating in of the shiniest glaze finish. ‘Black cloth’ was highly valued throughout the Caliphate, recognized especially as turban/veils and garments of officials, scholars,

25

Said to have been made in Doma. Kew Museum Accession Book 1855–61, 27 December 1856, 168. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK. See Rev. Samuel Crowther, Journal of an Expedition up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers (1854) (1855; London: Cass, 1970), 112.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

Figure 13.6 ‘Black’ turban/veil (bakin rawani) worn by Ahmadu Barmo, the Sarkin Zamfara, Anka, Nigeria, 1961–2. Photo by Kurt Krieger. Brigitte Menzel, Textilien aus Westafrika (Berlin: Museum für Vӧlkerkunde, 1972– 4), vol. ii, p. 487. © Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, Germany.

their female relatives, and other Muslim elites (Figure 13.6). What is especially noteworthy is the very high standard of quality maintained for textiles intended for long-distance export. On this important point it is best to directly quote historian Philip Shea: Not only did export-oriented centers [in the Sokoto Caliphate] differ in terms of the scale of their organization and the specialization of the workmen, but they most often produced somewhat different goods and of higher quality than did centers which served local needs. A distinction is commonly made between centers which specialized in ordinary, or “blue,” dyeing and centers which specialized in “black” dyeing. “Black” cloths and gowns require not only longer and more careful dyeing, but also longer and more careful beating. The production of this “black” cloth consumes more indigo in the dyeing process, as well as a great deal of expensive shuni (refined indigo) in the beating process. In addition, finer cloth is used for “black” than for “blue” cloth most of the time. A donkey load of “black” cloth thus had a much higher value than a load of “blue”

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

467

468

colleen e. kriger cloth equal in size and weight, and thus could more easily justify the considerable expense, difficulty, and risk of long-distance trade.26

Major sources for Shea’s research on the ‘black cloth’ export industry in Kano Emirate were the over 150 interviews he carried out with Muslim scholar/producers of it in the 1970s. They remembered invaluable details of manufacturing and trading carried out by their fathers and grandfathers before them, who were also Muslim scholars. Repeated over and over were their observations and judgements about all stages and aspects of the manufacturing process and the ranges and levels of quality. Events they remembered about twentieth-century colonial rule served mainly as temporal markers in recounting the industry’s decline. Shea’s estimate that before the Caliphate, indigo dyeing in the Hausa kingdoms was well established by the sixteenth century is certainly reasonable, especially for the time of his writing. My research for this chapter led me to the discovery that ‘black cloth’ was made and/or worn in the Wolof kingdoms and the Songhay Empire in the second half of the sixteenth century. However, Shea brought out important linguistic evidence in Hausa terminology for indigo dyeing, which offers clues about the early dynamics of indigo technology transfer in the region. To take one example, the Hausa language has two distinct terms for dyeing centre, karofi and marina, both of them loan words from other languages. Karofi came from Mande languages spoken in areas far to the west of Hausaland, whereas marina, originally from the Arabic term for indigo, came from Kanuri, spoken east of Hausaland in Kanem/ Borno.27 The Hausa word for cotton, auduga, also comes from Arabic, linking Hausa-speakers with the early cotton-producing area around Lake Chad. These linguistic imprints surely reflect the importance of indigo dyeing as an occupation in early Hausa history. And coming from both west and east, they signify the complex influences carried by streams of trade, pilgrimage, and visitor traffic through the Hausa kingdoms. 26

27

Philip Shea, ‘The Development of an Export-Oriented Dyed Cloth Industry in Kano Emirate in the Nineteenth Century’, 2 vols. (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1975), i, 111, 173. Ibid., i, 145–7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

During its century of existence, the Caliphate experienced economic expansion and prosperity fuelled in part by labour and expertise in manufacturing indigo-dyed cloth for export. A wide variety of suppliers, skilled artisans, and workshop structures proliferated especially in Kano Emirate. The scale of production increased as the traditional clay pots for dyeing indigo were replaced by large-scale dyepits, dug deeply into the ground and lined with a cement-like reinforcement. More permanent and valuable as property, they were owned and inherited, bought and sold, by many more people, including women. Dyeing centres, made up of groups of owners, had as many as five hundred dyepits in operation. Nearby were separate workshops for beating in the finishing glaze of ‘black cloth’. These were organized by groups of skilled men working under a recognized leader. Shea’s informants generally agreed that before colonial rule the highest quality cloth produced in Kano Emirate came from the town of Kura, reputedly also the best in dyeing and beating. Many credited Kura’s reputation for superior manufacture to the town’s women, known for spinning the finest cotton thread, a specialized occupation providing reliable independent incomes. Managers and slave labour in large-scale cotton and indigo production kept wholesalers and individual artisans well supplied. Official policy also played an important part in supporting cotton textile manufacture. By mid-century in Kano Emirate, there were no taxes on the cultivation of cotton or indigo, no taxes on spinners, weavers, or tailors, and the tax on dyepits was very low.28 The thriving Sokoto Caliphate textile industry must have seemed secure on firm foundations.

conclusion: global fashion in colour How and why British colonial rule was imposed, bringing the Caliphate and its large-scale export manufacture of ‘black cloth’ to an end, is an important story beyond the focus of this chapter. The breach of Kano City’s walls in 1903 was a shocking event still remembered by some of Shea’s informants. It began a series of trends and policies that can be mentioned only briefly here. In 28

Ibid., ii, 30–1, 43–5, 69–70, 74, 142–3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

469

470

colleen e. kriger

the long run, imports of low-cost European textiles and other manufactures led to a general decline in local craft production overall. Imports of white factory-produced cottons and new tastes for bold resist-dyed patterns completely transformed indigo dyeing. One of Shea’s informants who produced ‘black robes’ (kore) for export, put it very succinctly, ‘everyone [in the Caliphate] liked black cloth because it was the fashion [na zamani] just as today people prefer European cloth’. Meanwhile, production of cotton and peanuts for export to Britain was vigorously promoted by the colonial government.29 Caliphate ‘black cloth’ was far more than a passing fashion or personal preference. It emerged centuries ago during a pivotal time of transformation and cultural exchange as sub-Saharan West Africa became integrated into the global civilization of Islam. In contrast to Islamic robes of honour (khilʻa), which often bore embroidered calligraphic inscriptions with names of specific political rulers, the formal visual simplicity of ‘black cloth’ could appeal more broadly across space and over time to culturally varied communities of people. Manufactured into turbans and robes for men and wrappers and shawls for women, ‘black cloth’ became a prestigious elite fashion created in and for the wider AfroEurasian world. ‘Black cloth’ can also be appreciated as a communal Muslim ethos in material form. Its origins may have been in the turban/ veil of trans-Saharan merchants and the distinctive but unadorned robes marking the high achievement of scholars and jurists. A widening appreciation of ‘black cloth’ and proliferation of specialized workshops for producing it can only be inferred. Shea’s invaluable interviews with the scholar-craftsmen of Kano Emirate direct us to what we can know from what we see. The collective discipline and devotion of the mallams and crafts-workers who organized and manufactured the Caliphate’s export trade was distilled into the strong colour and dazzling sheen of ‘black cloth’. Above all, the garments they made radiated a quiet, dignified beauty for Muslim believers, their friends and associates, and peoples of other faiths and homelands to admire. 29

Ibid., ii, 30–1, 45–6, 88.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status and identity in islamic west africa

select bibliography Almada, André Álvares de, Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea (c. 1594), trans. P. E. H. Hair (Typescript, Department of History, University of Liverpool, 1984). Bedaux, Rogier M. A., ‘Les plus anciens tissus retrouvés par les archéologues’, in Jean Devisse et al. (eds.), Vallées du Niger (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), 456–63. Bolland, Rita, Tellem Textiles: Archaeological Finds from Burial Caves in Mali’s Bandiagara Cliff (Leiden: Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, 1991). Carreira, António, Panaria Cabo-Verdiano-Guineense (Lisboa: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1968). Curtin, Philip, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975). Gomez, Michael A., African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). Hopkins, J. F. P. and N. Levtzion (eds. and trans.), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Ka’ti, Mahmoud, Tarikh el-fettash, trans. O. Houdas and M. Delafosse (1913; Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1981). Kriger, Colleen E., ‘Mapping the History of Cotton Textile Production in Precolonial West Africa’, African Economic History, 33 (2005), 87–116. Lovejoy, Paul E., Jihā d in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016). Roberts, Richard, ‘“Guinea” Cloth: Linked Transformations within France’s Empire in the Nineteenth Century’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 32/128 (1992), 597–627. Saad, Elias N., Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Shea, Philip, ‘The Development of an Export-Oriented Dyed Cloth Industry in Kano Emirate in the Nineteenth Century’, 2 vols. (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1975). Stillman, Yedida, Arab Dress: A Short History from the Dawn of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2000). Watson, Andrew M., ‘The Rise and Spread of Old World Cotton’, in Veronica Gervers (ed.), Studies in Textile History (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1977), 355–68.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.015 Published online by Cambridge University Press

471

14

w

FASHION AND MORAL CONCERN IN EARLY MODERN JAPAN timon screech

In the 1580s Japan began to extricate itself from a barely imaginable 100-year civil war. Fighting had not been continuous, nor everywhere, but bloodshed had been prevalent enough to form what has been called a ‘culture of civil war’.1 The capital, Kyoto (kyo¯to means ‘capital’) was reduced to ruins. Its historic grid had been wiped away. The sovereign, ancestor of today’s emperor of Japan, had long since ceased to enjoy his ancient titles, and was known metonymically merely as ‘the palace’, though in truth, he was as likely to be lodging in a warlord’s mansion. People at the time defined their world as gekokujo¯, ‘those below overthrowing those above’ – the literal meaning of revolution. A series of strongmen brought peace to the central areas during the closing decades of the century, and then in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu won a resounding victory. Three years later he was awarded the lapsed title of shogun by the grateful sovereign, Go-Yo¯zei. The year 1603 therefore marks the start of Japan’s early modern period. It is also known as the Edo period, from Ieyasu’s seat, today’s Tokyo. The obligation on shoguns was to ‘subdue barbarians’ (sei-i) and to regulate the fissiparous Japanese states on the sovereign’s behalf. Japan, it should be recalled, is 3,000 km in length, and although that includes territories seized in recent times, even in the Edo period the country was 2,000 km, and stretching across impassable mountain ranges. Ieyasu was the

1

Mary Elizabeth Berry, The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

472

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan

first shogun for thirty years, and the first effective one for almost a century. Among moves towards consolidation, Ieyasu disarmed the populace. He created hereditary ‘military households’ (bushi), today called samurai (the term was seldom used at the time), and three status groups beneath them. Soon the samurai morphed into bureaucrats. With no one to fight, swordsmanship mutated into martial art. The other classes, in descending order, were farmers (primary producers), artisans (secondary producers), and merchants (circulators of goods). Each had its rules and expectations, and, crucially for this chapter, its codes of dress. However, probably more compelling on a day-to-day level was another division that lay athwart the official one, namely between the rural and the urban. Country areas generally lacked the wherewithal to participate in shifts in taste and in developments in fashion. All the military families lived in towns (samurai were very seldom on the land), while peasants were not found in metropolitan areas. Merchants and artisans tended to blend, and although their separation from the samurai was absolute in government decree and in formal dress, they overlapped in informal dress, and in alterations of costume and textile lying outside areas that the authorities had first envisaged, and off-duty they could, and did, socialize. It was the points of contact between urban groups and samurai that generated much alteration, but also much anxiety, as will be shown below, in polemics against the loss of a fundamental social partition that had been placed there to secure continuation of peace. In terms of this chapter, it was a coming together of urban samurai and non-samurai that fuelled the materials and polemics to be analysed. It should be noted also that regulations were not always clarified. Not only did innovations fall outside classification, but the Tokugawa shogunate did not have a sense of legalism that matches that of the modern world.2 It is not possible to offer a full fashion history of the Edo period, with its plethora of weaves, dyeing techniques, and also rhetorics of approval or opposition. This chapter will look mostly at the 2

See John Whitney Hall, ‘The Bakuhan System’, in Hall (ed.), The Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 4: Early Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 128–82.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

473

474

timon screech

seventeenth century, and the movement from war to peace, during which time the end of violence gave rise to market freedom and the greater circulation of goods, notably of textiles; secondarily it will consider 100 years on, at the end of the eighteenth century, by which time another fissure had opened in society, at exactly the place where the government had placed it, dividing samurai from others. Norms had inverted, with wealth utterly detached from status, and the merchants now in the leading role. The authorities tried to ‘restore’ the ways of former times.

arrival of peace No surviving documents lay out regulations regarding dress at the start of the Edo period, and probably none were ever issued, though sumptuary laws were certainly promulgated piecemeal, as has been well studied before, including in English.3 Regulations related to material and colour. For cut, a standard dress emerged known as a kosode, or ‘short sleeves’. The term referred not to length down the arm, but tightness at the wrist. Kosode had tube-sleeves, that did not trail downwards if the arm was raised. The garment was a T-shape. Kosode were easily made from one roll of cloth cut into six equal lengths, two each for back and front, and one divided again for the arms. Kosode were fixed. True, they went through minor changes, but over the course of the Edo period (up to 1868), there was nothing akin to the shift from doublet and hose to lounge suits seen in Europe. This meant that inherited clothing could be worn. Pass-along was considered frugal and good economics, on personal and state levels. The kosode transformed into the modern kimono. To a continuity in cut was added a rather small range of base materials (for merchants and artisans this was hemp or ramie, and later cotton),

3

See William Shively, ‘Sumptuary Regulations and Status in Early Modern Japan’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 25 (1964), 123–64; Katsuya Hirado, ‘Regulating Excess: The Cultural Politics of Consumption in Tokugawa Japan’, in Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 435–60.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan

but this was compensated for by a huge diversity of finish. Dyes and patterning were enormously wide-ranging.4 The samurai class wore kosode too, though they were permitted silk, to which figured brocade could be added. In formal contexts, such as when in attendance (samurai is from the verb saburau, ‘to be in waiting’), they did not use silk, as it smacked of extravagance and deficiency of martial resolve. Over this they wore a simplified military attire called kamishimo, which was in two pieces, one trouserskirt, or hakama, which allowed the legs to be spread (it is not possible to ride a horse in a kosode), and the other a starched and pleated shoulder extension, called kataginu. Swords were retained throughout the Edo period, one short, and always worn, the other long, slung on only when outside. They can be seen in a portrait of Nezu Uemon, who lived in the mid-seventeenth century (though the portrait is an imaginary recreation from a later date). Uemon was a well-known person, famous for admonishing his lord’s excessive drinking. This took some courage, as his lord was the shogun’s son. Uemon lived on as an icon of military resolve and propriety – literally because he continued to chide his lord from the grave, until the latter finally renounced drink (Figure 14.1).5 The artist shows an unbleached undergarment with a plain indigo-dyed kosode; both would be furled up inside to free the legs. The hakama is a green pinstripe, modest and unlikely to show stains. It can be seen how the pleated kataginu helps project a strong persona, even when worn by a frail old man. The whole ensemble is probably made of ramie, though it could be of silk: unembellished silk was a sign of sombreness and dedication. The clothing looks as if it has been washed many times, which conveys the wearer’s thrift and resolute values. A fan, necessary in summer, is as far as a person would go in terms of self-indulgence. Uemon’s kataginu bears the trefoil shogunal crest of his overlord, while his kosode bears his family crest. They bespeak heritage and office. There is no fashion here at all. This dress should 4

5

See Dale Gluckman and Sharon Takeda, When Art Became Fashion: Kosode in Edo-Period Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1992); and more broadly, Anna Jackson (ed.), Kimono: From Kyoto to Catwalk (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2000). Sato¯ Yasuhiro, ‘Tsubaki Chinzan hitsu, Nezu Uemon zo¯’ [Tsubaki Chinzan’s Portrait of Nezu Uemon], Kokka, 1215 (2016), 28–32.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

475

476

timon screech

Figure 14.1

Tsubaki Chinzan, Nezu Uemon, 1835. Hanging scroll, colour of silk. Photo: National Diet Library of Japan.

ideally be the same for samurai thereafter; indeed, the artist, Tsubaki Chinzan, who lived 200 years later and was also a samurai in the direct service of the Tokugawa, would have dressed, under similarly formal conditions, in an almost identical way.

the beginning of a ‘floating world’ Creation of the shogunate in 1603 brought manifold shifts. Commentators of the time were fully aware this was the age in which ‘those below overthrowing those above’ gave way to what they called ‘the present world’ (to¯sei).6 For the first time in 6

This term appears in numerous titles of books and pictures from throughout the Edo period with the meaning of ‘now’. For one instance, see Figure 14.5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan

generations boys were no longer called away (or captured) and made to fight; non-samurai had their guns and swords forcibly removed. There were huge numbers of war-widows. It was in the capital city that change first became apparent. For some decades, Edo was little more than a garrison city, but the capital had its old bourgeoisie. The Tokugawa system was subjected to immediate stress. Dress that pushed the limits of propriety was flaunted in the capital’s only truly public open space, which was the River Kamo. It was dry for most of the year, and the riverbed became a locus of recreation. Unowned and unpoliced, here emerged what came to be termed the ‘floating world’ (ukiyo). Regulations made for the fixed world were suspended here. The riverbed was a site of gestation for interactions and cultural alteration, including in dress. Men and women who gathered in the evenings were mocked by those who thought them improper, under the label of ‘river-bed people’ (kawara-mono); the word survives in Japanese for louche entertainers and wastrels. In tandem with society coming to terms with consolidation into hereditary status groups, were the liberating effects of peace. The ‘floating world’ ran incommensurably alongside the ‘fixed’ one, literally so, as the Kamo demarked the city limit. The authorities turned a blind eye.7 Markets reopened and flourished. Regional cloth appeared in cities. Textiles were imported too. What were termed ‘bentpeople’ (kabuki-mono), or non-upright sybarites, were the most visible manifestations. The defining quality of class was assaulted by the power of money. By no means all samurai were rich: they were on fixed stipends which did not rise and if anything, they fell with inflation. The ‘lower’ merchants achieved surpluses.8 ‘Floating’ did not remain in the riverbed. The authorities, supposed to enforce rules, were not immune to its delights either, and the 7

8

For an analysis of the floating world and its intellectual foundations, see Timon Screech, Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 265–301. Studies on this topic are very many, but see, inter alia, Toshiaki Tamaki, ‘A Fiscal-Military State without Wars: The Relations between the Military Regime and Economic Development in Tokugawa Japan’, in Stephen Conway and Raphael Torres Sanchez (eds.), The Spending of States: Military Expenditure during the Long Eighteenth Century: Patterns, Organisation and Consequences, 1650–1815 (Berlin: VDM Verlag, 2011), 155–79.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

477

478

timon screech

flourishing of society showed that their administration had achieved its root objective of peace. Consider another painting, unsigned and undated, but from about 1620–30. It is a screen, which habitually come in pairs, so we regrettably have only half the composition (Figure 14.2). Reading from the right (the East Asian way), a young woman with loose hair seemingly emerging from a bathhouse, enters in a loose-tied evening kosode, accompanied by her little sister, or perhaps a servant, who lowers her gaze in embarrassment as a decidedly ‘bent’ youth offers blandishments. The women wear complementary clothes, one in cool colours, softly dyed and the other in warm ones divided in a sharp diagonal. Whether it is a feature of the painter’s imagination or reality, people are dressed to complement each other. The male has a mock, overlong sword, an orange-dyed kosode tied so loose as to allow his legs to kick, and an unnecessary overgarment that may even be made of imported velvet. To the left, another woman, similarly gorgeous, feigns attention to a lapdog. Social mixing is taking place in the evening, perhaps at the riverbed, but this is incidental as the real theme of the screen is further left, which is now indoors, and where lavishly dressed figures lounge and read, play games, and pluck an instrument, led by an elderly blind man. The blind often worked as musicians, but here, surely, the implication is a want of mature oversight for the wealthy nubile young. Screen pairs were placed behind persons of power to enhance them with noble images or vistas. This accounts for more vacant sections in the middle of what would have been the pair, but is now on the right. Someone senior owned this work, and endorsed what the composition put forth. All we know is that the screen was later in the collection of the Ii, lords of Hikone, a very senior military family.9 They may have used it to suggest the dividends of peace, but contestation is also apparent, for the work parodies the Four Arts (shigei), or constituents of learned culture, which are music, games of skill, calligraphy, and painting. The Four Arts were often painted on screens, but previously only shown engaged in by sages, who plucked classical instruments, and moved pieces on traditional gaming boards, viewing antique art. Here modern people play the three9

Okudaira Shunroku, Hikone byo¯bu: mugongeki no enshutsu [Hikone Screen: Performing a Play without Words], E wa gataru [Pictures Narrative] 3 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1996).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 14.2

Genre scene, The Hikone Screen, Edo period. Six-panel folding screen, colour on gilded paper. Gift of Li Family, Hikone Castle Museum. https://hikone-castle-museum.jp/en/collection/331.html.

480

timon screech

stringed shamisen, associated with raucousness, and the game is fashionable backgammon, while the calligraphy looks like an up-todate novel, though painting, represented in the form of another halfscreen pair, looks formal enough. Whoever the original owners of what is now called the Hikone Screen were, they must have enjoyed this vision of nuanced ambivalence. But not all warrior families, so recently off the battlefield, were ready for such a negotiation. As the century progressed, ‘floating’ moved across society. A generation grew up that had never known warfare, and objected to the intransigence of the old guard. One of the areas of friction between the two was the attitudes to changes in costume. Take Hosokawa Tadaoki, born in 1563 and who had fought his first battle at the age of fifteen. Towards the end of his life, it was reported, ‘one thing that irked him was samurai who were slaves to fads and fashions’.10 He did not like the fact that dress had shifted. Tadaoki had fought to restore stability, after all. His anger spilled over onto a younger relative, Hosokawa Gyo¯bu, who came in one day ‘wearing a very short surcoat’, or jinbaori. Gyo¯bu explained he had just returned from the shogunal city, and this is ‘what all the bannermen in Edo are wearing’. Disgusted, Tadaoki threw his oldcut jinbaori at him, telling him hereafter to wear clothes ‘of the proper length’. The later reteller of this episode wanted readers to know that he shared Tadaoki’s view, noting, ‘that was in wartime of course, but even now I can’t help feeling queasy when someone admires my vest’. The reteller went on to note how he was always unhappy when someone detected and admired an unexpected feature of his apparel, and declared that ‘I pay no attention to fashions of any sort; they come and they go, from one day to the next.’11 The first two shoguns were warriors who championed stability but the third, Tokugawa Iemitsu, who succeeded in 1623 and gained full power on his father’s death in 1632, accelerated change. One record states that ‘he kept his words to himself, so those 10

11

Horiuchi Den’emon, quoted in Thomas Harper, The True History of the Vendetta of the 47 Ronin from Ako¯ (Sedgwick, ME: Leete Island Books, 2019), 681–2. Horiuchi Den’emon, quoted in Harper, The True History, 929. The Gyo¯bu were a junior branch of the Hosokawa family, thus the given name of Tadaoki’s interlocutor is not recorded. Den’emon chronicled the famous Ako¯ Vendetta of 1701–3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan

around him never knew what was in his heart’. This loss of forthrightness meant that ‘he was disliked and thought insubstantial, and it was easy to imagine how, in time, it would bring about his ruin’.12 This was palace tittle-tattle, but a rumour spread of how a veteran warrior had come across Iemitsu admiring a delicately lacquered hanging pocket (inro), given him by a page. The old man lurched forward, grabbed the object, and smashed it to pieces. In former days, he said, pages wore plain brown garments, and now they owned things like this, and worse, the shogun was abetting them.13 Under Iemitsu, Edo underwent a demographic shift. From 1642, he required Japan’s 250-odd regional lords (daimyo, such as the Ii) to reside every other year in Edo, and for their wives to reside there permanently.14 Edo grew into the country’s greatest conurbation. By 1700 it was the size of the capital and Osaka combined, and by 1750 it was the world’s only city of one million people. The lords’ retainers adopted Edo’s latest styles. One Yuasa Genzo¯ deplored this and wrote a book about it. He warned how ‘when a country samurai with his good old ways comes up to Edo, in a matter of just two or three years his whole character will have altered; his manners will have become superficial and trivial’. Genzo¯ continued: Urban customs go from bad to worse. They are like so many floating flowers . . . [They] infect recently arrived samurai, whose devotion to propriety consequently wanes. Whereas they might previously have had an affection for literature and military practice, they give these up in favour of ‘refinements’ (geiji).15 12

13

14

15

Okubo Chu¯kyo¯, Mikawa monogatari [Tales of Mikawa] (1622), quoted in Fujii Jo¯ji, Tokugawa Iemitsu [Tokugawa Iemitsu] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1997), 28–9. Mitamura Engyo¯, ‘Tsukiyo no sandai sho¯gun’ [Moonlight Nights of the Third Shogun], in Mitamura engyo¯ zenshu¯ [Mitamura Engyo¯: Complete Works] (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ ko¯ron-sha, 1976), i, 53–9, here 57; and Mitamura Engyo¯, ‘An-sho¯gun Iemitsu’ [Secretive Shogun Iemitsu], in Mitamura Engyo¯, Edo-banashi [Talks on Edo] (Tokyo: Seiabo¯, 1965), i, 97–120, here 104–5. The veteran warrior was Sakai Tadayo and the page Hotta Masamori. For periods of residence in Edo, see Constantine Vaporis, Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007). Yuasa Genzo¯, Kokui-ron [Medicine for the State], in Nihon keizai daiten [Dictionary of Japanese Economics] 22 (Tokyo: Ho¯bun Shokan, 1927), 3–48; here 7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

481

482

timon screech

The daimyo families came into contact with each other, especially the women living full-time in Edo, and they entered into cycles of competitive spending, as they developed knowledge of aesthetic pastimes. By contrast, daimyo men were intermittently away from the metropolis in often-remote castle towns. Commoners came up to Edo with the lordly retinues, or to find work in other ways, promoting the homogenizing of products and styles across the country, though regional differences did remain.16 The Hikone Screen depicts ‘refinements’, as the classical arts gone wrong, and it shows samurai and non-samurai engaging in them together.

international commerce The above discussion has cited internal factors relating to shifts in fashion. But Japan was never isolated, and it participated in the global movement of textiles. The English East India Company arrived in 1613, later than the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch, yet unlike them, the whole purpose of English voyages was to sell cloth. Japan has cold winters and no sheep, while England was famed for its woollens. The Company brought enormous quantities of cloth, predominantly broadcloth, but also kerseys (a lighter weight but similarly rather coarse woollen weave) and perpetuanas (a durable worsted). These were made in dark shades, called ‘sad colours’, which fitted the demands of samurai of taste. The Company went so far as to take Japanese indigo back to London, to dye home-manufactured textiles for resale.17 Yet when the second English ship arrived, in 1614, the cloth that had sold so well before now did not. As the ship’s commander put it, Japanese taste was ‘so mutable that that which is a good commodity this year will prove a drug [drag] another year’.18 The charm of this new type of ‘sad’ garment had worn off. Wool was a minor affair, but Japan was a major consumer of Chinese silk. The Ming 16

17

18

Nishimura Yasuko, ‘Edo jidai ni okeru ifuku kisei: hen’yo¯ no kaiyo¯ to seikaku’ [Edo Period Dress Regulations: Life and Change], Kasei-gaku zasshi [Journal of Home Economics], 31 (1980), 432–8. Timon Screech, The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 201. Ibid., 188.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan

had placed an embargo on it because of Japan’s perceived failure to deal with piracy, but silk came via the southern kingdom of Lu¯chu¯ (J: Ryu¯kyu¯, modern Okinawa), or, more copiously, by informal traders termed pirates.19 The English withdrew in 1623, turning their attention to India, but Iberian and Dutch ships continued to come, and carried, among other things, Chinese silk. They also brought Indian and Indonesian cottons. These tended to be striped, and so today the Japanese word for ‘stripe’ is the same as that for ‘island’ (shima/ jima).20 Imported cottons had the advantage of being novel in design, and almost limitless in variants, while at the same time appearing modest. Cotton-growing surged domestically, and before long local versions of ‘island’ patterns were made. The remote cloth-working town of Kameda, in Echigo (modern Niigata), for example, sent ‘Kameda-jima’ to Edo from 1696, and the company still exists.21 Stripes became so typical of Edo, that well into the nineteenth century, actors playing the role of an Edo citizen would wear striped costumes, to enhance their plausibility on stage, as can be seen from the genre of actor prints (Figure 14.3). The shogunate introduced a silk monopoly early on, and this became formalized around 1630.22 All imports were parcelled out to privileged merchants in the major cities for them to retail. It 19

20

21

22

Gang Zhou, The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684–1757 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), 26 and 141. Fujita Kayoko, ‘Japan Indianized: Material Culture of Imported Textiles in Japan, 1550–1850’, in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (eds.), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 181–203, here 190–1. https://kamedajima.net/edo-stripe (accessed 6 June 2020). For the textiles owned by an early nineteenth-century family in Echigo, and how clothes were used as trousseau items there, see Amy Stanley, ‘Fashioning the Family: A Temple, a Daughter and a Wardrobe’, in Mary Elizabeth Berry and Marcia Yonemoto (eds.), What Is a Family? Answers from Early Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 174–94. The monopoly was known as the Ittowappu; see Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 142–4; Kayoko Fujita, ‘Changing Silk Culture in Early Modern Japan: On Foreign Trade and the Development of “National” Fashion, from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century’, in Dagmar Schäfer, Giorgio Riello, and Luca Molà (eds.), Threads of Global Desire: Silk in the Pre-Modern World (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), 295–321.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

483

484

timon screech

Figure 14.3 Utagawa Toyokuni III, ‘Ichikawa Danju¯ro¯ VIII in the role of Yosa the Mudlark, and Ichikawa Ebizo¯ V in the role of Yasu the Spiderman’, from the series Konjaku ko no te-gashiwa, 1855. Multi-coloured woodblock print. Photo: National Diet Library.

increased prices, but rising standards of living brought even silk within the grasp of many, albeit in infringement of sumptuary laws. A decade later, in 1640, the Dutch East India Company noted that silk clothing was now very fashionable, and (perhaps tacitly) ‘permitted to ordinary nobles, samurai and merchants’.23 Supply could not keep up. Prices rose by 20 per cent. The collapse of the Ming in 1644 disrupted supply at purchase points so that,

23

Leonard Blussé and Cynthia Viallé (eds.), The Deshima Dagregisters: Their Original Tables of Contents (Leiden: Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1982–date), xi, 63 (adapted).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan

whereas the Dutch had been importing 120 metric tons annually, this plummeted to under half a ton.24 Most serious for the authorities was the inability to procure white silk, which was not a fashion item, but, as a Dutch record reveals, ‘mainly for the shogun and the nobles of Japan, for the making of gowns and such’.25 In 1646, the new Qing dynasty rescinded the Ming embargo, in the hope of custom fees. Extralegal trade continued, so they reinstated it soon after.

urban growth In 1668, a major fire in Edo led to restrictions imposed from the Japanese side. This included a total ban on imported woollens and other ‘costly fabrics’. Piracy, as always, made up the slack. After reconstruction, rules were eased for silk, since samurai needed it for their official dress, but the ban on wool remained, and was even extended to ‘all unnecessary imports’ outside textiles.26 The Qing finally lifted their embargo again in 1684.27 For several reasons, the latter part of the 1680s and into the early eighteenth century is considered a time of special opulence. One example comes from 1707 in the case of a flamboyant Osaka merchant named Yodoya Tatsugoro¯. He was discovered wearing a plain white silk garment. This he was not entitled to; Tatsugoro¯ was hauled before the governor. With great forbearance, the official suggested that if Tatsugoro¯ insisted on wearing this, he should ‘at least have a small piece of coloured stuff sewn on some part of it’, as this would obviate the restrictions. Not having thought of this, Tatsugoro¯ had to be imprisoned, and ‘this adventure was soon known throughout Osaka’. Investigation revealed other and greater offences to his name, but considering that ‘being still young he might mend’, and that the Yodoya house had done service to the government before, the governor spared his life, only confiscating Tatsugoro¯’s property and banishing him from the city. He gained insight from his tribulations, and Tatsugoro¯ entered a cloister as a monk.28 24 26 28

Ibid., xi, 237. The original units are 2,000 and 8 piculs. 25 Ibid., xi, 173. Ibid., xiii, 251, 260, 284, 306. 27 Zhou, Qing Opening to the Ocean, 141. Interestingly, this anecdote had already been introduced in Europe c. 1820. See Timon Screech (ed. and intro.), Secret Memoirs of the Shoguns: Isaac

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

485

486

timon screech

Members of the military class were concerned about their moral standing and the possibility of it faltering. They were also concerned about those below them. Samurai had a past to look back to, or to imagine, of spartan attachment to duty. The populace had no such myth, so no restraints.29 Women were a high-risk category because, not wearing swords, it was harder to tell the samurai rank from others (as the Hikone screen shows). This is not to mention the perennial fear that female agency engendered. Take the case of Ishikawa Okachi in the generation before Tatsugoro¯. It is a wellknown story that she went out to view a shogunal parade, where the shogun, Iemitsu’s son Tsunayoshi, spotted her. Assuming Okachi to be a daimyo’s wife, he sent over his compliments to her. On discovering she was of merchant class, he was livid. Tsunayoshi had Okachi and her husband, Rokubee, summoned to the magistracy where they were informed that their property was forfeit. They were exiled from Edo for ‘extravagance beyond their station’ which meant also a concomitant ‘lack of respect for their superiors’. The Ishikawas were expected to be grateful for ‘the shogun’s mercy’ and they suffered no more serious punishment.30 There are several important points here. Such dramatic attainders as Tatsugoro¯ and Ishikawa suffered were so shocking as to be recorded. They were not numerous. Only a handful appear across the whole Edo period. Self-policing seems to have been the norm. Popular fashions such as cotton ‘island’ designs were kept within bounds, or were confined to locations accepted as off-limits in the ‘floating world’. Secondly and relatedly, the story of Okachi and Rokubee is found in a book of instructions put together by a merchant to assist his heirs. The compilation does not deem the punishments as excessive, or as acts of shogunal aggression, but

29

30

Titsingh and Japan, 1779–1822 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 93–4 and 236–7. The governor is not named. For a broad-based study of these issues, see Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For Mitsui Takafusa, Cho¯nin ko¯kenroku [Observations for Merchants], see E. S. Crawcour (trans.), ‘Some Observations on Merchants, a Translation of Mitsui Takafusa’s Chonin Koken Roku’, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, Third Series, 8 (1961), 1–136, here 62, where the name is romanized as Rokubei.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan

rather sees them as just deserts for the failure of mercantile good sense.31 Extravagance will bring the ruin of a business. It is worth noting that the author of the collection ran the Mitsui house, which is still one of Japan’s largest enterprises. Thirdly, samurai were on fixed stipends, while farmers were required to surrender a portion of their yield. But merchants were untaxed. Although never officially articulated, excessive sequestrations from merchants, or forced loans that would not be repaid, served as a redistribution method. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the Edo system was mature and flowering. The country and its neighbours were at peace, which no one doubted was there to stay. The epoch is captured in the fiction of the Osaka merchant-class writer Ihara Saikaku, who brought out a five-year onslaught of tales of irresponsible spending, but was careful to locate these in the ‘floating world’, not the real one. The titles were launched in 1682 with the bestselling story of an imaginary rake named Yonosuke (literally the ‘man of the world’), published under the no-holds barred title of Life of a Sex-mad Man (Ko¯shoku ichidai otoko). It was followed by Life of a Sex-mad Woman (Ko¯shoku ichidai onna), then came Lives of Five Sex-mad Women (Ko¯shoku gonin onna) and in culmination, the Great Mirror of Sex Between Men (Nanshoku o¯kagami), in 1687. Here were more of that riverbed ilk, and with a vengeance.32 Back to reality: in 1692 the Dutch East India Company began importing fantastically expensive Iranian silk.33 It was very popular until the fad came to an end. That same year saw the death of the great pioneer Hishikawa Moronobu, who was the first ‘floating world’ artist to sign his work. Moronobu had also published a stream of books, not tales, but fashion plates. The genre went back to anonymous kosode order-books from the 1660s (the first is thought to be 31

32

33

The texts concerned are careful to stress that the punishments meted out were proportionate, though of course, such language itself might imply further fear of punishment. For translations (all of which bowdlerize the titles), see Ihara Saikaku, Life of an Amorous Man, trans. Kengi Hamada (Rutland, VT and Tokyo: Tuttle, 1963), Ihara Saikaku, Five Women Who Loved Love, trans. W. Theodore de Bary (Rutland, VT and Tokyo: Tuttle, 1989), and Ihara Saikaku, The Great Mirror of Male Love, trans. Paul Gordon Schallow (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Life of a Sex-mad Woman has not been translated. Blussé and Viallé (eds.), Deshima Dagregisters, xii, 94.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

487

488

timon screech

Design Patterns (On-hinagata) of 1666). Moronobu stoked popular fantasy with ‘dream’ designs – whether the costumes are genuine or invented is uncertain. Representative is Looking at Kosode Shapes (Kosode no sugatami), which came out in 1682, the same year as Life of a Sex-mad Man, to which it may, in some way, be related (Figure 14.4).

the late eighteenth century Moronobu shows fashion to wealthy women and fantasies to those who could afford the books, but not the garments illustrated. Saikaku detailed lives that were intriguing, but deviant, and his protagonists often meet their comeuppance. During the long first Tokugawa century, classes, on the whole, remained in place. This would change. Samurai could not engage in business, but their low stipends enforced straitened circumstances. Some took the cataclysmic step of renouncing their status, becoming artisans or merchants. It was humiliating, but it enabled them to raise funds by trade, while also freeing them from expenses attendant on military service.34 Conversely, among those doing well was an upper-level samurai named Ho¯seido¯ Kisanji. He could not but see social change in positive terms. Living in Edo full-time, he celebrated the city’s many pleasures, which he had full access to, unburdened by neuroses about the abstemiousness of his ancestors. Liking the times he lived in, Kisanji’s comparator was not the olden days, but the country’s other major city, the capital. He professed to like this less for the reason that it lacked much notion of fashion: People in the Capital have serene faces and reposeful minds. Many are almost too understated. This kind of spirit does have affinities with that of Edoites, but there’s also much that we can’t relate to. In what concerns tends (ryu¯ko¯), Edo is on the hop while the Capital drags its feet. If you go there you’ll see habits no longer prevalent in Edo still fully preserved – the thinness of a sash, or the length of a hairpin, and

34

The most famous instance is Hiraga Gennai; see Haga To¯ru, Hiraga Gennai (Tokyo: Asahi Sensho, 1989).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan

Figure 14.4

Hishikawa Moronobu, page from Kosode no sugatami, 1682. Monochrome printed book. National Diet Library.

so on, as things that have not been in Edo for a whole decade . . . Our two ways of behaving can’t mix.35

Kisanji had a kindred spirit in another Edo-based samurai, Kurahashi Itaru. In 1773, Itaru made his name in ‘hopping’ circles by publishing a guidebook, Knowing about Contemporary Fashion (To¯sei fu¯zoku tsu¯). It was not the sort of thing an upper-samurai was expected to do, especially as he did not confine these matters to ‘floating’ places. True, he wrote under a pseudonym (to this day not all scholars accept it was actually by him), signing the books he wrote and illustrated himself as ‘Koikawa Harumachi’ (something like ‘river of love and springtime in the city’). Itaru/Harumachi’s book graded levels of fashionability (tsu¯) in terms of dress and pattern. For samurai men, there was the angle at which one wore one’s swords. Men’s haircuts were another danger zone as they 35

Ho¯seido¯ Kisanji (aka Tegara no Okamochi), Nochi wa mukashi monogatari [The Rest Is History], in Nihon zuihitsu taisei [Anthology of Japanese Commonplace Writings] Series 3: 12) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1995), 263–96, here 285.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

489

490

timon screech

Figure 14.5 Koikawa Harumachi, page from To¯sei fu¯zoku tsu¯, 1773. Monochrome printed book. National Diet Library.

were not status-dependent, and he offered a full page of options, all variants of the latest style, known as a honda (Figure 14.5). The top illustration shows the original, which progresses through ‘five parts down’, ‘rounded cue’, ‘fast waves’, ‘younger son’, ‘goldfish’ (also known as ‘ship’s hull’), ‘epidemic’ (which should be worn well oiled), and finally a coiffeur used by actors playing the role of the kabuki swell Danshichi Kurobee.36 Itaru/Harumachi published extensively, but in 1781 he followed up his fashion interests with a more bantering look at modishness, Useless Fashions (Muda iki), again providing his own illustrations.37 The short, comic story is set in the future, ‘during the reign of the 33,333rd human emperor’. This was close to insolent, for just weeks before, the 119th sovereign, Ko¯kaku, had been inducted under very

36

37

For a modern edition, see Watanabe Yutaka (ed.), Sharebon taikei [Anthology of Fashion Stories] (Tokyo: Rokugo¯-kan, 1931), ii, 147–82. For a modern edition, see Koike Masatane et al. (eds.), Edo no gesaku ehon 1: Gendai Kyo¯iku Bunko (Tokyo: Shakai Shisôsha, 1980), 113–48.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan

contested circumstances.38 The book also spoofs on the Record of the Future (Mirai-ki) – the two titles sounding similar – which was volume 69 of a vast compilation attributed to the revered Crown Prince Sho¯toku who died in 622 ce. This huge work had been lost for 1,100 years, but then curiously came to light, only to be denounced by the shogunate as a forgery.39 Itaru/Harumachi was sticking his neck out to refer to such things, sullying the auspicious environment of a change of reign which could carry severe penalties. He could venture so far because the shogun’s chancellor, Tanuma Okitsugu, was a freewheeling fellow himself. One of the illustrations to Useless Fashions shows men with absurdly elongated honda hairdos and clothing that bags out under capacious sashes (Figure 14.6). These are spendthrifts flaunting a superfluity of expensive cloth. At least the road sign beside them indicates that they are on the way to one of the ‘floating world’ districts, while the text announces that people in the future will be so avid for novelties that they will even eat bonito in winter, though properly this fish is a spring delicacy; we see a delighted fishmonger with his panier making money in the dead season. Of course, the butt of laughter was not some distant future, but now. It was amusing to some, though not to everyone. The physician Sugita Genpaku deplored how ‘clothing is worn only half a dozen times, though it cost 40 or 50 pieces of gold’. His objection was not po-faced, as he reasoned that ‘when those above crave more, those below will be pushed further into want’.40 Hardly any garments survive from this period, though later examples exist. They are apt to be admired, and so they should be, but we should not lose touch with the fact that not all thought so. Take a surviving kosode of relaxed cut from after

38

39

40

The issue was that Ko¯kaku’s father had not himself been sovereign, which was a requirement for succession; see Fujita Satoru, Bakumatsu no tenno¯ [Emperors in the Late Edo Period] (Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 1994). Yuasa Keiko, ‘Masuho Zanko¯ no Shinto¯ setsu, “Sen’yo kyu¯ji honki taiseikyo¯” to no kakawari wo chu¯shin ni’ [On Masuho Zanko¯’s Theory of Shinto¯, Particularly his ‘Great Text of Ancient Generations and Former Matters’], Nihon Bungaku [Japanese Literature], 45 (1996), 11–25. Sugita Genpaku, Nochimigusa [Gleanings in Hindsight], in Sekiya Hiroshi (ed.), Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryo¯ shu¯sei [Anthology of Research Materials Relating to Japanese Commoner Lives] (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo¯, 1970), vii, 55–86, here 81.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

491

492

timon screech

Figure 14.6 Koikawa Harumachi, page from Muda iki, 1781. Monochrome printed book. National Diet Library.

the turn of the nineteenth century (Figure 14.7).41 We see how the widening of the sash has pushed the design downwards, leaving the whole upper part to be covered by a gigantic bow. The trailing sleeves are a kosode variant denoting the wearer to be an unmarried girl. The base fabric is blue, but hardly restrained, rather deep and vivid. Clouds outlined in coloured thread and floral vines recede, leaving a brilliant open sky. The owner’s family crest (unidentified) appears three times at the shoulders, meaning this robe was for formal use; but the most telling feature is the repeated pentagrams. They are one of the so-called ‘Genji fragrances’ (genji-ko¯), rebuses alluding to chapters in the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari), of c. 1100. Young women were unlikely to wade through this long and difficult book, but it was right that they should have some idea of the plot. This particular pentagram indicates Chapter 22, ‘The 41

This garment is also discussed in Gluckman and Takeda, When Art Became Fashion, 149.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan

Figure 14.7 Kosode with ‘Genji fragrance’ design, first half of the nineteenth century. National Museum of Japanese History, Nomura Collection.

Jewelled Chaplet’ (Tamakatsura), which tells of a woman brought up modestly in the countryside who makes a trip to the capital, only to discover that she is actually a court lady, long-lost daughter, no less, of Prince Genji’s closest friend, To¯ no Chu¯jo¯. Here is an aspirational article of clothing, and one that demonstrably does not encourage the wearer to confine herself within established categories. Changes in literature and art cannot have been unrelated to a series of natural disasters. Famine raged throughout the 1780s and peasants rioted continuously. In 1787, there was change. Tanuma Okitsugu was forced to step down, and Matsudaira Sadanobu took over as shogunal chancellor. His political treatise Words on Government (Seigo) is well known. Sadanobu wrote: manners and customs (fu¯zoku) have grown thin . . . differentials have been lost. Everyone now goes to the furthest extremes of

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

493

494

timon screech lavishness in their clothing, diet, and even in items for daily use, also ornaments and amusements. Materials have become scarce as a result, meaning the people suffer hardship.42

Sadanobu drew lessons from history: ‘Once when a continental emperor began using chopsticks made of ivory, it was enough for his wise and prudent subjects to flee the kingdom, complaining of extravagance. Yet today both there and in Japan even commoners think it normal to eat with ivory.’ Sadanobu returned to the period of civil war, referring to the warlord who held sway before the Tokugawa: ‘his handkerchief was but a half-sheet of paper folded in four and pinned with a wooden peg’, yet, ‘today it’s rare to find even humble folk with a handkerchief like that’. Waste and improvidence were everywhere. When ‘even ants have enough good sense to put things aside for winter, what a pity that our fine lords in this country should be a laughing stock for ants!’ Sadanobu’s conclusion: ‘a nation’s affluence or poverty, florescence or ruination depends on modesty being observed in consumption, as these examples demonstrate’.43 Sadanobu was determined to roll things back. After six years, in 1793, satisfied that he had done so, Sadanobu retired. He felt able to state, ‘manners and customs are now neither loud nor showy. Instead people like what is pure. Things have improved to a remarkable degree.’ He used the case of dress to illustrate such progress: ‘Women dislike sashes and other items made of flamboyant, imported gold thread. They go out wearing only a light silken weave.’ Whereas ‘just ten years ago people paid vast sums for things like hairpins, which would be made with the rarest intricacy, with a single one changing hands for significant sums, these were banned by law, and now they are hardly to be seen’.44 ¯ ta Nanpo reported that formerly ‘outThe samurai and litterateur O lay was regarded as the index of a person’s standing . . . no one was 42

43 44

Matsudaira Sadanobu, Seigo [Words of Government], in Nihon shiso¯ taikei 38 [Anthology of Japanese Intellectual History] (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1976), 249– 87, here 255. Ibid., 267. Matsudaira Sadanobu, Uge no hito koto [A Word Under the Eaves], in Uge no hitokoto, Shugyô-roku [A Word Under the Eaves / Record of My Training] (Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko, 1942), 30–222, here 40.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan

without their imported European pocket watch, slipped in to the folds of their costume, and in summer and winter it was crisp white socks every day’. And yet, he confessed, ‘truly, all those fashions can hardly be considered as having furthered military might in the service of peace (taiheibu)’ – the great Tokugawa desideratum. With Sadanobu came an about-face, and ‘a sombre coat good enough to ward off inclemencies became the order of the day . . . how stern people looked as they went up to attend at the castle!’45

institutionalizing the ‘floating world’ Despite the resolute nature of the above comments, the shogunate understood the need for social release. What had first been provided in improvised form in the dry riverbed, became institutionalized. Edo and other cities were provided with what were called ‘stockades’ (kuruwa), or physically discrete pleasure districts. These were the ‘floating worlds’. Edo had four, though only one was licensed, the others being extralegal, which is further evidence of a governmental propensity to ignore contravention, where it made sense to do so. The shogun could be like the elderly musician in the Hikone screen. Much can be said of these places which were, in essence, zones for men to assert themselves. Women were not admitted, unless as waitresses, entertainers, or sex-workers, in which case they were not allowed out, until their indenture expired.46 Edo’s licensed district was the Yoshiwara. Literally it meant ‘reed fields’ from the marshy place where it had been established, but as the city grew it was relocated, its name rewritten with yoshi meaning ‘good’, so ‘happy fields’. Today the place is known from sugar-coated depictions, made by specialist producers of ‘pictures of the floating worlds’ (ukiyo). Sadanobu, for one, was horrified that people in later

45

46

¯ ta Nanpo, Ichiwa ichigon [One Night, One Word], in Nihon zuihitsu taikei O [Anthology of Japanese Commonplace Writing], suppl. vol. iv (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1978), 197. For the structure and organization of the bordello district, see Ceclia Segawa Seigle, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993), 53–68.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

495

496

timon screech

ages – us – would look at their false depictions and infer what Edo had actually been like.47 The floating world was not the real world, and pictures of it showed the dreams of some people. Again, we may consider the case of a painted screen. It is unsigned and undated, but probably from the 1780s, the famine years before Sadanobu took over (Figure 14.8). It is without its pair, but compositionally it does not seem to need one, perhaps to look modest, despite everything, being only half the norm. It is also made on ungilded paper, to denote informality, though sprinkled with gold-dust, to show that money is no object. The bordello depicted is clearly identified from its awning (seen backwards from inside), and this is the Tamaya. Women are real women, though contracted into ‘floating’. The room has latticed windows, allowing men to leer in from the street. No man is present, since that role is taken by the viewer of the screen, and the composition is set up so that the viewed seem to be positioned inside the room. It is winter and braziers are lit, which allows for the showing of gorgeous, multi-layered gowns. Six women are clad as identical pairs and are ranged around a foreground figure who nonchalantly lights a tobacco pipe; she wears a top layer of white silk, forbidden in the ‘fixed’ world. It has been speculated that she is the courtesan Komurasaki, who was a senior inmate at the Tamaya in this period.48 The three pairs are her maids and trainees. Very likely the owner of the screen was her client. We have no names of clients, but had any of them appeared in the restrained dress of Nezu Uemon he would have received short shrift in this world of voluptuous fashion. But the shogunate was prepared to accept this, if what occurred in the Yoshiwara stayed there. As Sadanobu himself let slip, behaviour around 1790–1800 only changed because he passed legislation requiring it to do so. Once he had left office, though his laws were not repealed, enforcement 47

48

Matsudaira Sadanobu, Taikan zakki [Random Notes of Leaving Office], in Zoku Nihon zuihitsu taisei [Anthology of Japanese Commonplace Writings, Continued], vol. vi (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1980), 11–253, here 35. www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1982-0701-0-2 (accessed 6 June 2020). Such names were passed on, and a later Komurasaki of the Tamaya appears in Utamaro’s series of 1795, To¯ji zensei nijin zoroi, see https://bunka .nii.ac.jp/heritages/detail/287242 (accessed 6 June 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 14.8

Anon., Interior of the Tama-ya Bordello, 1780s. Folding screen, gold and colour on paper. The British Museum, 19820701,0.2. The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo MX2G2G.

498

timon screech

lapsed. The early decades of the nineteenth century were another time of competitive spending.

conclusion From before the Edo period, Japan had enjoyed a considerable culture of fine garments. To a long-standing appreciation of Chinese silks was added, from the latter part of the sixteenth century, enthusiasm for European woollens and Southeast Asian cottons, later supplemented with Bengali textiles of many kinds. The concept of fashion, and shifts in taste, were central to consumption. The effects of the end of war and the arrival of peace were incremental, but from about 1620 it was clear that the Tokugawa were likely to remain as shoguns for some time, perhaps even as long as the 250 years of the previous, Ashikaga shogunate. The flourishing of commerce was surely appreciated by all social sectors, but the rhetoric of concern about lavishness, and the inherent waste of alterations in dress, became increasingly vocal too. The Tokugawa had established a status-based system, to keep the country from further warfare, and in this aim it was largely successful. Yet status levels and economic wherewithal did not align for long. Condemnations of excess centred on merchants who promoted, and, as retailers, benefited from, overconsumption. These two factors – fashion and the deploring of fashion – necessarily went in tandem. One fed on the other. Since status could not be surmounted, the often-commented ‘rise of the merchant’ had to find its outlet elsewhere. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that readers seem to have consumed texts that articulated the issue from both sides, that is, displaying glee in participating in ever-changing style, and also regret that change existed. One and the same text often made both assertions. It is perhaps best, therefore, to see an interpenetrating rhetoric, rather than two oppositional assumptions about the world of dress.

select bibliography Blussé, Leonard and Cynthia Viallé (eds.), The Deshima Dagregisters: Their Original Tables of Contents, 12 vols. (Leiden:Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1982–date).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and moral concern in early modern japan Fujita Satoru, Bakumatsu no tenno¯ (Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 1994). Gluckman, Dale and Sharon Takeda, When Art Became Fashion: Kosode in Edo-Period Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1992). Harper, Thomas, The True History of the Vendetta of the 47 Ronin from Ako¯ (Sedgwick, ME: Leete Island Books, 2019). Matsudaira Sadanobu, Seigo, in Nihon shisô taikei 38 (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1976), 249–87. Matsudaira Sadanobu, Taikan zakki, in Zoku Nihon zuihitsu taisei 6 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1980), 11–253. Matsudaira Sadanobu, Uge no hito koto, in Uge no hitokoto, Shugyo¯roku (Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko, 1942), 30–222. Okudaira Shunroku, Hikone byo¯bu: mugongeki no enshutsu [Hikone Screen: Performing a Play without Words], E wa gataru [Pictures Narrative] 3 (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1996). Sato¯ Yasuhiro, ‘Tsubaki Chinzan hitsu, Nezu Uemon zo¯’, Kokka, 1215 (2016), 28–32. Screech, Timon, Obtaining Images: Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan (London: Reaktion Books, 2012). Screech, Timon, The Shogun’s Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Seigle, Ceclia Segawa, Yoshiwara: The Glittering World of the Japanese Courtesan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993). Shiveley, William, ‘Sumptuary Regulations and Status in Early Modern Japan’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 25 (1964), 123–64. Sugita Genpaku, Nochimigusa, in Sekiya Hiroshi (ed.), Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryo¯ shu¯sei 7 (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobô, 1970), 55–86. Watanabe Yutaka (ed.), Sharebon taikei, 11 vols. (Tokyo: Rokugo¯-kan, 1931).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.016 Published online by Cambridge University Press

499

15

w

TEXTILES AND FASHION IN SOUTHEAST ASIA ruth barnes

Southeast Asia has an exceptionally rich textile history, and weaving has developed into a high art form in the wider region. The imagination and creativity that one finds reflected in the making of cloth, its detailed patterning and overall design, is equal in aesthetic quality to artistic forms that usually are associated with the more conventionally recognized visual arts of a culture, such as painting and sculpture. Cloth was and is first of all used to dress the human body. For this reason, it is evident that textile production and design connect to a long history of change: what one may call a history of fashion. But textiles also have an unusually deep cultural significance in the region. They play an essential part in many ceremonies and rituals, either as ostentatious displays or as part of offerings, and they often are essential in gift exchanges that establish and emphasize social relationships. Southeast Asia as a region has been on the crossroad of exchanges between West and East for millennia, with direct connections between South and East Asia resulting in a particularly fruitful mixture of Indigenous and outside social and religious ideas. A further characteristic of Southeast Asian textiles is their response to, and integration of, connections to the wider Indian Ocean world. Three aspects are therefore of particular significance here to the making and meaning of textiles: their outstanding artistic quality, their deep cultural meaning, and their involvement with, and response to, connections that reach far beyond the region. This chapter attempts to address all three of these topics.

500

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

southeast asia: background Southeast Asia is made up of two distinct areas: the mainland which is part of the Asian landmass, and an archipelago of thousands of islands which reaches from Sumatra in the west to the Philippines and the Moluccas in the east (Map 15.1). The region is characterized by considerable geographical, ecological, and cultural diversity. Although entirely tropical and consistently hot, levels of rainfall vary greatly. The non-seasonal, continuously wet conditions at the equator support the rainforests of Sumatra, the Malay peninsula, Borneo, and Sulawesi, but this ecology is not conducive to intensive agriculture and in general cannot support large populations. Seasonal rainfall, with an annually predictable dry season, is necessary for the irrigation of rice cultivation of mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. The mainland’s geography is dominated by large river plains and plateaus, separated by mountain ridges that run north–south. The world’s most active volcanoes are found on the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines. The population of Southeast Asia is now predominantly Southern Mongoloid, but in eastern Indonesia there is a shift to Melanesian features. The language families of the mainland are Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, and Tai-Kadai; Austronesian languages are spoken throughout the archipelago, and in parts of eastern Indonesia one also finds non-Austronesian languages related to New Guinea. Social structures and kinship systems vary considerably and have been the topic of numerous anthropological studies, many of which have become classics in their field. Yet despite this diversity, certain cultural traits are commonly shared, among them features of material culture and technology. Historically, houses were built on stilts with a raised floor, and they had prominent roof structures, with walls as visual barriers but with little or no structural function. These architectural features now are still used in ritually important buildings, such as village temples or clan houses. For weaving cloth, the back-strap (body-tension) loom is, or at least was once, shared by most populations, although simple frame looms are also in use now. For metalwork a unique type of bamboo bellows is used. The specific make-up of these tools distinguishes Southeast Asian cultures,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

501

502

ruth barnes

Map 15.1

Southeast Asia. Nations Online Project.

from the Naga Hills in Assam to the Philippines and eastern Indonesia, and they were taken to Madagascar by Austronesian settlers at some time in the first millennium ce. Human habitation in the region goes back at least 55,000 years; the present Austronesian population originated in South China and Taiwan and gradually moved into mainland and maritime Southeast Asia, becoming dominant possibly as early as 3,500 bce.1 Bronze Age 1

See Ian Glover and Peter Bellwood, Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004) for an introduction and general survey of the early history of the region.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

Figure 15.1 Bronze situla, Dong Son culture, Vietnam, 300–100 bce. Detail of warriors on a boat, wearing feather headdress. Yale University Art Gallery, lent by Thomas Jaffe, B.A. 1971. ILE2012.30.817.

artefacts made in the Dong Son culture of Vietnam, in particular large kettle-drums dating from c. 300 bce to c. 100 ce, have been found in many locations of the archipelago and point to early and sustained trade links. Among the most exotic items sought after in exchange for bronze objects were the plumes of the bird of paradise, which is restricted in its habitat to New Guinea and the Northern Moluccas. These brilliantly coloured feathers were highly prized as dress ornament, and many of the bronze drums or situlas show men wearing large, plumed headdresses (Figure 15.1).2 The region’s geography, with its large rivers of the mainland and the short distances between the islands of the archipelago, invites contacts and navigation, and from the first millennium ce onwards Southeast Asia has been a hub of far-reaching connections, especially to South and East Asia, but also beyond to East Africa and the emerging Islamic world. From the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, the port emporium of Srivijaya on the east coast of southern

2

Pamela Swadling, Plumes from Paradise: Trade Cycles in Outer Southeast Asia and Their Impact on New Guinea and Nearby Islands (Port Moresby: Papua New Guinea National Museum, 1996).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

503

504

ruth barnes

Sumatra was a centre of trade and intellectual exchange.3 It was more than a gathering place for merchants and emissaries but also became renowned as a community of teaching and learning. Over the centuries it brought together Buddhist scholars travelling between India and East Asia, as well as Muslim merchants trading between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, South Asia, and China. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, contacts with the Chola Empire of present-day Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh in south India reinforced an appreciation of South Asian beliefs and artistic forms, yet they were integrated into a distinctly Indigenous culture. Both Hinduism and Buddhism gained a strong presence in mainland Southeast Asia and western Indonesia and merged with local beliefs. These generally focused on ancestor veneration, and nature spirits continued to play an important part. Muslim navigators and merchants passed through the ports of the region and already had settlements in China by the ninth century, but Islam did not gain significant influence in Southeast Asia until much later, when local rulers started to convert from the thirteenth century onwards. One of the first realms to be affected by Islam was Aceh in northern Sumatra, whose rulers at the time controlled the trade through the Strait of Malacca. All of these historical contacts had an impact on the arts, including textiles and dress. As the source of precious spices, Southeast Asia became a key attraction to Europeans after 1500 ce. Finding the best routes to the origins of these commodities was a major driving force behind the journeys of discovery during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.4 Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, and French attempts to establish trade monopolies led to political dominance, and with the exception of Thailand the entire region eventually came under the colonial rule of European nations. Twentieth-century movements of 3

4

Oliver W. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967); Kenneth R. Hall, ‘State and Statecraft in Early Srivijaya’, in Kenneth R. Hall and John K. Whitmore (eds.), Explorations in Early Southeast Asian History: The Origins of Southeast Asian Statecraft (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 61–105. The early Portuguese sources are especially instructive about trade and political contacts, e.g. Duarte Barbosa, The Book of Duarte Barbosa, ed. Mansel Longworth Dames (London: Hakluyt Society, 1921); and Tomé Pires, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires, ed. Armando Cortesão (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

independence, in which national dress often became a key signifier of anti-colonial sentiments, eventually led to the establishment of independent Southeast Asian states. It is important to realize, though, that the boundaries of these nations mostly reflect their colonial past and do not necessarily correspond to ethnic and linguistic borders. This is particularly true for the hill communities of Laos, northern Thailand, and Myanmar. The peoples of Upper Myanmar, for example, the Chin, are culturally linked to Assam in Northeast India, and close cultural and linguistic ties exist between the Hmong of North Thailand and Laos, and the Miao of southern China. The way of life of ethnic minorities is often at odds with the nation-states of the region, as the latter may suppress cultural diversity in the name of national unity. The mainland now includes Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, as well as Peninsular Malaysia. The latter country also includes Sarawak and Sabah in North Borneo within its borders. Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Brunei, and Timor Leste (East Timor) make up maritime Southeast Asia.

textiles in southeast asia Weaving in Southeast Asia has a chronological depth that reaches into prehistory. For the Austronesian-speaking population of maritime Southeast Asia linguistic evidence suggests that loom weaving (as distinct from basket weaving) goes back as much as 5,000 years. There is both linguistic and technological evidence for the early presence of weaving in Southeast Asia.5 A bronze sculpture found in Flores, eastern Indonesia, of a woman seated at a back-strap loom 5

Otto Dempwolff, Austronesisches Wörterverzeichnis (Vergleichende Lautlehre des Austronesischen Wortschatzes, vol. iii), Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen No. 19 (Berlin: Reimer, 1938), 135; he has Austronesian *tenun, ‘weave’. Blust refined the definition to refer specifically to loom weaving, rather than the wider category including, e.g. basketry; see Robert Blust, ‘Austronesian Culture History: Some Linguistic Inferences and their Relations to the Archaeological Record’, World Archaeology, 8 (1976), 19–43. He argues that ‘The conclusion seems inescapable that the loom was known to speakers of a language ancestral to at least Malay, the Batak languages and various languages of northern Luzon. A minimum time depth of 4,000 years would seem to be implied’ (p. 34). This linguistic interpretation is confirmed by the back-strap loom technology shared by the Aborigines of Taiwan, who are Austronesian, and peoples of Indonesia whose ancestors left Taiwan close to 5,000 years ago.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

505

506

ruth barnes

and nursing a child, was acquired in the early 2000s by the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; it dates to the sixth or seventh century ce. Stylistically is owes nothing to China or India, and the detailed depiction of the loom and textile link the figure to a weaving technology and textile aesthetic still familiar from the late twentieth century.6 Scholarly research on Southeast Asian textiles began more than a century ago, when J. E. Jasper and Mas Pirngadie published their monumental study of weaving in the (then) Dutch East Indies.7 Thirty years later, Alfred Bühler’s treatise on ikat techniques in the archipelago laid the groundwork for further studies.8 He visited Timor, Rote, and central Flores in 1935 and paid particular attention to the textiles of the region.9 In the late 1970s Mattiebelle Gittinger curated a major exhibition on Indonesian textiles at the Textile Museum in Washington, DC, and its accompanying publication Splendid Symbols: Textiles and Tradition in Indonesia became a seminal work that inspired an entire generation of scholars.10 From the 1980s onward, numerous in-depth studies followed, all based on field research in particular locations. Much of this research was carried out in the archipelago.11 Mainland Southeast Asian work on textiles had a slower start and focused initially on larger regions rather than

6

7

8

9

10

11

Robyn Maxwell, The Bronze Weaver: A Masterpiece of 6th Century Indonesian Sculpture (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2006). J. E. Jasper and Mas Pirngadie, De Inlandsche Kunstnijverheid in Nederlandsch Indië, Vol. II: De Weefkunst (The Hague: Mouton, 1912). Alfred Bühler, Materialien zur Kenntnis der Ikattechnik, Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, Supplement xliii (Leiden: Brill, 1943). Bühler was curator at the Basel Museum of Ethnology and taught at Basel University. Many of his students became internationally renowned scholars in textile studies and art history, among them Marie-Louise NabholzKartaschoff, Eberhard Fischer, and Annemarie Seiler-Baldinger. Mattiebelle Gittinger, Splendid Symbols: Textiles and Tradition in Indonesia (Washington, DC: The Textile Museum, 1979). Ruth Barnes, The Ikat Textiles of Lamalera: A Study of an Eastern Indonesian Weaving Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1989); Brigitta HauserSchäublin, Marie-Louise Nabholz-Kartaschoff, and Urs Ramaeyer, Textiles of Bali (Basel: Museum of Ethnography, 1991); Danielle Geirnaert-Martin, The Woven Land of Laboya: Socio-Cosmic Ideas and Values in West Sumba, Eastern Indonesia (Leiden: Centre of Non-Western Studies, 1992).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

on in-depth research.12 Several substantial broad surveys have also been published, and although generally not based on firsthand field research, some of them are now classic works of reference.13 Three international symposia, held in 1979, 1885, and 1991, show the development of a new and truly interdisciplinary field, with contributions from anthropology, history, art history, and archaeology.14 As most of these sources acknowledge, consideration of dress in Southeast Asia needs not only to discuss cloth to cover the body, but also has to refer to headdress, jewellery, coiffure, and permanent or temporary markings of the body, such as tattoos and cosmetics. Both the region’s mainland and the archipelago have an exceptionally rich tradition of adorning the human body. Dress and body ornament are used to indicate personal and social identity and status within the community, and to signify one’s membership of an ethnic or national unit. They are usually gender-specific and often age-related. Particular dress requirements and the use of prescribed cloths are inevitably associated with certain religious and social ceremonies. To some degree these are commonplace aspects of dress and fashion for any culture, and they apply to most historical periods. But in Southeast Asia they have developed to a particularly rich degree, with dazzling variations in evidence: from the Shaman’s dress of the Shan of Myanmar (Burma), to the glittering outfits of dancers performing at Balinese temple rituals (Figure 15.2), from 12

13

14

Susan Conway, Thai Textiles (London: British Museum Press, 1992); Gillian Green, Traditional Textiles of Cambodia: Cultural Threads and Material Heritage (Bangkok: River Books, 2003). Brigitte Khan Majlis, Indonesische Textilien: Wege zu Göttern und Ahnen (Cologne: Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, 1984), and Gewebte Botschaften: Indonesische Textilien im Wandel (Hildesheim: Roemer-Musem, 1991); Sylvia Fraser-Lu, Handwoven Textiles of South-East Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Robyn Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia: Tradition, Trade and Transformation (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990). Mattiebelle Gittinger (ed.), Indonesian Textiles, Irene Emery Roundtable on Museum Textiles, 1979 Proceedings (Washington, DC: The Textile Museum, 1980); Gisela Völger and Karin von Welck (eds.), Indonesian Textiles: Symposium 1985, Ethnologica Neue Folge 14 (Cologne: Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, 1991); Marie-Louise Nabholz-Kartaschoff, Ruth Barnes, and David Stuart Fox (eds.), Weaving Patterns of Life: Indonesian Textiles Symposium 1991 (Basel: Museum of Ethnography, 1993).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

507

508

ruth barnes

Figure 15.2

Male dancers at a temple ceremony, Sukawati, Bali, Indonesia. Photograph Ruth Barnes, 1996.

the rich blend of Indigenous dress mixed with European garments in the court of Siam, as recorded in late nineteenth-century photographs, to the ritual gifts of cloth and jewellery in eastern Indonesian village societies, reserved to be worn only on ceremonial occasions.15 The earliest detailed representations of Southeast Asian textiles and dress come from the great religious temples of the mainland and Java, built from the ninth century onwards.16 At Angkor 15

16

The northern Thai courts are well documented in Susan Conway, Silken Threads, Lacquer Thrones: Lan Na Court Textiles (Bangkok: River Books, 2002). Borobudur and Prambanan in Central Java were built in the ninth century ce. Angkor Wat dates to the twelfth century ce, but there are numerous earlier temple sites in Cambodia.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

(Cambodia), at Borobudur and Prambanan (Java) we can still admire relief sculptures that show the apparel styles of princes and warriors, as well as of ordinary people, depicted in exquisite detail. Judging by representations in stone and metalwork during the medieval period (ninth to thirteenth centuries), local fashions for personal dress remained relatively unaffected by dress styles from elsewhere in Asia. This meant that both men and women kept a bare upper torso and donned a wrap-around hip cloth. The manner of fastening the cloth is indicated by folds and looped drapery. Tailored garments were not common, although cut and sewn warriors’ jackets appear on temple reliefs and are mentioned in Old Javanese literature.17 Divine status was emphasized by rich jewellery, in the form of armlets, necklaces, foot-bracelets, earrings, and especially elaborate head crowns. Gold jewellery surviving from Java often matches these adornments represented in stone and metalwork sculpture. The most spectacular Javanese gold find was discovered in a rice field in 1990 ce, near the Central Javanese village of Wonoboyo; it is likely to date to the late ninth or early tenth century. The Wonoboyo Treasury is now in the Indonesian National Museum in Jakarta, but other collections of gold jewellery are held elsewhere, and some have been well published.18 Evidence of influence from outside Southeast Asia appears already at this time, as designs and patterns change. From the ninth century onwards, Indian and East Asian designs became integrated into local weaving and textile patterns, even when the manner of wearing cloth remained specific to Southeast Asia. Early ninth-century Javanese sculpture shows the hip wrapper worn by 17

18

Sandra Sardjono, ‘From Warrior’s Attire to Dance Costume: The Short and Sleeveless Jacket in Ancient Indonesia’, in Ruth Barnes and Cristin McKnight Sethi (eds.), ‘In Honor of Dr Mattiebelle Gittinger’, The Textile Museum Journal, 46 (2019), 126–47. The Valerie and Hunter Thompson collection at the Yale University Art Gallery has generated two publications: a collection catalogue and the proceedings of a symposium. See John Miksic, Old Javanese Gold: The Hunter Thompson Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2011); and Ruth Barnes, Emma Natalya Stein, and Benjamin Diebold (eds.), Gold in Early Southeast Asia: Selected Papers from the Symposium ‘Gold in Southeast Asia’, Yale University Art Gallery 13– 14 May 2011, Yale Southeast Asia Studies Monograph 64 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 2015).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

509

510

ruth barnes

men and women decorated mainly with band patterns, as is still found in many of the ikat textiles of Indonesian island cultures today. In the tenth century, there is a shift to an overall pattern of linked circles or floral patterns. The source for this change in design preference is likely to be a response to Indian textiles, which emphasize large fields of connected patterns. From the tenth and eleventh centuries onwards, representations of textiles show a strong similarity to Indian design, and we can assume that the trade with South Asian fabrics started to have a formative aesthetic impact on Southeast Asia. These overall patterns, which are depicted with astonishing detail on the relief panels and large sculptures of Hindu deities or Buddhist saints, are often identical to designs known from Indian textiles traded throughout the Indian Ocean; some of these survive on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century block-printed Indian cotton found in Egypt.19 These textiles have become primary evidence for the important role Southeast Asia played in the pre-modern trade history of the Indian Ocean. The influence of India and, to a lesser degree, China on Southeast Asia is significant, and one cannot appreciate the cultures of the region without paying attention to these farreaching connections. But it is just as important to recognize the cultural and technological vitality of the region, independent of outside influences. It is characteristic for Southeast Asian cultures that they absorb, but then transform outside influences into something uniquely their own. The impact of Indian cloths at this time is not surprising, as there was an intense exchange of trade and knowledge between south India and Java. We cannot say whether these textiles depicted were made in South Asia or locally produced. More surprising is a connection to Central Asia, which must have been filtered through contacts with Tang dynasty China. Hiram Woodward has identified eight panels at the Buddhist Candi Sewu in Central Java, dated to the ninth century ce, which apparently represent textiles.20 19

20

Ruth Barnes, Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt: The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Hiram W. Woodward, ‘Indonesian Textile Patterns from a Historical Point of View’, in Gittinger (ed.), Indonesian Textiles, 15–26.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

They show Central Asian textile motifs of linked, lobed roundels and crouching animals, popular in China during the Tang dynasty in the ninth century. The Central Asian or Chinese prototype must have found its way to Java and was considered precious enough to be replicated in stone relief on a sacred building. Tenth- and eleventh-century tax records from Java give detailed accounts for textile workshops associated with temple foundations, and of the specialized crafts people working in them, as well as the materials and techniques they used. These have been analysed by Jan Wisseman Christie in several seminal publications.21 She finds evidence for the use of ikat, the resist-dye technique that is widely used throughout mainland and island Southeast Asia, and she suggests that from the twelfth century onwards there may even be evidence for the first use of batik, another resist-dye technique for which Java is especially well known. She supports this claim with an epigraphic references to tulis (drawn) cloth, which may be a reference to batik tulis, the term now used for hand-waxed batik. She also mentions the import of cloth from south India. The records she has analysed show that by the tenth century there were specialist workshops that were spinning, weaving, and dyeing textiles, generally connected with temple establishments. None of these early textiles survive. The earliest weavings from Southeast Asia were found in South Sumatra and are dated by radiocarbon analysis to the fifteenth century ce (Figure 15.3). About half a dozen of these early cloths are currently known. They all are patterned with weft ikat, a resist-dye technique now used in mainland Southeast Asia and Sumatra, but formerly probably also found in Java. They have silk warp threads and a cotton weft, and their weft ikat designs share the same arrangements of birds, stylized crouching deer, and centralized geometric mandala patterns. This suggests that they were all made in professional workshops, most likely associated with a court or temple. They were made in multiple productions, rather than as individual creations, but they are of astonishingly high quality.

21

See especially Jan Wisseman Christie, ‘Ikat to Batik? Epigraphic Data on Textiles in Java from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Centuries’, in NabholzKartaschoff et al. (eds.), Weaving Patterns of Life, 11–29.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

511

512

ruth barnes

Figure 15.3 Ceremonial cloth (detail), collected in Lampung, South Sumatra, possibly made in Java, fifteenth century. Silk warp, cotton weft, weft ikat. Detail showing birds in flight and mandala. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Robert J. Holmgren and Anita E. Spertus. 2017.48.14.

After the great classical stone sculptures and early evidence from metalwork from mainland and insular Southeast Asia it becomes difficult to trace further developments in design, let alone changes in fashion, until depictions in eighteenth-century manuscripts from Siam and Burma, as well as mural paintings from Buddhist temples in northern Thailand. These show the predominance of unstitched, wrapped clothing, but also the use of tailored jackets for men, and remarkable tattoos that cover their thighs.22 Early nineteenth-century Javanese and Balinese manuscripts take up the story for the islands, as do shadow puppets that show dress patterns in great detail (Figure 15.4). Stamford Raffles’ History of Java (1817) also provides images for the early nineteenth-century dress of court and commoners, showing designs and dress patterns in use that are still familiar.23 22 23

See illustrations in Conway, Thai Textiles, 12, 32–3, 95. Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History of Java. Reprint Cambridge Library Collection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; first published 1817), 85–95.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

Figure 15.4 Shadow puppet (wayang kulit) of Bima, from the set Kyai Drajat, Solo (Surakarta), Central Java, late nineteenth to early twentieth century. Water buffalo hide, buffalo horn, pigments, bone, gold leaf. Yale University Art Gallery, Dr. Walter Angst and Sir Angest Collection 2018.130.305.8.

the making of cloth The two most common fibres used in weaving are cotton and silk. Cotton may have been Indigenous to Southeast Asia, but it was not utilized for weaving purposes until the early first millennium ce, probably as the result of a technological transfer from India. Silk cultivation originated in China, but it was introduced to mainland Southeast Asia, most likely also some time during the first millennium ce; silk weaving is now common on the mainland. In the archipelago it only spread to western Indonesia. Prior to the introduction of cotton and silk, though, there were other Indigenous bast fibres, some of which are occasionally still in use today,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

513

514

ruth barnes

especially in the Philippines. Notable are the threads made from the abaca plant, a banana fibre, and piña, a pineapple plant with leaves that produce exceptionally fine fibres, used to weave delicate, lace-like fabrics. In addition to woven cloth, bark cloth was still made in the early twentieth century, especially in eastern Indonesia, but it has now been replaced by woven textiles. Dye plants that produce red and blue are particularly sought after; indigo provides blue, and morinda citrifolia is an ancient Southeast Asian source for red. Lac, a resinous insect secretion that accumulates on the branches of certain plants, is used for dyeing silk. In western Indonesia and Malaysia, the sumptuous use of gold and silver metal thread, often inserted as a supplementary weft, creates garments of high prestige. These cloths are worn as waist wrappers or head and shoulder cloths. The colour of dress textiles was, and is, of great importance and may be prescribed for specific occasions and functions. The most important colour classification is red, black, and white. Colour symbolism is a difficult topic to pursue in a cross-cultural survey, though, as the meaning of a particular colour can shift radically from one context to another. White is most consistently connected with spirits and the divine, but red and black are more ambiguous. Among the Lamaholot people of eastern Indonesia, red is associated with positive strength, and the bride-wealth cloth needed for the gift exchange at marriage has to be dyed a deep red. Their neighbours in Kedang, however, associate red with witchcraft and warfare, and their bride-wealth textiles have to be dark blue (classified as ‘black’).24 A similar shift between red and black is mentioned by Schulte Nordholt for Timor. He says: The extraordinary fact remains that red and dark blue (black) as the main colours of cloths are spread in an extremely irregular pattern across Indonesian Timor. They are at the same time the colours which play an important, though rather vague part in the classificatory system.25

24 25

Barnes, The Ikat Textiles of Lamalera, 92–3. Henk G. Schulte Nordholt, The Political System of the Atoni of Timor, Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 60 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971), 45.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

The major Southeast Asian patterning techniques for decorating cloth can be divided into three groups. First, the weaver may introduce differently dyed thread into the warp and/or weft, creating stripes and bands, or a plaid effect. This technique is found worldwide wherever looms are in use, and it is common throughout Southeast Asia, from the hills of Burma to eastern Indonesia. It is a simple way of introducing different colours and patterns, yet it can result in extremely fine and elegant cloth; one example is the exquisite red and blue checker plaid woven by the Minangkabau of Sumatra. A second technique, which also uses patterning through weaving, is called supplementary warp or weft. As the name indicates, additional weft or warp threads are introduced to partly float above the plain weave of the ground fabric. It probably has an ancient history in the region, with supplementary weft most widely spread and especially highly developed in mainland Southeast Asia and Sumatra, but also found in eastern Indonesia. Again, it is not a technically complex technique, but the patterns that can be created with it are often very intricate. To make effective use of the technique, the weaver has to keep track of the geometric build-up of patterns. Mattiebelle Gittinger considered it one of the most ancient Southeast Asian patterning techniques, and she traced its distribution among the Tai-speaking peoples of the mainland.26 Among the finest examples are the ceremonial tampan, so-called ships’ cloth of South Sumatra, named after the prominent ship motifs on many of them (Figure 15.5). Early interpretations of the boat image refer to it as the ‘Ship of the Dead’ and link the iconography to the afterlife. But as Gittinger has argued convincingly, the interpretation needs to take into account a much wider meaning, as boat imagery is introduced at moments of transition, as in wedding ceremonies, celebrations of child-bearing, and funerals.27 The tampan are used as covers for food presentations and offerings at marriage feasts and ceremonies that celebrate rich men’s prestige. 26

27

Mattiebelle Gittinger and Leedom Lefferts, Textiles and the Tai Experience in Southeast Asia (Washington, DC: The Textile Museum, 1992). Mattiebelle Gittinger, ‘The Ship Textiles of South Sumatra: Functions and Design Systems’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land en Volkenkunde, 132 (1976), 219–20.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

515

516

ruth barnes

Figure 15.5 Ceremonial cloth tampan, Lampung, South Sumatra, eighteenth century. Cotton, supplementary weft. Yale University Art Gallery, Thomas Jaffe, B.A. 1971 Promised Gift. ILE2006.4.121.

The third patterning group involves resist-dye techniques, of which ikat is the most widespread. The name ikat derives from the Malay word for ‘tie’, as the design is tied into the warp or weft threads (in some rare instances, into both warp and weft) and then dyed, prior to weaving (Figures 15.6 and 15.7). Southeast Asia may have been one of the earliest regions to develop this technique, along with Central and possibly South Asia.28 It is one of the most complicated and labour-intensive techniques for patterning 28

The term ‘ikat’ is not generally recognized in local cultures, as each region has its own word for the technique. But the Malay word is used here as it is widely recognized in the textile and fashion field.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

Figure 15.6 Ikat frame showing patterns tied with palm leaf strips, ready to be dyed. Lamalera, Lembata, Indonesia. Photo by Ruth Barnes, 1982.

Figure 15.7

Tying the ikat knots. Lamalera, Lembata, Indonesia. Photo by Ruth Barnes, 1982.

a textile, and like supplementary weaving techniques, it is an outstanding example of applied mathematics. The design is built up from small knot units that are shifted across the warp or weft to create the pattern.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

517

518

ruth barnes

Figure 15.8 Patolu made in Gujarat, India for trade to Southeast Asia. Silk, double ikat. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Mr and Mrs Lee Kip Lee, Singapore. 2015.91.13.

One Indian version of silk, double ikat, where both warp and weft are tied with patterns, called patolu (sing.)/patola (pl.) and made in Gujarat, became a highly desired import to maritime Southeast Asia (Figure 15.8). When the first European merchants arrived in the region and tried to gain access to the spice trade, they quickly realized that these silk cloths were a major item of exchange. The patola designs eventually had a major impact on many Indonesian ikat designs, as first noted by Alfred Bühler and since investigated in more detail in eastern Indonesia and Bali.29 Southeast Asian weavers have developed the technique to the highest decree, with masterpieces created throughout the region, from Cambodia and Thailand to Sumatra, Sulawesi, and all of eastern Indonesia. In western Southeast Asia, both silk and cotton may be used, while east of Sumatra and Bali, ikat textiles inevitably are made of cotton. Tie-dyed textiles also occur, specifically on Java and Sulawesi. Batik, where the pattern is drawn with a liquid resist onto the surface of the cloth prior to dyeing, is found among the Hmong of northern Thailand and Laos, and the Miao of southern China, where hill tribe women apply their intricate geometric batik designs to full cotton skirts, otherwise an unusual form of dress in Southeast Asia. However, the technique is most famous for textiles from Java (Figure 15.9(a)–(d)). There batik designs adorn primarily wraparound skirt cloths. The island’s courts all have, or formerly had, 29

Alfred Bühler, ‘Patola Influences in Southeast Asia’, Journal of Indian Textile History, 4 (1959), 4–46; Barnes, The Ikat Textiles of Lamalera, 72–3 and 82–7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia (a)

(b)

Figure 15.9(a)–(d) Four pages from a book demonstrating the different stages of batik patterning, Java, early twentieth century. Cotton, wax. Yale University Art Gallery. 1937.5446.

their own batik workshops (Figure 15.10). Javanese batik attracted European attention and was much admired by the late nineteenth century. Designs created in North Java became especially popular as collectors’ items among Dutch colonial officers and their wives (Figure 15.11). The origin and history of Javanese batik and its use for dress cloth is uncertain. The technique may have been imported from India or may have been an independent innovation.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

519

520

ruth barnes (c)

(d)

Figure 15.9(a)–(d) (cont.)

As Jan Christie has suggested, it may have been known in Java by the twelfth century, but it is impossible to say at present where it originated.30

the cultural meaning of textiles Textiles in Southeast Asia cannot be separated from the cultural role of weaving, and weaving in turn is closely linked with 30

Christie, ‘Ikat to Batik?’, 16–18.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

Figure 15.10 Batik workshop at the Sultan of Yogyakarta’s court, 1928. Photo by Hanna Vatter.

Figure 15.11 Waist wrapper sarung, Lasem, North Java, c. 1910. Cotton, wax-resist batik. Yale University Art Gallery, Thomas Jaffe, B.A. 1971 Promised Gift. ILE2006.4.345.

Indigenous ideas of gender, as well as social and symbolic issues. The significance given to weaving is common to both mainland and maritime Southeast Asia and it is inevitably associated with

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

521

522

ruth barnes

women and the female aspects of society. As child-bearing, women are affiliated with fertility and the cloth they weave can become part of the enaction of life-giving ceremonies. Textiles form part of gift exchanges common in many cultures of the region, and they are inevitably given by the female side, either by the weaver herself, or her family or lineage. These cloths more often than not also function as dress items. The exchange of gifts is usually established with a marriage, an occasion that brings two families or lineages (clans) together (Figure 15.12). Gifts of cloth and dress items continue as children are born and grow up. At the end of a person’s life, cloth gifts are again offered at the funeral and may accompany the deceased into the grave (Figure 15.13). These stages of textile and dress presentation are common to many Southeast Asian communities, but they are especially well documented for

Figure 15.12 Women bringing gifts of cloth at a wedding. Lamalera, Lembata, Indonesia. Photo by Ruth Barnes, 1982.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

Figure 15.13 Cloth displayed at a funeral. Witihama, Adonara, Indonesia. Photo by Ruth Barnes, 2014.

the Tai of Thailand and Laos, as well as for the Toba Batak (Sumatra) and eastern Indonesian cultures. Detailed studies have been published for Flores, the Solor Islands, Savu, and Timor.31 Without textiles one cannot marry, and it would be impossible to have a proper burial. Textiles hold the society together. 31

Barnes, The Ikat Textiles of Lamalera; Gittinger and Lefferts, Textiles and the Tai Experience; Roy Hamilton (ed.), Gift of the Cotton Maiden: Textiles of Flores and the Solor Islands (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1994); Geneviève Duggan, Ikats of Savu: Women Weaving History in Eastern Indonesia (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2001); Sandra Niessen, Legacy in Cloth: Batak Textiles of Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2009).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

523

524

ruth barnes

Figure 15.14 Woman’s cloth, Palembang or Bangka, eighteenth century. Silk, metal thread, weft ikat, supplementary weft. Yale University Art Gallery, Thomas Jaffe, B.A. 1971 Promised Gift. ILE2006.4.214.

Cloth can also have a safeguarding function. On Bali a person who in a ritual performance is expected to go into trance, is wrapped in a protective textile: an Indian double-ikat silk patolu or a Balinese copy of the same serves this purpose.32 A priest about to invite the gods to descend and participate in a ritual, will do so wearing a white robe and special sash. At the circumcision ceremony for a Muslim boy in Java, a cloth is placed to protect him. Fine textiles used as articles of dress also indicate rank and prestige, and their colour and patterns may shift with age. In western Southeast Asia, high status is emphasized by gold or silver metal thread woven into silk, as well as jewellery of precious metal (Figure 15.14). In village societies the supplementary woven or ikat-dyed designs of women’s skirts may show affiliation with a prestigious lineage or family; in eastern Indonesia, lineages sometimes claim ownership of particular named patterns, and only members of that group may wear these.33 A different form of 32

33

Marie-Louise Nabholz-Kartashoff, ‘Cloths for the Ancestors: On the Relationship between Technique and Meaning of Balinese Textiles’, in Ruth Barnes and Mary Hunt Kahlenberg (eds.), Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles: The Mary Hunt Kahlenberg Collection (Munich: Prestel, 2010), 186–97. Ruth Barnes, ‘East Flores Regency’, in Hamilton (ed.), Gift of the Cotton Maiden, 187–9; Duggan, Ikats of Savu.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

prestige linked to dress has developed in societies where competition for merit is a strong element. The Naga, who are the westernmost peoples with Southeast Asian cultural traits, and the Iban of Borneo, both celebrate individual male achievements at prestige feasts, involving animal sacrifice and ritual performances and chants. Formerly success in headhunting brought prestige, now a successful return from education or work abroad serves the same purpose. On these occasions, elaborately prepared cloths, woven by the most highly skilled women, are essential items to be displayed, as they are meant to express great merit and prestige. They are the women’s accomplishments equivalent to the men’s achievements.34 Weaving these cloths successfully cannot be undertaken without divine support. In-depth research into the textiles of a particular region usually also attempts an analysis of patterns, their history, and meaning. Ideally this should reflect information gleaned from the weavers themselves and be based on historical or ethnographic interpretation. However, in some cases this has become an issue of academic debate. One of the first authors to take up the topic of the meaning of patterns was Jager Gerlings, who proposed that the abstract linked hook designs commonly found in Indonesian ikat textiles represented ancestor figures, connected to indicate a line of descent.35 His interpretation was not based on field research but on a visual analysis of textiles at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, and it could not be confirmed by later scholars. Nevertheless, his views appealed to collectors and connoisseurs and were repeated on many occasions. A similarly fanciful discussion happened to the ceremonial women’s cloth tapis from Lampung, South Sumatra, which are among the finest Indonesian textiles. They have cotton warp ikat patterns and bands of silk embroidery, the latter with an iconography that often remains enigmatic, although one may discern stylized 34

35

See Traude Gavin, The Women’s Warpath: Iban Ritual Fabrics from Borneo (Los Angeles, UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1996); Ruth Barnes, ‘Women as Headhunters: The Making and Meaning of Textiles in a Southeast Asian Context’, in Ruth Barnes and Joanne Eicher (eds), Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning (Oxford: Berg, 1992), 29–43. Johannnes H. Jager Gerlings, Sprekende weefsels: Studie over Ontstaan en Betekenis van Weefsels van einige Indonesische Eilanden, Mededeling 99 (Amsterdam: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, 1952).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

525

526

ruth barnes

human figures, possibly also boats and marine life. The making of these tapis was discontinued in the late nineteenth century, and the Indigenous names and meanings have been lost. Unfortunately, this has led some collectors and dealers to put forward fanciful interpretations that are not based on ethnographic or historical information. Nowhere has the discussion of the meaning of patterns become more contentious than in the interpretation of Iban textiles from Borneo. Iban designs can be extraordinarily complex, and they have evoked often contradictory interpretations. The initial publication on them, by Alfred Haddon and Laura Start, claims the motifs to be mainly descriptive: if a pattern is called ‘tiger’, it must represent the tiger, even if not recognizable as such by the outsider.36 Closer field research has shown this not to be the case; in particular Derek Freeman’s work and his wife Monica Freeman’s diaries placed Iban textiles into a richer cultural context.37 From the early 1990s onwards, there has been a debate about the interpretation of Iban textiles. At the forefront of the battlefield has been Freeman’s student Michael Heppell who started an acerbic argument with Traude Gavin on the significance of Iban patterns. He claimed that ‘every motif has a meaning’, which Traude Gavin has argued against.38 This is not the place to present the various positions in further detail. It is sufficient to say that emotions have run high. An analytical account of the arguments was recently published by V. T. King.39 The meaning of patterns remains a hot topic for researchers to consider.

36

37

38

39

Alfred Haddon and Laura Start, Iban or Sea Dayak Fabrics and their Patterns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). Derek Freeman, Report on the Iban, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology 41 (London: Athlone Press, 1970); Laura P. Appell-Warren (ed.), The Iban Diaries of Monica Freeman, 1949– 1951, Including Ethnographic Drawings, Sketches, Paintings, Photographs. And Letters, Borneo Research Council Monograph Series 11 (Phillips, ME: Borneo Research Council, 2009). Michael Heppell, Limbang anak Melaka, and Enyan anak Usen, Iban Art: Sexual Selection and Severed Heads – Weaving, Sculpture, Tattooing and Other Arts of the Iban of Borneo (Leiden/Amsterdam: Swartenkot/KIT Publishers, 2005), 147; Gavin, Women’s Warpath; Iban Ritual Textiles, Verhandelingen KITLV 205 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2003). Victor T. King, ‘Claiming Authority: Derek Freeman, His Legacy and Interpretations of the Iban of Borneo’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 173/1 (2017), 83–113.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

Why do textiles have such a strong cultural meaning in Southeast Asian societies? The reasons vary from one society to the next; any proper analysis therefore needs to provide a specific detailed historical and ethnographic account. Here it is only possible to highlight certain aspects that come up with some consistency. Firstly, textiles are associated with the female side of society, as mentioned at the beginning of this section. Women weave, and the gift of cloth at marriage comes from their side of a union between two lineages. Traditionally the status of women in Southeast Asia has been high; they are seen as one side of two complementary aspects of worldly existence – female complements male, and vice versa, as does right and left, up and down, and odd and even numbers. The high status of women may explain why their particular expertise, weaving, also enjoys such prestige. But secondly, there is evidence for at least some Southeast Asian societies that the technology of weaving, and some of the peculiarities of the original back-strap loom, add weight to the high esteem given to the loom’s product. The earliest and still most common type of back-strap loom uses a continuous warp, so that the finished cloth comes off the loom as a circular structure (Figure 15.15). For utilitarian purposes, the continuous warp will be cut and the cloth becomes a rectangle. For ceremonial use, though, the cloth often is not cut but retains its circular shape, with the continuous warp threads remaining intact. This happens with the double-ikat cloth geringsing woven in Bali, which play an important role in healing ceremonies. It also applies to the textiles given as marriage presentations in some eastern Indonesian societies on Flores and the Solor Islands. The appropriate bride-wealth cloth is an elaborately patterned woman’s skirt which has to retain the continuous warp, as these warp threads are a metaphor for the continuity of life and the lines of descent that the wedding initiates.

forms of dress: similarities and difference Certain aspects of dress are shared by virtually all cultures of the region. The ubiquitous wrap-around untailored cloth is most common, either in its open rectangular shape, or as a tubular skirt sewn together. The cloth is fastened either by tucking in the folds, or

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

527

528

ruth barnes

Figure 15.15 Weaving on a back-strap loom. Lamalera, Lembata, Indonesia. Photo by Ruth Barnes, 1982.

with the help of a belt. It is often worn by both sexes, although male attire may also use trousers in traditional dress. Jackets and tailored tops are now generally worn by both men and women. In western Indonesia these were fashionable imports from western Islamic cultures, such as the Ottoman or Mughal empires, from at least the seventeenth century onwards. They also evolved into a hybrid dress under Dutch rule in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the more remote parts of the islands the upper part of the body remained largely uncovered until well into the twentieth century. In addition to the tubular skirt or trousers worn by men, a shoulder cloth may be used as additional ornamental dress or cover. This can also serve as a hold-all and device for carrying young children or goods. A headdress or hat is more commonly worn by men than by women, although a ceremonial headdress is part of both male and female attire on certain occasions. Some of the hill tribes of northwest Thailand and Myanmar have developed elaborate women’s headdresses where the cloth is folded to create two horn-shaped peaks; a similar outfit is found among the Minangkabau of southern Sumatra, worn especially at weddings.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

This brings up the diversity of dress forms and patterns, despite the similarities of the basic construction of dress. Prior to the development of urban workshops and large-scale commercial textile mills in the twentieth century, weaving was primarily a local activity. It took place in individual village households or in court workshops. Specific local pattern arrangements, use of techniques, and colour juxtapositions developed, and it was easy to recognize the origin of a cloth. Dressing in it gave the wearer a distinct local affiliation. This is not to say that cloth did not travel – quite the contrary, its light weight and initial durability has made it an easily transportable product. Textiles for dress, and to make a ‘fashion statement’, have moved long distances, in Southeast Asia as much as anywhere. In nineteenth-century Thailand, for example, when aristocratic women from the northern courts became allied through marriage with the royal family of Siam, they often continued to wear their Chiangmai style of dress to emphasize their origin.40 In eastern Indonesia, textiles were traded from weaving production areas into regions that produced little weaving of their own.41 But even here locally specific designs and colours could be requested from the non-local weaverproducer, to establish a look that appealed to, and was subsequently identified with, the end-user. There is evidence that textiles were produced for specific requirements, not only from nearby weaving communities, but also from as far afield as India. Particularly striking examples are Indian textiles made specifically to suit the taste of the Toraja of Sulawesi. They are stored in the lineage houses, but are brought out for the annual harvest ceremony.42

textiles and dress in colonial and post-colonial southeast asia The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brought great changes to textiles and fashion in the region. Early in the 40 41

42

Conway, Silken Threads, Lacquer Thrones. Ruth Barnes, ‘Weaving and Non-Weaving in Lamaholot’, Indonesia Circle, 42 (1987), 16–31. Ruth Barnes, ‘Indian Textiles for Island Taste: The Trade to Eastern Indonesia’, in Rosemary Crill (ed.), Textiles from India: The Global Trade (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2005), 99–116.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

529

530

ruth barnes

twentieth century an Indigenous national dress developed in Indonesia, to emphasize the difference from colonial uniform and European dress. Women wore a Javanese batik sarong and a tightly tailored blouse with long sleeves, men a checked sarong or Western-style trousers, and a black velvet cap (peci) originally associated with Islam, but adopted as a sign of national independence. One still sees it, now again worn primarily by Muslim men. Religious affiliation is increasingly expressed in dress, in particular by Muslims. Especially the way Muslim women started to dress in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was a departure from the secular emphasis of the decades following the independence of Indonesia and Malaysia, when Western-style dress became common, especially in urban centres. The custom of partial veiling to cover the head first emerged in Malaysia in the 1970s, but it did not spread to Indonesia and Islamic parts of the Philippines until the 1990s. There is a long history of dressing according to religious affiliation, though. The mostly Buddhist populations of mainland Southeast Asia prepare their dress for certain ceremonial occasions, and of course the Buddhist monks follow a particular code of dress, wearing saffron robes that have been patched together from a multitude of cloth pieces. The Hindu of Bali dress with hip wrappers and breast cloths for temple rituals and domestic offerings, and the men and boys wear folded head cloths. Christians in Indonesia and the Philippines wear Europeanstyle dress when they go to church, with some local variations and Indigenous adaptations, such as the fine Philippine piña cloth that resembles delicate Spanish lace. Village societies everywhere still hold Indigenous rituals, and typically these are performed to celebrate their relationship to the ancestors; on these occasions specially woven local cloth and elaborate headdress may be worn.

conclusion In the face of globalization there has been a remarkable revival of local forms of dress fashion and what is considered to be Indigenous and traditional. The reasons for this are manifold. An emphasis on what is

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

textiles and fashion in southeast asia

thought to be particular to a local culture has emerged; in some contexts, this is at least in part in response to commercial advantages seen in promoting the ‘exotic’, as regions have become centres for tourism. The picturesque dress of the villagers of northern Thailand and Laos, of the Toba Batak in northern Sumatra, or of East Sumba may be paraded in sanitized dance performances set up for the entertainment of tourist visitors. But there is no doubt that there also is a revival of local ceremonial and ritual performances, often carried out in a syncretic mixture with the nationally accepted form of religion. In Indonesia this was helped by the failure of Suharto’s New Order regime which had held a tight grip on the nation and insisted on a strongly centralized structure. Regionalism has had a revival, not just in political terms, and it is emphasized by local textiles. Producers of textiles and dress ornaments also have become aware of the potential of an international market. Apart from their weaving being fostered in locations favoured by tourists, such as Bali or southern Thailand, the partial displacement and emigration of mainland Southeast Asians from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, following the end of the Vietnam War and the ensuing period of political upheaval, has helped to disseminate textile and weaving experts to North America and Australia. Their colourful dress has enchanted Westerners, and it has encouraged the development of a niche market for high-quality hand-woven articles, exported and sold as textile art. These cloths are now no longer worn, but have become artistic wall displays exhibited in galleries and collectors’ homes. Despite this commercialization of Southeast Asian textiles, they retain their importance in their place of origin. New designs may have evolved in response to influences from outside the wider region, but similar assimilations have happened in the past. Preferences for particular colours and fibres may be in evidence, as synthetic dyes and threads have become common. However, the making and meaning of cloth is as integral to cultural and gender identity as ever.

select bibliography Barnes, Ruth, Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt: The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

531

532

ruth barnes Barnes, Ruth, The Ikat Textiles of Lamalera: A Study of an Eastern Indonesian Weaving Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1989). Blust, Robert, ‘Austronesian Culture History: Some Linguistic Inferences and their Relations to the Archaeological Record’, World Archaeology, 8 (1976), 19–43. Bühler, Alfred, Materialien zur Kenntnis der Ikattechnik, Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie, Supplement xliii (Leiden: Brill, 1943). Bühler, Alfred, ‘Patola Influences in Southeast Asia’, Journal of Indian Textile History, 4 (1959), 4–46. Christie, Jan Wisseman, ‘Ikat to Batik? Epigraphic Data on Textiles in Java from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Centuries’, in Marie-Louise Nabholz-Kartaschoff, Ruth Barnes, and David J. Stuart-Fox (eds.), Weaving Patterns of Life: Indonesian Textile Symposium 1991 (Basel: Museum of Ethnography, 1993), 11–29. Conway, Susan, Thai Textiles (London: British Museum Press, 1992). Dempwolff, Otto, Austronesisches Wörterverzeichnis (Vergleichende Lautlehre des Austronesischen Wortschatzes, vol. iii), Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen No. 19 (Berlin: Reimer, 1938). Gavin, Traude, Iban Ritual Textiles, Verhandelingen KITLV 205 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2003). Gittinger, Mattiebelle, Splendid Symbols: Textiles and Tradition in Indonesia (Washington, DC: The Textile Museum, 1979). Gittinger, Mattiebelle and Leedom Lefferts, Textiles and the Tai Experience in Southeast Asia (Washington, DC: The Textile Museum, 1992). Glover, Ian and Peter Bellwood, Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004). Maxwell, Robyn, Textiles of Southeast Asia: Tradition, Trade, and Transformation (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990). Raffles, Thomas Stamford, The History of Java. Reprint Cambridge Library Collection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; first published 1817). Völger, Gisela and Karin von Welck (eds.), Indonesian Textiles: Symposium 1985, Ethnologica Neue Folge 14 (Cologne: RautenstrauchJoest Museum, 1991).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.017 Published online by Cambridge University Press

16

w

FASHION IN MING AND QING CHINA rachel silberstein

Until fairly recently, fashion was viewed as of little relevance to Chinese history. It was not until the late 1990s that scholars began to challenge the assumption, demonstrated to have originated with eighteenth-century reports from Western observers, that China lacked the phenomenon of fashion until it was introduced by the West in the early twentieth century.1 As BuYun Chen’s chapter in this volume discusses, these new studies of fashion in historical China were part of a wider trend to contest the association between fashion, Western modernity, and capitalism. This scholarship spanned cultural history, literature studies, and museum exhibitions, but it shared a desire to look to new sources, rather than echo the court-issued and official texts that charted regulation and control.2 Scholars began to discuss vernacular and commercial texts that revealed histories of women and merchants, of 1

2

Antonia Finnane, ‘Yangzhou’s “Mondernity”: Fashion and Consumption in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Positions, 11/2 (2003), 395–425; Dorothy Ko, ‘Bondage in Time: Footbinding and Fashion Theory’, Fashion Theory, 1/1 (2003), 3–28. Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Sarah Dauncey, ‘Illusions of Grandeur: Perceptions of Status and Wealth in Late Ming Female Clothing and Ornamentation’, East Asian History, 25–26 (2003), 43–68. A key moment was the 2003 publication, in the journal Positions, of papers by Antonia Finnane (‘Yangzhou’s “Mondernity”’), Paola Zamperini (‘Clothes that Matter’), and others, which also included an English translation of the twentieth-century novelist Zhang Ailing’s (Eileen Chang) 1943 essay, ‘A Chronicle of Changing Clothes’ (Geng yi ji). Important exhibitions include Evolution and Revolution curated by Clare Roberts at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (1997) and China Chic curated by Valerie Steele and John Major at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York (1999).

533

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

534

rachel silberstein

entertainment and trade.3 Most of all, historians began to look beyond regulated court dress objects like rank badges and dragon robes, which had long fascinated Western collectors, to diverse objects including photographs, vernacular paintings, and prints, thus moving the field away from twentieth-century connoisseurship accounts.4 This chapter draws attention to the range of sources – textual, material, and visual – to provide a broad overview of fashion in Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) China through four key periods of change: the early Ming transition away from the Mongolian influence of the preceding Yuan dynasty; the rise of fashion through the so-called ‘silver century’ period (1550–1650); the reintroduction of ethnicity as a source of sartorial tension with the ascent of the ethnic Manchu Qing rulers; and the commercialization of fashion in the mid-late Qing period. Each section is structured around a key image: a fifteenth-century handscroll depicting the Ming court at leisure; a seventeenthcentury painting of a Nanjing literati surrounded by three fashionable musicians; an eighteenth-century album of Jiangnan amorous elites; and a late Qing beauty print. Through this visual grounding, the chapter identifies both the stylistic shifts and the systemic features of fashion in Chinese history: the key players; the role of urban centres as production and popular culture hubs; the impact of developments in the textile industry, in particular the shift away from imperially controlled workshops to private

3

4

For an introduction to primary sources, see Li Zhitan (ed.), Zhongguo fushi wenhua cankao wenxian mulu (Beijing: Zhongguo Fangzhi Chubanshe, 2001). A very selective list includes Helen E. Fernald, Chinese Court Costumes (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology, 1946); Schuyler Cammann, China’s Dragon Robes (New York: Ronald Press, 1952); Valery M. Garrett, Chinese Clothing: An Illustrated Guide (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994); John Vollmer, Decoding Dragons: Status Garments in Ch’ing Dynasty China (Museum of Art, University of Oregon, 1983); Linda Wriggleworth and Gary Dickinson, Imperial Wardrobe (London: Bamboo Publishing Ltd, 1990). For more on the ways collecting has shaped scholarship, see Rachel Silberstein, ‘Other People’s Clothes: The Secondhand Clothes Dealer and the Western Art Collector in Early Twentieth-Century China’, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 26/2 (2019), 164–87.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

producers that permitted wider access to textile and tailor-made handicrafts; and finally the impetus of global trade in the last century of the period.

early ming court life, c . 1368–1550 Both the Ming and Qing dynasties – the late imperial period that spanned China’s early modernity – began with revolutions in dress. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) was established by overturning the Yuan Mongol dynasty (1279–1368), and from the outset, its founder, the Hongwu emperor (r. 1368–98), was concerned with rejecting ‘barbarian customs’ and establishing correct rituals, including those of dress and adornment. His court established a clothing system that banned ‘nomadic clothes’ (hu fu) and returned to the ethnically Han Chinese ways of the ancient Zhou, Han, and, more recently, Tang dynasties.5 Despite the ban on Mongol customs, more recent scholarship shows how Mongol influence was sustained through the early Ming period, particularly in north China, something confirmed by the repeated prohibitions against wearing Mongol-style dress through the latter half of the fourteenth century. Hu fu was an ambiguous term; but associated features like braided thread waists and braided hair certainly persisted, as did associated garments.6 Moreover, the ‘archetypal male Mongol silhouette’7 – a cinched waist, side closure with ties, narrow sleeves, and calf-length skirt – seems to have prevailed through the early Ming period, not only in

5

6

7

BuYun Chen, ‘Wearing the Hat of Loyalty: Imperial Power and Dress Reform in Ming Dynasty China’, in Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 416–34. These included the kuzhe riding suit with divided jacket and trousers, the ‘barbarian hat’ (humao), and the bijia long vest worn by women, Chen Baoliang, Mingdai shehui shenghuo shi (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe, 2004), 206–7. For definitions of garments, see Gao Chunming and Zhou Xun, Zhongguo yiguan fushi dacidian (Shanghai: Shanghai Cishu Chubanshe, 1996). Eiren Shea, ‘Fashioning Mongol Identity in China (c. 1200–1368)’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2016), 122, 239; Luo Wei, ‘A Preliminary Study of Mongol Costumes in the Ming Dynasty’, Social Sciences in China, 39/1 (2018), 165–85.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

535

536

rachel silberstein

China but also in East Asia more widely. Two significant tomb finds of the early Ming period – one a Ming prince’s yellow dragon-motif adorned silk robe, the other a Korean courtier’s robe; both featuring similar constructions of tight-fitting sleeves, smocked waist, and full, pleated skirt – suggest sartorial interactions between China and Korea.8 Korean influence is also evident in one of the most talked about fashion trends of the early Ming period: the horse-hair skirt (mawei qun). Early Ming writer Lu Rong (1436–94) described how the style ‘came to Beijing from Korea. Beijing people bought garments of this style, but none could weave it. At first the style was only worn by rich merchants, wealthy princes, and singing girls. But later, military officials also wore it in some numbers, and then in Beijing, some people (learnt how to) weave it, and thereupon, those without title or money wore it, the numbers increasing each day.’9 The horse-hair skirt trend tells us about which groups had access to new, expensive styles but it also tells us about early Ming preferences for sartorial lines. Much of the skirt’s appeal derived from its umbrella-shape, created by the stiff and wide pleats. That same cinched waist and wide skirt silhouette is also seen in a rare image of the early Ming court at leisure. An early to mid-fifteenth-century handscroll, Amusements in the Four Seasons (Figure 16.1), depicts the emperor and his palace ladies. The women wear short, waist-length jackets with very full, long skirts that create an exaggerated A-line. The skirt’s triangulation is balanced by pointed hairstyles gathered high upon the head. Their garments are brightly coloured, in contrasting shades of blues, greens, purples, and red, and the only form of surface decoration is the gold-woven or embroidered patterning over jacket chest, shoulders, and back (tongxiu), with little other trimming visible.

8

9

Craig Clunas and Jessica Harrison-Hall (eds.), Ming: 50 Years that Changed China (London: British Museum Press, 2014), 72–3. Lu Rong, Shu yuan zaji (late fifteenth century; reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1985), juan 10, 123–4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

Figure 16.1 Anon., Amusements in the Four Seasons (Siji shangwan tu 四季賞玩圖), handscroll, ink and colours on silk, Xuande to Chenghua periods, c. 1426–84. H 35 cm, W 780 cm. Collection of Hai-sheng Chou.

The women’s high-piled hair provided a key site for gold, pearls, jade, and precious materials, and for symbols like the dragon and phoenix, which expressed ideas of imperial power and marital harmony. Objects like the ‘Phoenix Coronet’ headdresses – made of gold and silver wire, lined with silk gauze, and inlaid with pearls and jewels – were theoretically coded according to sumptuary regulations, the primary means by which the Ming court controlled (or attempted to control) the dress of their courtiers and subjects. For example, the wives or mothers of officials, ‘ladies of rank’ (mingfu), whose material possessions were bestowed at the same rank as their menfolk, were instructed to wear the ‘Phoenix Coronet’ headdresses, together with the court vest (xiapei), a sleeveless, fringed vest worn over a long robe and skirt. This combination could only be worn by women of fourth rank or above, and the regulations laid out materially detailed gradations for each rank.10 Many edicts were concerned with restricting luxurious fabrics, such as brocades, damasks, embroidered and other patterned silks, and expensive darker fabric colours, such as crimson, duck-blue, and green, as the preserve of the upper classes. Since different social levels often wore the same style of garments, elements like colour, fabric, and adornment were critical for expressing status 10

Zhang Tingyu (ed.), Ming shi, juan 67, zhi 43, ‘Treatise on Dress and Carriages’, 1641–2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

537

538

rachel silberstein

differences. For example, empresses could wear the large-sleeved tuanshan robe (a long and loose formal robe style), in any colour and embroidered with gold dragon and phoenix patterns. Princesses and imperial concubines could also wear tuanshan of various colours, but not yellow, and their gold embroidery depicted the luan phoenix. ‘Ladies of rank’ could only wear red tuanshan embroidered with pheasants (the number according to rank). Ordinary women could only wear tuanshan of plain silk in pale, dull colours, without embroidered pattern.11 Thus, the Ming clothing system asserted a well-ordered society that distinguished between noble and common, and specified rank and identity through the control of consumption.12 But if regulation was one side of the court’s efforts to define a social matrix for material consumption, display was the other side. In particular, the display of princely estates played a key role in stimulating consumption, by establishing cultural and intellectual centres, and patronizing artists and artisans.13 Princes received salaries and gifts from the emperor to maintain their palaces, and imperial tomb excavations have revealed countless luxurious objects, including clothing, intended to meet their needs in the afterlife, believed to be similar to this one. The tomb of King Jing of Ning (d. 1502) and his wife, in Jiangxi province, contained numerous items of silk clothing including a gold-embroidered cloud and phoenix-patterned gauze xiapei vest; a golddamasked cloud and phoenix-patterned satin skirt painted with floral branches; and an eight treasures and phoenixpatterned damasked satin-lined ao jacket with cloud collar 11 12

13

Ibid., 1622, 1624, 1645, 1649. On Ming dress more generally, see Shen Congwen, Zhongguo gudai fushi yanjiu (1981; rev. ed., Shanghai: Shanghai Shiji Chuban Jituan, 1997), 559– 61; Zhou Shaoquan, ‘Mingdai fushi taolun’, Shixue Yuekan, 6 (1990), 34–40; Li Yinghua, ‘Cong Jiangsu Taizhou chutu wenwu kan Ming dai fushi’, Shoucangjia, 5 (1995), 28–31; Li Meixia, ‘Mingdai fushi liubian tanjiu’, Tianjin Gongye Daxue Xuebao, 21/5 (2002), 37–9. On the Ming courts, see David Robinson (ed.), Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368–1644) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008); Yang Xiaoneng, ‘Ming Art and Culture from an Archaeological Perspective, Part 1: Royal and Elite Tombs’, Orientations, 37/5 (2006), 40–9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

and tongxiu patterning.14 Such tomb finds demonstrate typical silk designs of the mid-Ming: monochromatic satins and gauzes patterned with small-scale designs like flowers, plants, and geometric motifs: peony branches, coiled floral branches, ruyi-shaped clouds, or cloud clusters.15 Yet outside the princely tombs, the tombs of officials and the wealthy have also revealed a world of material consumption unfettered by sumptuary regulation’s theoretical restraint.16 In one Jiangsu province tomb dating to 1533, a court official of the third rank, Xu Fan (1463–1530), wore an official robe with the correct peacock badge, while his wife (d .1532) wore a robe with the crane insignia, a symbol for the first rank, thus overstepping her assigned status.17 Tomb finds have repeatedly exposed forms of material emulation, for example, a chignon adorned with phoenix hairclasps to imitate the phoenix coronet worn by imperial women.18 Tomb evidence, read together with textual evidence, recreates the dominant styles, patterns, and fabric of clothing of the mid-Ming period.19 Official Yan Song (1480–1567) had his entire possessions, including more than 14,300 bolts of silk and more than 1,300 silk garments, forfeited to the state after he tumbled from political heights in 1562. His inventory, A Record of Heavenly Waters Melting the Iceberg (Tianshui bingshan lu), catalogues elite Ming tastes: in particular satins, weaving technology developed to create varieties like 14

15

16 17

18 19

Jiangxi Sheng Wenwu Kaogu Yanjiusuo (ed.), ‘Nanchang Mingdai Nanjing wang furen Wushi mu fajue jianbao’, Wenwu, 2 (2003),19–34. He Jiying (ed.), Shanghai Ming Mu (Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe, 2009), 165. The Dingling imperial tombs are another important source for Ming textile historians. Wang Xiuling has written a number of articles on the silk finds; see for example ‘Ming Dingling chutu sizhi pinzhong, shang’, Shoucangjia, 7 (2008), 19–24. Li Yinghua, ‘Cong Jiangsu Taizhou chutu wenwu kan Ming dai fushi’. Taizhou shi bowuguan (ed.), ‘Jiangsu Taizhou shi Mingdai Xu Fan fufu mu qingli jianbao’, Wenwu, 9 (1986), 1–15. Dauncey, ‘Illusions of Grandeur’, esp. 50–1. Other tomb reports include Nanjing shi wenwu baoguan wenyuanhui, ‘Ming Xu Da Wu shi sun xu fu fu fu mu’, Wenwu, 2 (1982), 28–35; Wei Zengze and Liu Guishan, ‘Huai’an xian Mingdai Wang Zhen fufu hezang ji qingli guanbao’, Wenwu, 3 (1987), 1–15; Taizhou shi bowuguan, ‘Jiangsu Taizhou Mingdai Liu Xiang fufu hezangmu qingli jianbao’, Wenwu, 9 (1986), 1–15; Jie Lixin, ‘Jiangsu Taizhou chutu Mingdai fushi zongshu’, Yishu sheji yanjiu, 1 (2015), 40–8; Jie Lixin, ‘Taizhou chutu Mingdai fushi yangshi mantan’, Dongfang shoucang, 1 (2012), 22–5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

539

540

rachel silberstein

monochrome patterned satin damask (anhua duan), gold-woven satin (zhijin duan), brocaded satin (zhuanghua duan); as well as patterned twills; monochrome or gold-woven luo and sha gauzes; polychrome jin fabrics woven with stripes, checks, or Song-style interlocking geometric designs. Other fabrics included ‘altered loom fabric’ (gaiji), a new speciality of Fujian, invented during the late fifteenth century by Fujian loom-maker Lin Hong; an array of plain, sculpted, two-sided and brocaded velvets; kesi tapestries; kudzu cloth; and cottons.20 The vast range of fabrics highlights the importance of cloth, rather than tailored cut, as the platform for late Ming fashion.21 The clothing items, for men and women, included those made from tapestry and satin weaves, in up to forty different colours and patterned with the most popular designs – ‘fighting bull’ (douniu), four-clawed python (mang), heavenly crane (xianhe), qilin unicorn, ‘flying fish’ (feiyu), and cloud heron (yunlu). Like the tomb examples of transgression, Yan’s inventory highlights how the increasing wealth of material forms made regulations futile. While the first Ming emperor had obsessed about creating a material basis for a hierarchically correct populace, his successors mostly displayed less interest in controlling dress.22 Following the reign of the Zhengde emperor (r. 1505–21), the Ming court no longer attempted to regulate production through sumptuary legislation, and it gradually loosened its grip on silk production. Just when they were most openly flouted, Ming sumptuary laws were neither updated nor enforced.23

the rise of fashion through the silver century, 1550–1650 The early sixteenth century was a turning point in what came to be known as the ‘silver century’.24 After the Portuguese established 20 21

22 23

24

Shen Congwen, Zhonggo gudai fushi yanjiu, 578–82. See Sarah Fee’s chapter in this volume for additional analysis of textiles as fashion markers in the Indian Ocean world. Chen, ‘Wearing the Hat of Loyalty’. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991). Most writers pinpoint the Longqing (1567–72) and Wanli (1572–1620) periods as when clothing began to move away from ‘simple and plain’ towards

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

a trading base at Macau in 1557, and the Spanish a base in Manila in 1571, creating the first global circuit of economic exchange, the Ming economy experienced a huge influx of silver from South American and Japanese mines to pay for global exports of Chinese goods, in particular porcelain, silk, and tea. This silver set off transformative processes within Ming society and economy, and the period 1550– 1800 witnessed an ‘economic revolution’: characterized by huge population growth, ‘expansion of money economy, growth of rural industries, increasing spatial range of markets, greater volume of foreign trade, the disappearance of bound labor, [and] ascendancy of private enterprise over state economic management’.25 Many Neo-Confucian officials and scholars worried about the impact of silver upon Confucian norms and morality. They saw the expanding attention to objects as detrimental to a harmonious society, and the social mobility enabled by material emulation as undercutting the stability of a hierarchical society and challenging propriety by causing a shift from simplicity to luxury. Historians like Wu Jen-shu and Lin Liyue have demonstrated the proliferation of discussions about luxury and fashion during this period, particularly in local gazetteers of the wealthy silk- and cotton-producing Jiangnan region, south of the Yangzi River, in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces.26 Gazetteer writers used terms like aberrant (yao), common (su), and ‘outlandish dress’ (fuyao) to chart, criticize, and ridicule these new forms of fashionable clothing. The anxiety about society’s obsession with objects is captured in the novel The Plum in the Golden Vase, written around 1610.27

25

26

27

fashion and luxury. For example, Gu Qiyuan, Kezuo zhuiyu (1618; reprint, Beijing: Zhonghua Huaju, 1987), 1, 70. Richard von Glahn, The Economic History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 295. See also Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Lin Liyue, ‘Yishang yu fengjiao: Wan Ming de fushi fengshang yu “fuyao” yilun’, Xin shi xue, 10/3 (1999), 111–57; Wu Jen-shu, Shechi de nüren: Ming Qing shiqi Jiangnan funü de xiaofei wenhua (Taipei: Sanmin Shuju, 2016). Xiaoxiaosheng (Wanli period, 1572–1620), Jin ping mei. Fiction is a major source for Chinese dress history, and other good novels for dress history include Marriage Destinies to Awaken the World (Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, c. 1628–61), Tales of Heroic Lovers (Ernü yingxiong zhuan) (c. 1850), and Dreams of Wind and Moon (Feng yue meng, 1848). For studies, see Jiang Lanying, ‘Cong Xingshi yinyuan chuan kan Mingdai wanqi fushi’,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

541

542

rachel silberstein

A satirical tale of the sexual and material excess of a wealthy merchant, Ximen Qing, and his many wives, set in sixteenth-century Shandong, a commercially vibrant city, the novel underlines how the social status of the merchant, traditionally the lowest rank of commoner, had begun to change with the growth of commerce. Material things were key for those wishing to display grandeur and gentility, and Ximen Qing possesses an extensive wardrobe, filled with fine damask and satin robes; as well as garments prohibited by sumptuary laws, like the four-clawed python, ‘fighting bull’, and ‘flying fish’ robes, supposedly bestowed by the emperor only upon those he favoured, but now being worn by the likes of Ximen Qing.28 In the eyes of Shen Defu (1578–1642), merchants were a problem group who, along with the sons of nobility, eunuchs, and women, especially the wives of elites, engaged in inappropriate dress.29 Officials like Shen had reason to contest the boundaries of the ‘regimes of value’ possessed by objects like the python robe. The early Ming court had established a restricted system of commodity flow, in which the python robe or phoenix coronet functioned as coupons or licenses, regulated through sumptuary laws designed to protect status systems within a relatively ‘stable universe of commodities’. By the late Ming, these objects circulated within the less restricted system of fashion, which ‘in an ever-changing universe of commodities’, provided a means of contesting taste, competing for status, and challenging old wealthy groups.30 Hence the late Ming began a shift away from the fashions of a courtly society, generated by court-controlled artisan production and hierarchically defined consumption, towards one far more determined by vernacular tastes.31 The early seventeenth-century

28

29

30

31

Nanfang wenwu, 2 (2009), 97–104; Yan Xiangjun, Zhongguo gudai xiaoshuo fushi miaoxie yanjiu (Shanghai: Shanghai Shudian Chubanshe, 2007). Sophie Volpp, ‘The Gift of a Python Robe: The Circulation of Objects in Jin Ping Mei’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 65/1 (2005), 133–58. Shen Defu, Wanli Ye huo bian (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1997), juan 5, 27b–28a. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 25. Jane Schneider, ‘Cloth and Clothing’, in Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, and Susanne Kuechler (eds.), The Handbook of Material Culture (London: Sage, 2006), 203–20.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

Songjiang writer, Ye Mengzhu, observed how, whereas the formal dress (rank-badge dress, xiapei and huanpei) of the ‘ladies of rank’ followed their husbands, their informal dress (bianfu) was worn in a variety of fibres and weaves, with colours ‘determined by the seasons and the wearer’s inclination’, rather than coming from court.32 All the evidence points to women of the entertainment quarters of southern cities as being the primary leaders in innovating styles. Poet and chronicler of Nanjing’s entertainment district, Yu Huai, noted that ‘everywhere, people follow the styles of the southern entertainment quarters . . . the length of the jackets, the size of the sleeves, are always changing, and is referred to as fashion (shishi zhuang)’.33 The increasing influence of female entertainers and lower-class concubines upon women of elite families was a matter of particular concern for moral critics. Ximen Qing’s wives wore garments like a scarlet satin tongxiu gown, with the chests and shoulders patterned in a golden design of ‘one hundred animals facing the qilin’, theoretically worn only by women in the imperial household or wives of ranked officials, but now apparently worn by merchants’ consorts.34 The novel charts new styles like the ‘picked thread skirts’ (tiao xian qunzi) as worn in the following summer outfit: ‘a center-opening jacket of lavender [lit. lotus colour] silk, and a white gauze joinedskirt with “picked thread” borders; and below the skirt, a pair of tiny sharply pointed red shoes with mandarin duck beaks’.35 Though sometimes translated as petit point, the ‘tiao xian’ technique likely refers to the sewing of the skirt’s narrow pleats. The same style is also described in a 1631 gazetteer in a section entitled ‘Changes in Clothing’ and the pleated skirt occupied a key role in women’s celebratory wear.36 A rare example, a white gauze skirt embroidered 32

33

34 35

36

Ye Mengzhu, Yue shi bian (seventeenth century; reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 1981), 180–1. Yu Huai, Ban qiao zaji, Shangzhuan, collected in Nanjing xijian wenxian congkan (Nanjing: Nanjing Chubanshe, 2006), 11. Wu Yueniang, cited in Dauncey, ‘Illusions of Grandeur’, 43. Xiaoxiaosheng, Jin Ping Mei, vol. i, ch. 13, 159; translation adapted from David Roy (trans.), The Plum in the Golden Vase (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993–2013), i, 254. Chen Jiru and Fang Yuegong (eds.), Chongzhen Songjiang fuzhi (1631; reprint, Beijing: Shumu Wenxian Chubanshe, 1991), juan 7, 175b.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

543

544

rachel silberstein

Figure 16.2 White gauze skirt embroidered with birds and flowers. W 60 cm, L 88 cm. Collection of Shandong Museum.

with plum blossom motifs, survives in the collection of the Kong Family Mansion (now in Shandong Museum) (Figure 16.2). The skirt descriptions from The Plum in the Golden Vase focus on colour and embroidered decoration, but other sources suggest that the skirt’s fashionability depended primarily upon the pleat style and the quantity of fabric involved, both of which created a distinctive swaying movement for the wearer. The late Ming arbiter of taste, Li Yu (1611–80) had much to say on the subject of skirts, in particular the amount of fabric used. He cautioned that while ‘clothing fabric may be economized elsewhere’, if the wearer wished for a natural and elegant gait, then ‘the [quantity of] skirt fabric must not be cut back upon’.37 This was apparently particularly important upon social occasions: ‘an eight length (fu) skirt is 37

Li Yu, Xian qing ou ji (1671; reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 2000), 158.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

suitable for wearing at home, but in order to be beautiful in front of visitors, then it must be ten lengths’. The emphasis on fabric reflects the importance of the textile trade as a stimulus for fashion, enabling increased variety in colours and styles. The women in The Plum were able to wear such fashionable clothing because Ximen Qing was a silk merchant – he buys for his Shandong shops from silk-producing centres like Nanjing, Huzhou, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, allowing his women to play with the latest styles. Silk production in the late Ming was increasingly driven by private workshops. The early Ming court had established more than twentyfour regional manufacturing sites across Jiangnan and a textile workshop in Beijing to ensure the steady production of handicrafts for court use.38 But the influx of silver eventually caused this system to break down.39 By the mid-fifteenth century, corvée craftsmen service was commuted to silver payments and the imperial workshops increasingly depended upon private ventures weaving to order (lingzhi). By the end of the Ming, there were an estimated 30,000 independent weavers, three or four times the number employed in the imperial workshops. This growth in the market economy was most marked around Jiangsu and Zhejiang, where several market towns gained repute for their silk production, with huge areas devoted to mulberry trees, and thousands of families engaged in growing mulberry trees, raising silkworms, and reeling and weaving.40 Silk, though much emphasized in accounts of Chinese history, was hardly the only clothing fibre, and outside the silk-producing districts, only elites would have been able to wear it. Fur was crucial in winter and ramie or hemp in summer, but cotton was the most important fabric, particularly for commoners.41 Cotton 38

39

40 41

On the Ming dynasty silk industry, see Dagmar Schäfer and Dieter Kuhn, Weaving an Economic Pattern in Ming Times, 1368–1644: The Production of Silk Weaves in the State-Owned Silk Workshops (Heidelberg: Edition Forum, 2002). On the silk industry more generally, see Fan Jinmin and Jin Wen, Jiangnan sichou shi yanjiu (Beijing: Nongye Chubanshe, 1993); Zhao Feng, Sichou yishu shi (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Meishu Xueyuan Chubanshe, 1992). Fan Jinmin and Jin Wen, Jiangnan sichou shi yanjiu. Fur became much more widespread following the Manchu conquest. One early Qing writer comments on how few people he saw wearing fur as a child, but now ‘none were without it’. Dai Shu, Quenan zalu (Kangxi period), in Yu yang shuo yuan, comp. Ding Zuyin (China: Chuyuan Dingshi, 1917), vi, 2a.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

545

546

rachel silberstein

was also worn by upper ranks: in one Jiangsu official’s tomb, that of Cheng Tianxiu (1464–1545), two-thirds of the thirty-eight garments were made from cotton.42 First established in the Yangzi region in the twelfth century, cotton manufacture flourished from the fifteenth century onward, particularly in Songjiang, renowned for ‘clothing all under heaven’. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Songjiang was self-sufficient in raw cotton but as its cotton industry flourished, it started importing raw cotton from the north and northwest, to supply its weavers and dyers. Ye Mengzhu listed three fine qualities woven in this prefecture, as well as detailing the prices and merits of three everyday weaves.43 As with silk, cotton weaving became increasingly varied with different types of cloth, distinguished by weave quality, dye, pattern, texture, or width, associated with the place in which they were produced. And as in the silk industry, cotton production was increasingly driven by private enterprises, which brought prosperity to this region and stimulated local fashions. In its 1631 compilation, Songjiang’s local gazetteer included a long section entitled ‘Changes in Men’s and Women’s Clothing and Hairstyles’, which analysed the changes in different areas, singling out clothing, footwear, embroidery, cotton fabrics, and fabric dyes.44

ming–qing transition fashions In the late Ming, scholar Gu Qiyuan (1565–1628) summarized how the new styles were changing fashion: ‘In the capital, thirty years previously, women’s clothing would change every ten years. But nowadays, after just two or three years, the size and height of the hairstyles, the width of the sleeve, the styles of the hair ornaments,

42

43 44

On fur in fashion, see Lai Huimin, ‘Qingqianlongchao neiwufu de pihuo maimai yu jingcheng shishang’, Gugong xueshu jikan, 21/1 (2003), 101–34; and also Chen Fang, ‘A Fur Headdress for Women in Sixteenth Century China’, Costume, 50/1 (2016); and Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). Yang Xiaoneng, ‘Ming Art and Culture from an Archaeological Perspective’, 72–3. Ye Mengzhu, Yue shi bian, juan 7, 157. Chen Jiru and Fang Yuegong, Chongzhen Songjiang fuzhi, 175b.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

the colours of the fabric dyes, the decoration of hairstyles, the workmanship of shoe bases, none are without change.’45 These areas – hairstyles, sleeves, fabric colours, and shoes – are well depicted in an album of paintings likely produced in the early eighteenth century. In one scene from the album, shown in Figure 16.3, a wealthy man and his female companions enjoy food and wine outside while a maid plays the drums. The artist has highlighted fashion details like the floral patterned silk of the women’s robes and the flowers in their hair. Half of the original twenty-four leaves are now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), but the seals show that it was originally in the imperial collection, where the emperors would have enjoyed its erotically tinged and materially detailed depictions that allow the viewer to revel in the colours, patterns, and textures of early seventeenth-century styles.46 The women all wear long, loose garments that create slim and languid silhouettes that contrast markedly with both the triangulated body seen in early Ming imagery and the man’s much bulkier presence in his ‘great sleeves’ robe (daxiu shan), named after its impressively wide sleeves and broken up only by the encircling of his two belts. In this scene of a group enjoying outdoor music and food, the woman seated at centre wears a bijia, a long, sleeveless, collar-less, centre-fastening outer jacket, particularly popular during this period, usually worn over a longer shan jacket, as seen here. The woman seated to the left wears another fashionable jacket, the beizi, a long, slim jacket with long sleeves, side slits, and contrast trim along the opening, similar to another more informal style, the pifeng.47 They wear these overgarments over jackets and slim skirts with flowing pleats in pale colours. Though unseen, beneath they would have worn trousers or leggings of various kinds and lengths. The MFA album also contains an image of one of the most notorious fashion trends of this period: the shuitian patchwork 45 46

47

Gu Qiyuan, Kezuo zhuiyu, juan 9, 252–3. On possible artists, see James Cahill, Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 121–3. Chen Fang, ‘Ming dai nüzi fushi “pifeng” kaoshi’, Yishu sheji yanjiu, 2 (2013), 25–34.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

547

548

rachel silberstein

Figure 16.3 Scene from ‘Intimate Scenes of Leisurely Love’ (Yanqin yiqing 燕寢怡情), 1750–1800; ink, colour, and gold on silk. H 40 cm, W 36.8 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Accession Number: 2002.602.1-12.

technique, created from small squares of disparate fabrics, whose multiple seams resembled the partition and shapes of rice-paddy fields, after which it was named.48 In the album, the technique is seen twice: a shuitian bijia worn by a maid, and a pifeng style worn by a lady. Though the evidence is sparse, fictional and visual descriptions in novels and illustrated dramas suggest that shuitian clothing was primarily worn by lower-ranking status women like 48

Gao Chunming and Zhou Xun, Zhongguo yiguan fushi dacidian, 343.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

Figure 16.4 Li Guanjian, ‘Playing cards in the Spring Boudoir’ (Chunjia doupai 春閨鬥牌), H 98 cm, W 50.6 cm, after Wang Shucun, Zhongguo minjian nianhua shi tulu (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1991), shang, no. 278.

courtesans, concubines, and maids. A rare mid-Qing Suzhou woodblock print entitled ‘Playing cards in the Spring Boudoir’ (Figure 16.4) provides a good example – the socially inferior maid, indicated by her smaller size, wears a shuitian bijia sleeveless robe. To understand why this was so, consider Li Yu’s lengthy critique of shuitian clothing in his analysis of dress: ‘As for that clothing which opposes reality and causes worry to those concerned with worldly morals, this [clothing includes] the garments made by

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

549

550

rachel silberstein

patching together small fabric pieces, commonly called shuitian yi.’ Li blamed the trend upon the ‘wicked tailors’ who, wishing to conceal their filching of fabric sections, came up with this style, never expecting that ‘since it is in people’s nature to dislike the ordinary and favour the unusual, so not only did they not attack this evil, but actually, in sheep-like fashion, they imitated it!’ He then asked perplexedly, ‘What kind of guilt do women have that they suddenly wear nun’s dress? The change in customs and fashion is often related to a dynasty’s fate’, and posited a link between the style and the peasant rebellions of the 1630s (that contributed to the fall of the Ming).49 Though Li Yu was the only one to, no doubt satirically, connect shuitian clothing to factors as disparate as the iniquity of the tailors and the downfall of the Ming, other writers also saw the fashion in similarly moralistic terms.50 There were various reasons why the style offended: the inappropriateness of extending a textile technique associated with Buddhist religious dress into female secular dress, and the undesirability of a style that blurred gender or social identity. Whether commentators were resisting the dress style itself or the religious belief that it may have represented is a matter of conjecture, but by classifying it as ‘outlandish dress’ (fuyao), these writers could invoke dissent, creating an association between contemporary disastrous events and women’s dress choices. Given Ye Mengzhu’s characterization of shuitian yi – ‘really nothing like mortals’ clothing. Those families who maintain decency need not imitate this’51 – it is unsurprising that this fashionable form, associated with lower-class women, was little represented. Those who guarded social norms would have hardly wished to see the fashion recorded and circulated; such judgements would make it difficult for gentry daughters and wives to wear this style, something that ultimately gave the aesthetic advantage to courtesans and those who dared to follow their style. Alongside fashionable garments, the women in the album convey style through their hair, as seen in Figure 16.4 with the range of buns coiled high on the head into decorative shapes.52 The male character 49 51

Li Yu, Xianqing ouji, 157. 50 Ye Mengzhu, Yue shi bian, juan 8, 181. Ibid. 52 Gao Chunming, Zhongguo fushi mingwu kao, 49.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

in the album also wears late Ming-style dress and his hair is often arranged on top of the head in a similar style to the women, though less decorated. Other scenes depict various styles of hair wrapping, with the cloth-end pairs arranged in assorted shapes either side of the head. Hat and shoe styles were clearly an important focus for the fashionable man. The defining outfit of late Ming masculinity was the black gauze hat (wusha mao) worn with overlapping front, roundnecked robe, decorative belt, and black leather boots, a combination that could only be worn by those of the official or upper gentry classes. The use of hats, like belts and shoes, was regulated, and so exceedingly important for social status and judgement: the lowest classes could only wear a green cloth wrapped around their heads, while commoners wore a mesh cap or skullcap. Yet in practice, like other areas, hat fashions were hard to control. Gu Qiyuan summarized the ‘ever-increasing extravagance’ of hats. Prior to the Longqing (r. 1567–72) and Wanli (r. 1570–1620) periods, the clothing styles had been simple and plain, but recently (his work was published in 1618), ‘scholars wear all kinds of hats, their names are very many: the Han cap, Jin cap, Tang cap, Zhuge cap, Chunyang cap, Dongpo cap, Yangming cap, Nine Splendors cap, Jade Terrace cap, Free and Easy cap, gauze hat cap, Huayang cap, Four Open cap, and Brave cap . . . sometimes decorated with jade knots, jade floral vases, or two large jade pieces . . . today the variation of clothing and headwear is very extreme’.53

regime and dress change in the early qing The silver influx did not strengthen the Ming state, and poor harvests and rebellions made it vulnerable to invasions. In 1644, the Manchus, a federation of northern tribes, occupied Beijing and founded a new conquest dynasty, the Qing (1644–1911). Like the Ming rulers, the Qing moved swiftly to establish a clothing regime to define their dynastic image and create social hierarchies, including the dragon robes and rank badges that constituted public dress for male civil servants. The Qing authorities also deployed dress to assert control and establish visually which members of society had 53

Gu Qiyuan, Kezuo zhuiyu, juan 1, 70.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

551

552

rachel silberstein

accepted the new regime, and which remained Ming loyalists. All men were forced to change their hairstyles to the Manchu style of shaving the head (other than the back of the head, where hair was grown long and plaited) – dramatically different to the Ming style of long hair, coiled up on the head.54 The Qing emperors sought a delicate balance of maintaining their Manchu identity while dressing as Han Chinese emperors, something that fed through to the Qing fashion dynamic more widely. Much regulatory discourse was devoted to prohibitions against Han Chinese influence upon Manchu women; as manifested in ‘Han-style’ wide-sleeved robes, one earring rather than the three earrings of traditional customs, and most controversially, footbinding. Footbinding had become the norm for elite females during the Ming dynasty, but during the Qing dynasty, Dorothy Ko argues, it spread further to become a politicized practice, a statement of identity parallel to Han men refusing to shave the head in Manchu style. Unlike the latter – a public declaration that resulted in execution – footbinding was not forbidden to Han women. Still, to interpret footbinding as mutilation is to miss the point: it was understood rather as adornment, a part of the properly attired female body, and thus ultimately a mark of civility. To understand its spread, Ko invokes the force of fashion and the participation of women anxious to share the latest shoe styles.55 Though court authorities sought to prevent Manchu women from binding their feet, the practice proved difficult to eradicate, partly because of the presence of Han women at court, and partly because women’s domestic confines made their clothing hard to monitor, especially informal clothing. In spite of the Manchu efforts, Ming styles evidently remained popular for at least the first few decades of the Qing dynasty. The early Qing Manchu historian Zhaolian (1780–1833), observed in ‘The Clothing Revolution’, a passage detailing changes in dress, 54

55

Sun Ji, ‘Mingdai de shufaguan, huoji yu toumian’, Wenwu, 7 (2001), 62–83; Weikun Cheng, ‘Politics of the Queue: Agitation and Resistance in the Beginning and End of Qing China’, in Alf Hiltebeitel and Barbara D. Miller (eds.), Hair: Its Power and Meaning in Asian Cultures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 123–42. Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

how ‘Ming style of clothing’ continued through the early years of the dynasty.56 Hence that album from the MFA, produced during the early Qing, likely for the Qing emperors, demonstrating the enduring appeal of Ming looks in the early stage of the new dynasty, despite their discourse of Manchu identity. Qing fashions were to move away from the Ming styles over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but concepts of Manchu fashion and beauty remained largely driven by trends of southern urban centres like Suzhou, Yangzhou, and Nanjing. There are, however, a few examples of fashions moving in the other direction. Beijing dress historian Chen Fang has argued that objects like wotu’er or pifeng demonstrate foreign influence from Central Asia and Southeast Asia. Her careful study of the fashionable head adornment, the wotu’er or ‘crouching cottontail’ fur wrap, in which fur wrapped around the forehead, provides a good example of these interactions. The wotu’er was a popular headwear style, often mentioned in The Plum in the Golden Vase, and remained in fashion through the eighteenth century. Made from the expensive marten fur, the style benefited from the expansion of the fur trade and the lifting of fur restrictions during the early-mid Qing period. But Fang argues that the Manchus, who originated in a northeast nomadic culture, helped fuel the popularity of fur headwraps. Significantly, it gained a new name by the eighteenth century: the Zhaojun tao, named after a Han dramatic heroine, Wang Zhaojun, popular in the Qianlong period, suggesting that as fashions moved between different groups, their names shifted to accommodate their adoption.57 The example shows how the tension between the southern fashion capitals and Beijing as the political capital, created interactions between Manchu and Han customs and bought new influences to bear upon Qing fashion.58 By the 1680s, the Manchus had quelled pockets of resistance and after several decades of the ‘Kangxi depression’, the commercialization that began in the sixteenth century continued apace and 56 57

58

Zhaolian, Xiaoting xulu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), juan 3, 637. Chen Fang, ‘A Fur Headdress for Women’; Chen Fang, ‘Ming dai nüzi fushi “pifeng” kaoshi’. See also Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur. On Manchu clothing, see Zhou Hong, Manzu funü shenghuo yu minsu wenhua (Beijing: Zhongguo Kehui Kexue Chubanshe, 2005), 148–9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

553

554

rachel silberstein

a long period of economic stability began. The transition away from a court-centred and court-led fashion system towards more a vernacular one, begun in the Ming, also continued, fuelled by monetization and private production.59 In fashion, economic expansion was felt in the rise of commercial handicrafts and the further increased range of fabrics. It was also felt in the growing assertions of new fashion players, as the robust economy enabled merchants and artisans to gain status through wealth rather than education or examination. And while literati continued to enjoy rank and privilege, increasing numbers of this group could no longer rely on receiving an official position at the end of the lengthy education and examination period, and instead became unemployed or underemployed scholars (lower-degree holders, specialists and secretaries), or occupied hybrid social roles as scholar-craftsmen or gentry-merchants, previously distinct categories.60 These challenges to a once-stable social system were to further tilt control of fashion away from court towards the urban markets and entertainment quarters. Those commentators who wrote on fashion seem to have understood it as a top-down process – Ye Mengzhu thought that: Trends begin in elite families, they are copied by their maids and concubines, and gradually seep through to their families and then catch on in the neighbourhood. Initially wealthy and powerful families create out of the desire for something novel, but later they have to exceed former styles to achieve splendour. Those who can attain it do not think it excessive but instead splendid, those who cannot attain it are not at peace but instead feel shame.61

Yet consider Figure 16.5, ‘The three pleasures of Qiao Yuanzhi’ by the Yangzhou artist Yu Zhiding (1647–1716). A renowned portraitist, Yu presents the focal male character surrounded by his ‘pleasures’ – books, wine, and music. The women around him evidently contribute to Qiao’s ideal identity; to his left three female 59

60

61

Li Bozhong, Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620–1850 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Jonathan Hay, Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010); Wu Jen-shu, Shechi de nüren. Ye Mengzhu, Yue shi bian, juan 8, 178.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 16.5

Yu Zhiding 禹之鼎 (1647–1709), ‘The three pleasures of Qiao Yuanzhi’ (Qiao Yuanzhi Sanhao 喬元之三好), 1676, colour on silk. H 36.6 cm, W 107.3 cm. Nanjing Museum.

556

rachel silberstein

entertainers play their musical instruments, clothed in voluminously sleeved gowns, intricately worked cloud collars, and giddilyhigh coiffures. Though Qiao’s stare commands the viewer’s attention, we see the glamorous entertainers through the eyes of the servant girls to the right, one with hair styled in cautious mimicry of the musicians; they turn to study the glamorous women’s bright sashes, fancy collars, and extravagant hair. These fashion elements are visually highlighted by the artist through colour accents: whereas the servant girls are clothed in drab greens and beige, the women’s fashionable collars, linings, and vests are highlighted in scarlets, turquoises, and azurites, colours that also pick out the books – the other of the sitter’s pleasures. The evident importance of hair in this image is backed up by numerous primary accounts.62 The female entertainers wear the ‘songbin bianji’ hairstyle, popular during the late Ming and early Qing transition, one of a number of puffy bun styles where the hair was piled into high structures and the hair on the temple or nape was curled. The servant girls’ tamer version was known as a ‘lotusleaf flip topknot’. Women’s hairstyles possessed a huge variety of formations and poetic names, often geographically aligned. Consider the ‘peony hairstyle’, in which a bun was created in the centre of the top of the head with pieces of hair curled into place to resemble a peony, and described by Songjiang writer Dong Han (1624–c. 1697): ‘When I was a student, I saw women wearing hairstyles of a height of about three cun, they called this the “new style”. By the next year it had increased in height to six or seven cun, loosely puffy and glossy – they called this style “peony head”. They used fake hair to pad out the head – it was so heavy they could 62

For a list of some of the poetic names given to hairstyles, see Li Dou, Yangzhou huafang lu (Preface 1793, reprinted, Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1960), 9.195. On hair as a focal area in Chinese fashion, see Antonia Finnane, ‘The Fashionable City? Glimpses of Clothing Culture in Qing Yangzhou’, in Lucie B. Olivová and Vibeke Børdahl (eds.), Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2009), 68. As Finnane observes, in this relatively conservative clothing culture, fashion was most obvious at the peripheries: shoes, headwear, accessories. For a discussion on how the limitations on access to tailor and clothing shops provide a possible explanation for this observation, see also Rachel Silberstein, A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in Late Qing China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020), ch. 2.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

barely lift their heads!’63 Known as a Jiangnan mode, these hairstyles would eventually spread to the Beijing court; poems described how imperial women competed to imitate the ‘peony head’.64 Given the sway of southern influences over palace styles, this is hardly surprising, but it raises the question of how such fashionable hairstyles were transmitted: What mechanisms and media spread fashions in the Qing dynasty? Dauncey observed, for the late Ming period, the ways in which concubines and maids (often a different social class to wives) could direct the flow of sartorial information through a Chinese household. The scene of Qiao Yuanzhi and his entertainers visualizes just that: as women of disparate social backgrounds mingle within an elite household, we see the role of transient, non-elite visitors like female entertainers in disseminating the latest fashions. Aside from their hairstyles, the most important sartorial component worn by the glamorous entertainers in Yu Zhiding’s painting is their bright red cloud collars. The cloud collar had begun gaining popularity during the late Ming (it makes an appearance in the MFA album). Ye Mengzhu identified three different styles in his account of women’s dress, and numerous variations are displayed in popular prints of this period. ‘Three pleasures’ illustrates Ye’s misguided emphasis upon the top-down transmission of gentlewomen. As shown in other studies on fashion in East Asia, it was not necessarily the elites leading fashion, but rather more vernacular groups: merchants, courtesans, and entertainers.65 And to explain why the cloud collar or the peony hair came to prevail in fashion, we need to look, not to elite culture, but to vernacular culture, in particular the media of popular prints. 63

64

65

Dong Han, San gang shi lue (1644; reprint, Shenyang: Liaoning Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2000), juan 10, 223. Another writer from this period, Dai Shu, also describes the style, further detailing the construction and use of pearls and other decoration (Que nan za lu, 2a). Poem by You Tong (1618–1704) cited in Gao Chunming, Zhongguo fushi mingwu kao, 48. For example, Bethe’s study of Edo period fashions shows how fashions were first established among merchant women and only then moved upwards to the military and the nobility. Monica Bethe, ‘Reflections on Beni: Red as a Key to Edo-Period Fashion’, in Dale Carolyn Gluckman and Sharon Sadako Takeda (eds.), When Art Became Fashion: Kosode in Edo-Period Japan (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1992), 149.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

557

558

rachel silberstein

Single-sheet woodblock prints of the mid-late Qing period provide one of the best, though understudied, sources on fashion.66 As elsewhere in Europe and Asia, prints were a primary tool for the dissemination and popularization of fashion.67 Prints were produced in regional workshops throughout China, and they featured various themes, spanning deities, plump sons, dramas, and historical tales, but images of fashionable women were particularly important to the two most commercially successful regional locations: the northern Yangliuqing print workshops near Tianjin, and the southern Taohuawu workshops in Suzhou. Most surviving prints date to the nineteenth century, but earlier examples survive in European and Japanese collections. Figure 16.6, ‘Two ladies playing cards’, an early eighteenth-century Yangliuqing print, shows the importance of visual details of fashion to these prints. Originally a double screen, it depicts full-length images of beauties within an elegant interior: like other prints of this time, the ladies are shown at leisure – they primp in bedrooms, play cards with friends, and tease plump sons, typically accompanied by a lowerstatus female companion. As Ellen Johnston Laing observed, the prints combine normative views of idealized womanhood – beautiful mothers playing with healthy sons within a wealthy household – with mild erotic overtones – the women are shown in their bedchamber, baring wrists, surrounded by flowers and plants with sexual connotations.68 Auspicious motifs were a critical aspect of the appeal of these prints, and though these punning motifs have been seen as somewhat ahistorical, never changing through Chinese history, Qing writers like Zhaolian (1780–1833) detailed the distinction between contemporary designs and those of the early 66

67

68

For collections of nianhua, see Zhongguo muban nianhua jicheng series edited by Feng Jicai. An earlier but excellent compilation is Wang Shucun, Zhongguo minjian nianhua shi tulu (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Meishu Chubanshe, 1991). Nagasaki Iwao, ‘Designs for a Thousand Ages: Printed Pattern Books and Kosode’, in Gluckman and Sadako Takeda (eds.), When Art Became Fashion, 95–113. For the power of prints to disseminate fashion, see the chapter by Peter McNeil in this volume. Ellen Johnston Laing, ‘Mothers and Sons: Four Newly Discovered Eighteenth-Century Chinese Prints’, Orientations, 44/7 (2013), 70–7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

Figure 16.6 Anon., ‘Two ladies playing cards’ (Yexi shinü tu 葉戲仕女圖), double sheet, upper one missing, Yongzheng period, Zhongguo meishuguan, after Pan Yuanshi and Wang Lixia (eds.), Yangliuqing banhua (Taipei: Xiongshi Tushu Gufen Youxian Gongsi, 1976), fig. 71.

dynasty: ‘During the Kangxi period, they favored well-known patterns like “Endless Wealth and Nobility”, “Rivers and Mountains for Ten-Thousand Generations”, “Blessings of Longevity”.’69 Depictions of fashionable dress were equally important to the market success of prints. Figure 16.6 details typical styles of the mid-Qing, informal garments like the bijia 69

Zhaolian, Xiaoting xulu, juan 3, 637.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

559

560

rachel silberstein

Figure 16.7 Anon., woodblock print, late nineteenth century. 71 × 47 cm. Collection of Christer von der Burg.

or beizi, long skirts with flowing hems, worn under sleeveless, vest-like overdresses. The silhouette was effectively divided into three layers. The decorative emphasis came from woven fabric patterning – winding floral designs, or large floral medallions against geometric backgrounds. By the late Qing, prints like Figure 16.7 emphasize a new silhouette, the ao or shan jacket, a decorated and lined calf-length jacket cut wide with split sides, and straight or bowed sleeves, and distinguished by the heavy emphasis on decorative trimming at the collar, overlapping front, side, and bottom hem, and sleeveband or cuff, with fabric knot-and-loop buttons or gilt buttons.70 Photographs show that 70

Gao Chunming, Zhongguo fushi mingwu kao, 550.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

the jacket had become much heavier, more bulky and layered than the fluid silhouette worn by late Ming and early Qing women. The saturated, densely patterned surfaces of the late Qing compare sharply to the aesthetic of delicate stitchwork and bright shades against white background seen in the midMing skirt in Figure 16.5, a new aesthetic that reflects the expansion of urban commercial handicrafts in the clothing industry.

cities and the production of fashion The Qing rulers had moved quickly to establish control of silk production: cutting the numbers of workshops and consolidating the weaving workshops (zhizao ju) in three locations: Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou. All three wealthy urban centres were renowned for their silk specialities: Suzhou for embroidery and Song-style brocade, Nanjing for ‘cloud brocade’ and metallic thread-brocaded weaves, and Hangzhou for ling twills and complex luo gauzes. Further control was achieved through the court workshops which not only produced but also designed, commissioned, and circulated object specifications, and used supervisory officials to control quality. Of the three cities, Suzhou dominated textile and clothing handicrafts: most of the court’s clothing was sent to the Suzhou workshops, and the phrase ‘Suzhou style’ was shorthand for fashion in cities and villages across China and beyond.71 Urban scrolls depicting mid-Qing Suzhou, for example, the Qianlong emperor’s ‘Southern Urban Scrolls’ (Qianlong Nanxun tu), provide visual evidence for the vast numbers of textile shops, selling fabric specialities like Ningchou damask, Huzhou crepe silk, Shandong Yi river pongee, and fine Chongming cotton.72 But in all three cities,

71

72

Zhang Han, Song chuang meng yu (1593), in Yuan ming shiliao biji congkan (Beijing: Zhonghua Huaju, 1985), juan 4, 15, ‘bai gong ji’. Fan Jinmin, ‘“Suyang”, “Suyi”: Ming Qing Suzhou lingchaoliu’, Nanjing Daxue xuebao: Zhixue, renwen kexue, shehui kexue, 4 (2013), 123–60. See the shop names in Qianlong Southern Inspection Tour Scrolls (Qianlong nanxun tu), after the Columbia University website annotated version from the Metropolitan Museum collection: www.learn.columbia.edu/nanxuntu/ district1/html/shops_d1.html (accessed 10 October 2018).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

561

562

rachel silberstein

commercial growth was driven by private workshops, which now greatly outnumbered imperial workshops. The further expansion of private manufacture meant an expansion of silks for mass consumption, produced in numerous varieties and prices, and used by many social levels; rather than the elaborate, high-cost fabrics produced by the state-managed silk factories for the court. Silks of a vast variety of weaves, colours, and patterns appeared on the market. For example, satin (duan) had at least twenty variations, often with regional names: Ba duan, from East Sichuan; Dian duan, from Kunming; Yue duan, from Guangdong; Huan hua, from Sichuan.73 Economic expansion strengthened the mercantile class and the concentration of wealth in Jiangnan region, and much moralistic literature bewails the increasing consumption of luxuries and the lack of boundaries between previously distinct members of society. As the industry moved away from producing entire pieces of finished silk cloth towards part processes supplied to workshops or local agents, silk became a livelihood for many, as weavers, spinners, calenderers, dyers, and embroiderers. Silk fabric firms (zhangfang), financed by large-scale commercial capital, increasingly gained control of all stages of silk production: they purchased yarn and contracted with weaving and dyeing workshops to finish the silk cloth. The cotton industry also depended upon vast numbers of labourers. Wholesale merchants or ‘trademark firms’ (zihao) marketed cotton cloth under their own name brands, and contracted out key labour stages like bleaching, dyeing, calendering and transporting, enforcing production quality and extending cotton and yarn on credit.74 The growth of rural industry enabled households to make more intensive use of previously underutilized labour power, in particular that of women. As families devoted more of their labour to production for the market, goods they had formerly produced for 73

74

Chen Juanjuan and Huang Nengfu, ‘Textile Art of the Qing Dynasty’, in Dieter Kuhn (ed.), Chinese Silks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 438. Harriet T. Zurndorfer, ‘Cotton Textile Production in Jiangnan during the Ming-Qing Era and the Matter of Market-Driven Growth’, in Billy K. L. So (ed.), The Economy of Lower Yangzi Delta in Late Imperial China (New York: Routledge, 2013), 72–98.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

their own use – including clothing and shoes – were purchased instead. There is considerable debate about how profitable textile labour was, and obviously rates of pay varied according to the many tasks involved in producing and decorating silk and cotton cloth. Still, scholars have argued that one of the central drivers of luxury consumption in early modern China was the growing economic power of female textile workers and have provided evidence to suggest the same women engaged in weaving and making clothes for the market were criticized for their luxurious consumption.75 The Jiangnan textile workshops distributed goods across a vast, inter-provincial distribution network of urban markets and overseas trade, particularly with Southeast Asia. After the conquest of Taiwan in 1683, the Qing repealed the ban on foreign trade, opening Chinese ports to foreign merchants and allowing Chinese merchants to travel overseas. In 1757, European merchants became subject to strict regulations: they were only allowed to trade in Canton (Guangzhou), and only with the Cohong, a group of twentyodd Chinese merchant houses. Despite these restrictions, by the 1780s, there was huge growth in the ‘Canton trade’, fuelled by massive imports of Mexican silver coin, and massive exports of tea, porcelain, and silk. Much scholarship has focused on the impact of these textiles on European fashion: raw, woven and painted silks; embroidered silk crepe shawls and slippers; and the cotton nankeens, produced by the Songjiang loom houses, which become a major export category to Europe (an average export volume of 1.041 million bolts, and peaking at 3.36 million bolts in 1819 at the height of the East India Company trade), and briefly a fashionable fabric for pantaloons.76 The Canton trade brought the 75

76

Wu Jen-shu, Shechi de nüren, 54–61. On women’s work and commerce, see also Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997),148–65; Silberstein, A Fashionable Century, ch. 3. On nankeens, see Billy So, Vincent Ho, and K. C. Tam, ‘Overseas Trade and Local Economy in Ming and Qing China: Cotton Textiles Exports from the Jiangnan Region’, in Angela Schottenhammer (ed.), Trade and Transfer Across the East Asian “Mediterranean” (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), 163–84. On export silks, see Paul A. Van Dyke, Merchants of Canton and Macao: Success and Failure in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Trade (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011); Leanna Lee-Whitman, ‘The Silk Trade, Chinese Silks and the British EIC Company’, Winterthur

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

563

564

rachel silberstein

presence of foreigners and their new dress styles, and foreign imagery filtered through to dress decoration – steam ships peopled by red-haired and bearded European figures embroidered on jackets.77 But the Canton trade, along with trade with Russia, also provided a funnel for European textiles, in particular luxury silk fabrics and woollen camlets, broadcloths, and long ells.78 These fabrics were a popular tribute gift at the eighteenthcentury courts of Emperors Yongzheng (r. 1722–35) and Qianlong (r. 1735–96). The tributary system, which required both provinces and foreign tributary counties to send gifts each year, had long been a primary mechanism for the channelling of new luxury goods to court. There are numerous accounts of gold and silver threadfigured silks and fancy woollens being given as diplomatic gifts by the foreign embassies of Holland, Portugal, France, and England. The foreign fabric designs became an influence for the Suzhou workshops, which started replicating the designs and styles of the European silks.79 The highest quality woollen camlets were also presented as gifts to court by Guangdong provincial officials and port officials. Initially worn or used only by Beijing princes and high officials, British woollens eventually filtered out into wider society through the East India Company imports.80 In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the East India Company sold approximately 140,000 pieces of camlets, 82,000 pieces of broadcloth, and 1,276,000 pieces of long ells to Canton. These new fabrics were included in a local gazetteer entry from 1841

77 78

79

80

Portfolio, 17/1 (1982), 21–41; Christiaan J. A. Jorg, ‘Chinese Export Silks for the Dutch in the Eighteenth Century’, Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society, 73 (2010), 1–23. For examples, see Silberstein, A Fashionable Century, ch. 5. Rachel Silberstein, ‘Fashioning the Foreign: Using British Woollens in Nineteenth-Century China’, in Kyunghee Pyun and Aida Wong (eds.), Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 231–58. Mei Mei Rado, ‘Encountering Magnificence: European Silks at the Qing Court during the Eighteenth Century’, in Petra Chu and Ding Ning (eds.), Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015), 58–75. Lai Huimin, ‘Qian Jia shidai Beijing de yanghuo yu qiren richang shenghuo’; Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 157–70.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

Shandong, on the ‘excessive luxuriousness of dress’: ‘Previously farming and merchant families all wore plain, elegant cotton cloth, and (even) wealthier families did not wear fabrics beyond pongee, Shandong silk, Xiji silk, or Shenchou silk. Nowadays however Huzhou crepe and foreign wool are seen as ordinary, even styles like tasselled hats and satin boots, reddish-black and pure black outer gowns can be seen.’81 Here we see how garments and fabric formed a medium by which Qing society encountered foreign cultures. By the end of the dynasty, notions of Manchu fashion and beauty were no longer as influenced by the southern Han styles as had been the case during the early Qing period. The magua jacket was one of the most distinctive of late Qing Manchu-led fashions. A short jacket, apparently originating among Manchu horsemen, it came in a variety of styles: buttoned and buttonless, long-sleeved and short-sleeved; each style with its own name: for example, the ‘Getting Victory’ style, named after a famous general who returned triumphant from battle;82 or the ‘Large Lapel’ style, mostly worn by Han men and women.83 As with many Qing fashions, it was worn by a wide swathe of society, with different fabrics for different social ranks, and late Qing Beijing urban rhymes are filled with details on magua trends: ‘Egg-sleeve jackets were once in vogue, but lately all compete to wear the snow-pile shape. The most loved jacket style is the single-lined magua jacket, made of camlet in a reddish-black colour.’84

fashionable accessories, commercial handicrafts, and popular culture The fashions of imperial China’s last century have often been viewed as embodying the zeitgeist of decline.85 The emphasis 81

82 83

84

85

Jining zhi li zhou zhi (Daoguang edition, 1841; reprint, Nanjing: Fenghuang Chubanshe, 2004), juan 3, 28. Zhaolian, Xiaoting xulu, juan 3, 637. Xu Ke, Qing bai lei chao (Shanghai: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1917), juan 46, 69; Li Xiaojun, ‘Magua kao’, Manzu yanjiu, 95 (2009), 124–8. ‘Jacket sleeves’, comp. in Li Jiarui, Beiping fengsu leizheng (1937; reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai Shudian, 1996), 238. See the discussion in Silberstein, ‘Other People’s Clothes’, 175.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

565

566

rachel silberstein

upon embellishment culminated in the multi-trimmed women’s jacket, seen in Figure 16.7, with its jacket openings – cuffs, collars, hems, sides – laden with repeated ribbons and borders. But the fashionable rise of ribbon and appliqué had as much to do with the growth of small private producers turning to these items to make a living as with political decay. Indeed, one of the most striking features of the mid-late Qing period is the rise of the small handicraft producer, something evidenced in fashion’s turn towards modular embellishment. The numbers of clothing producers greatly expanded between the late Ming and late Qing. Gazetteers and guild records of clothing and accessory producers suggest a decline in home manufacture of clothes and shoes and an increase in their purchase in markets and shops, a process often described in the context of moral criticism for pointless expenditure on frivolous and expensive items like beribboned jackets. The Suzhou scrolls mentioned earlier depict clothing shops – ‘Studio of Three Submissions Court Shoes’, ‘Damao’s Clothing Shop’ – and accounts from Suzhou writers list producer-branded shops like ‘Jin Fang Studio’s Purses’, ‘House of Nobility’s Collars’, ‘Zhang Hanxiang’s Hats’ and so on.86 For women who could not afford to employ a tailor, commercially made trimmings and appliqués were increasingly available. The production of trimmings increased exponentially through the Qing period, particularly after the Taiping Rebellion (a catastrophic uprising between 1850 and 1864 that destroyed much of the wealthy Jiangnan textile cities), when their accessibility made them attractive to beleaguered producers. In early nineteenthcentury Nanjing, there were only a few score looms producing silk ribbons; by the end of the century, there were about three thousand, employing four thousand men and producing three hundred different patterns of ribbons between two to three inches wide.87 Along with ribbons and appliqués, small embroidered and embellished accessories became key components of Qing fashion, cheap and easily accessible for the middle- and lower-middle-class 86 87

Silberstein, A Fashionable Century, Appendix 2. Silberstein, A Fashionable Century.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

consumer. Purses and bags came in a vast array of shapes and styles – fan cases, brush cases, money purses, chopsticks purses – often hanging from the robe or jacket, as in this description from a late Qing novel: ‘a bamboo-green silk-lined robe patterned with small dragon roundels, fastened with a rose-red Guangzhou crepe belt with scattered flowers, a long two-part trouser belt dragged behind her. Fastened (to her jacket) was an apple-green Beijing-style small handkerchief, a small Beijing-style betelnut purse, and a weft brocade fan-case.’88 The rise of the fashionable accessory is also detailed in oral literature like bamboo ballads and Manchu bannerman songs: detailed descriptions present the shifting fortunes of embroidery techniques like seed stitch or gold work.89 Commercial embroidery burgeoned during this period, especially in Suzhou, Guangzhou, and Chengdu, with growing numbers of shops, guilds, and subcontracted workers.90 Shops employed draftsmen to produce the latest urban designs and woodblock-printed pattern books made design knowledge ever more widely accessible. The retail of embroidered clothing, accessories, and furnishings meant that embroidered decoration became increasingly obtainable, a marked contrast to the early Ming, when the court had restricted the technique and its pictorial possibilities to only the highest-ranking members of the imperial family. Now, gold-embroidered dragons were available to all those who could pay for them.

conclusion The last years of the Qing saw the fashion-leading cities of the late Ming and early-mid Qing period – Suzhou and Yangzhou – fade in importance. Following the destruction of the wealthy silk regions during the Taiping Rebellion, many migrated to Shanghai, now a major port city, where artists, merchants, and handicraftworkers from Jiangnan mingled and competed with transplants from Guangdong, Japan, and Europe, creating diverse trends in 88

89 90

Zou Tao, Haishang chentian ying (Guangxu edition; reprint, Beijing: Beijing Airusheng Shuzihua Jishu Yanjiu Zhongxin, 2011), juan 3, 28. ‘Fengliu gongzi’, comp. in Li Jiarui, Beiping fengsu leizheng, 243. Silberstein, A Fashionable Century, ch. 3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

567

568

rachel silberstein

fashion, art, and design. In this period of cultural experimentation, artistic innovation, and social change, Shanghai emerged as a major site for a new era in Chinese fashion.91 Zhang Ailing, the writer whose account of Chinese fashion best captured the transition to modernity, described how Shanghai’s ‘fashions and fancies . . . were swiftly introduced into the interior’.92 The late imperial period had begun with revolutions in dress and the end of the Qing was also accompanied by such ruptures, as new concepts and dress forms appeared. Urban rhymes now described imported printed cottons, foreign silks, and Western styles, and fashion took on a new cast in forming political and personal identity. And yet, to chart the history of fashion through the Ming and Qing dynasties is to interrupt the neat narratives of imperial history. The developmental arc of fashion between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries does not correlate to dynastic boundaries; rather it suggests continuities that span dynasties and then suddenly end, propelled less by dynastic change and official regulation, and more by forces like textile manufacturing and trade, entertainment, publishing, print culture, and foreign influence, that together sustained what Zhang called the ‘vast, unaccountable waves of communal fancy’ that constituted fashion.93

glossary anhua duan 暗花緞, monochrome patterned satin damask ao 袄, lined jacket style worn by Ming and Qing women beizi 褙子, a long, slim jacket with long sleeves, side slits, and contrast trim along the opening bianfu 便服, informal dress daxiu shan 大袖衫, ‘great sleeves’ robe douniu 鬥牛, ‘fighting bull’ 91

92

93

Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Paola Zamperini, ‘Clothes that Matter: Fashioning Modernity in Late Qing Novels’, Fashion Theory, 5 (2001), 195–214. Zhang Ailing, ‘A Chronicle of Changing Clothes’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 11/2 (2003 [1943]), 427–41, 433. Ibid., 439.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion in ming and qing china

feiyu 飞鱼, ‘flying fish’ fu 幅, length fuyao 服妖, ‘outlandish dress’ gaiji 改机, ‘altered loom fabric’ hu fu 胡服, ‘nomadic clothes’ lingzhi 領織, private workshops weaving to order luan 鸾, phoenix luo 羅, gauze mang 蟒, four-clawed python mawei qun 馬尾裙, horse-hair skirt mingfu 命妇, ‘ladies of rank’ qilin 麒麟, unicorn qunzi 裙子, skirts sha 紗, gauze shishi zhuang 时世妆, fashion shuitian 水田, patchwork style songbin bianji 松鬢扁髻, hair styled into high buns with the hair on the temple or nape curled tiao xian 挑線, ‘picked thread’ tongxiu 通袖, gold-woven or embroidered patterning over jacket chest, shoulders, and back tuanshan 團衫, a long and loose formal robe style worn by Ming dynasty women wusha mao 烏紗帽, black gauze hat xianhe 仙鹤, heavenly crane xiapei 霞帔, a sleeveless, fringed court vest worn over a long robe and skirt yunlu 云鹭, cloud heron zhijin duan 織錦緞, gold-woven satin zhuanghua duan 妝花緞, brocaded satin

select bibliography Chen, BuYun, ‘Wearing the Hat of Loyalty: Imperial Power and Dress Reform in Ming Dynasty China’, in Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 416–34.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

569

570

rachel silberstein Chen Fang, ‘A Fur Headdress for Women in Sixteenth Century China’, Costume, 50/1 (2016), 3–19. Clunas, Craig and Jessica Harrison-Hall (eds.), Ming: 50 Years that Changed China (London: British Museum Press, 2014). Dauncey, Sarah, ‘Illusions of Grandeur: Perceptions of Status and Wealth in Late Ming Female Clothing and Ornamentation’, East Asian History, 25–26 (2003), 43–68. Fan Jinmin, ‘“Suyang”, “Suyi”: Ming Qing Suzhou lingchaoliu’, Nanjing Daxue xuebao: Zhixue, renwen kexue, shehui kexue, 4 (2013), 123–60. Fan Jinmin and Jin Wen, Jiangnan sichou shi yanjiu (Beijing: Nongye Chubanshe, 1993). Finnane, Antonia, Changing Clothes in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Gao Chunming, Zhongguo fushi mingwu kao (Shanghai: Shanghai Wenhua Chubanshe, 2001). Ko, Dorothy, ‘Bondage in Time: Footbinding and Fashion Theory’, Fashion Theory, 1/1 (2003), 3–28. Kuhn, Dieter (ed.), Chinese Silks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). Li Yu, Xian qing ou ji (1671; reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 2000). Lin Liyue. ‘Yishang yu fengjiao: Wan Ming de fushi fengshang yu “fuyao” yilun’, Xin shi xue, 10/3 (1999), 111–57. Silberstein, Rachel, A Fashionable Century: Textile Artistry and Commerce in Late Qing China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020). Ye Mengzhu, Yue shi bian (seventeenth century; reprint, Shanghai: Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 1981). Zhang Ailing 張愛玲 (Aileen Chang), ‘A Chronicle of Changing Clothes’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 11/2 (2003 [1943]), 427–41.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.018 Published online by Cambridge University Press

17

w

EVERYDAY FASHION IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, C. 1600–1800 james grehan

Ottoman fashion communicated through two sets of sartorial standards. The first traced out official attitudes encapsulated in the laws and regulations put forward by the state. Though some of this thinking was ‘Islamic’, insofar as it sought to promote norms and values prescribed by Islamic law, it really represented an ‘imperial’ mentality that thought in hierarchical terms and aimed at policing clothing in the name of social order. The second set of standards paid little heed to this official perspective. It spoke on behalf of regional styles, which were most pronounced among the poor in both town and village. These more mundane fashions reflected the immense cultural diversity of the empire, of which clothing was merely one of the most obvious artefacts. Measured against this local customary landscape spanning three continents, from the Balkans to the Middle East and North Africa, one can hardly talk about a single ‘Ottoman’ fashion at all. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ottoman dress maintained an overall stability, as headgear and clothing largely conformed to established shapes and styles. The most noticeable shifts corresponded to a growing preference for lighter fabrics and floral decorative prints, matching tastes that were taking hold in markets across the early modern world. Fashion was most vibrant in Istanbul, the imperial capital, where the testing of the official sartorial order always took its most insistent forms. In the eighteenth century, these pressures would goad the state into several rounds of strident but feckless sumptuary legislation.

571

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

572

james grehan

women’s fashions: head and face Ottoman fashion was most expressive around the head and face. This emphasis on headgear was true for both men and women, who were actually subject to comparable notions of taste and status. Let us first examine women’s fashions, reminding ourselves that we are starting this survey at the top of the social order. One observation that we can immediately make is that, in public, respectable women sought to reveal as little of the head and hair as possible. So powerful were these taboos that, as European travellers sometimes discovered to their great surprise, women were more careful about concealing their hair than their breasts.1 Yet the register of shame was neither uniform nor automatically operative on all occasions. The prohibitions against showing the head and face rested more heavily on urban women than the rural majority, who lived in the familiar confines of the village, where such precautions were both unnecessary – since everyone knew each other – and inconvenient, because nearly all women had to work outside the house and perform physical labour which rendered extra coverings a positive nuisance. Peasant women only felt the need to conform to the more restrictive expectations when they visited towns or encountered strangers. And even in the towns, not all women took such elaborate precautions, particularly if they were moving in the back streets of the residential quarters, which were, in terms of social intimacy, not very different from little villages. The sartorial strictures of the elite remained, for most of the population, little more than an ideal. Greek women working in the gardens outside Edirne knew that they could dispense with their veils; only if they were to venture into town, Lady Mary Montagu observed in the early eighteenth century, would they take care to put them on.2 Women could choose not to wear them, but appearing in public without veiling was an automatic forfeiture of respectability – at least for those who had high status to protect (or pursue). 1

2

See for example Carsten Niebuhr, Travels Through Arabia and Other Countries of the East, trans. Robert Heron (Edinburgh: R. Morison and Son, 1792), i, 118; Richard Pococke, A Description of the East, and Some Other Countries (London: W. Bowyer, 1745), iii, 13. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters from the Levant during the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716–1718 (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 137.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

Of all the components of fashion, the headdress was the most subject to variation. Istanbul was a particularly favourable incubator for extravagant styles. Strolling through the gardens on the outskirts of the metropolis, well-to-do women vied with one another in devising new fads. Among Greek women, ‘the headdress varies with the caprice of fashion; and they are, if possible, more attentive to it than even our European ladies’.3 By the eighteenth century, their ostentation was beginning to annoy the imperial court, as some fashions had become so outsized and elaborate that they rivalled the headgear of upper-class men.4 Each region preserved its own styles. Here is one snapshot from Izmir (1696): ‘a pretty long velvet cap made of eight pieces, the outward circle being just large enough to receive the head; but it widens by degrees towards the top not unlike to a close crown . . . [It] is so long that it would fall back upon the shoulders if it were not artificially raised above the head, where they pleat and fold it.’5 Away from the big towns, materials and proportions became ever more extravagant. Throughout much of Syria, fashion dictated ‘a sort of silver or lackered [sic] hat, shaped like a cone, a platter, or some other fantastic form’.6 The women of Malatya, in southeastern Anatolia, adorned their heads with ‘broad flat pieces of metal’ which ‘resemble common eating plates and are fastened with strings under the chin’. The wealthy had them in silver; those of lesser rank, in copper. The poor wrapped ‘pointed skullcaps’ (sivri takye), which were fashionable throughout central and eastern Anatolia.7 The biggest 3 4

5

6 7

Niebuhr, Travels, i, 119–20. Madeline Zilfi, ‘Goods in the Mahalle: Distributional Encounters in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul’, in Donald Quataert (ed.), Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 299. Jean Dumont, A New Voyage to the Levant (London: T. Goodwin, 1705), 271– 2. Compare with the turban-like fashions of Arab towns like Cairo and Aleppo; Edward Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (New York: Dover Publications, 1973), 43; Alexander Russell, The Natural History of Aleppo (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 2nd edition, 1794), i, 106. Niebuhr, Travels, i, 118. W. G. Browne, Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria from the Year 1792 to 1798 (London: Adell et al., 1806), 493–4; Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, ed. Yücel Dağ lı et al. (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1999–2006), iv, 15. On similar fashions in Erzincan and Kayseri, ibid., ii, 108; iii, 109.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

573

574

james grehan

fashion statements belonged to ceremonial dress. Conspicuous bulk, as usual, indicated high social standing. At Ioannina, in Epirus, affluent Greek and Albanian women wore a pointed headdress ‘as big as a gourd’.8 Perhaps nowhere was regional diversity as pronounced as the Aegean islands, which were notorious for their eccentric fashions (Figure 17.1). One extreme case, even by these insular standards, was Lesbos, where the women of the coastal settlements had their own peculiar headgear, not found in the interior.9 In this proliferation of styles, history mattered at least as much as geography. On islands that had long been Latin outposts, like Chios (Genoese until 1566) and Crete (fully conquered from Venice in 1669), Italian manners retained their vogue. Landing at Chios in 1696, Jean Dumont could not help noticing how local dress resembled that of Italy and France. The only difference, he smiled, was that the island lagged ‘about twenty years’ behind the times, as if he were looking back to styles worn by his parents or grandparents.10 Ottoman rule did not erase the abiding Latin imprint. Veiling obeyed the same tendency to vary by region. One cannot identify a universal ‘Islamic’ style. In Istanbul, women generally preferred light materials. By the seventeenth century, a white, gauzy veil (yaşmak), wrapped around the head, had come into fashion.11 The tastes of the capital travelled far into the towns of the central Ottoman lands. On the streets of Bolu, a town between Istanbul and Ankara, women also disported themselves in veils of a fine weave.12 Regional fashions nonetheless persisted. Most 8 9

10

11

12

Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, viii, 292. Johannes Van Egmont, Travels Through Part of Europe, Asia Minor, the Islands of the Archipelago, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Mt. Sinai, trans. John Hayman (London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1759), i, 244–5. On the manifold quirks of island fashion, see Markos Antonios Katsaites, Δύο Ταξίδια στη Σμύρνη, 1740 και 1742 (Athens: Ekdoseis ‘Henoseos Smyrnnaion’, 1972), 107. Dumont, New Voyage, 192. See also Jean Thévenot, The Travels of Monsieur Thévenot into the Levant, trans. Archibald Lovell (London: Gregg Farnborough, 1971), i, 100. On Italian fashions in Crete, see Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, viii, 248. The yaşmak may have actually been an innovation of the seventeenth century; Nureddin Sevin, Onüç Asırlık Türk Kıyafet Tarihine Bir Bakış (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığ ı, 1990), 94–5. Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, ii, 90.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

Figure 17.1 A woman from the island of Mykonos shows off the local dress. Divided into remote little worlds by the sea, the Aegean zone had evolved its own manifold fashions, which differed from one island to the next, from Jacques Le Hay, Recueil des cent estampes representant differentes nations du Levant (Paris, 1714). Original painting by Jean-Baptiste Vanmour. Getty Images.

common in Egypt was the burqu`, which consisted of two pieces: one that came down from the headpiece to the eyes, from which a second one hung loosely over the face, falling over the front. As a rule, the women of Arab towns remained loyal to such local styles.13 13

See for example Benoit de Maillet, Description de l’Egypte (Paris: Genneau and Rollin, 1735), ii, 232–3. On the prevalence of local veils in the Arab lands, see Yedida Kalfon Stillman, Arab Dress: A Short History from the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 148–9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

575

576

james grehan

Did Christian and Jewish women follow separate customs? Throughout the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern zones of the empire, one can hardly differentiate on the basis of religion. Women of all confessional groups adhered more or less to the same fashions. Only the subtlest signals might convey religious identity. In Aleppo, it was a matter of a few extra touches of colour: Christian and Jewish women tended to favour purely white veils, whereas their Muslim neighbours wore those of ‘checkered blue or red’. Jewish women further stood out for the different way of wrapping their cloak and veil so that one arm remained free.14 In Thessaly and the Morea, Christian women were no less likely to veil than their Muslim neighbours.15 Since the veil pre-dated the arrival of Islam, they were merely enacting a much older set of ideals. Only in the northern Balkans can one detect more relaxed standards. Evliya Çelebi (1611–82), the renowned Ottoman traveller, marvelled at the women of Sofia, who went about the streets at all hours with their long braids of hair without the least concern for covering.16 The Balkan interior was a sort of cultural gateway, in which the traveller left behind the ancient zones of Mediterranean modesty. Let us not overrate the weight of culture or religion. The most decisive factor in determining whether a woman would veil was socio-economic status. Most of the urban poor did not bother with veiling at all, and took care only to keep the hair covered.17 Across the Ottoman countryside, moreover, only women of high social standing would take pains to conceal their face.18

the male head and face Like women, men observed the same common rule: to keep their heads covered at all times. Unlike the case of women, however, it 14

15

16 17 18

Russell, Natural History, i, 114–15. On similar colour schemes in Jerusalem, see Browne, Travels, 457. J. C. Hobhouse, A Journey Through Albania (New York: M. Carey, 1817), i, 409; Niebuhr, Travels, i, 119. Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, v, 188. See for example the streets of Cairo, Lane, Account, 52. See for example John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (London: John Murray, 1822), 294; Browne, Travels, 439.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

was not because of sensitivity about their hair, which most townsmen either shaved or kept very short. At most, they left perhaps a small tuft at the top of the skull.19 Little different were Greek peasants, who preferred the equivalent of a tonsure.20 Most men allowed only the beard to grow luxuriantly, and treated it as a point of pride. The Janissaries were the main exception to this norm, shaving the beard and keeping just their moustaches.21 Why, then, the imperative to cover the head, even for men? One motive was practical: headgear was the main protection from sun, rain, and cold, and had to be worn in all seasons. No less important were cultural sensibilities, which counted as much for men as for women. Thus men, too, were not to exhibit their head as a matter of decency. The idea of doffing a hat in greeting, as Europeans did, seemed ridiculous to Ottoman opinion. Headgear was to stay on the head, which was not meant for direct display. A second rule, common to men and women, was that height corresponded to status, wealth, and power. On Mount Lebanon – to take only one possible example from many others – it would have been unthinkable for a simple priest to wear a taller turban than his bishop.22 And like women, men could be very expressive with their sense of style and decoration. To speak in the most general terms, we have to distinguish between turbans and caps. The choice depended mainly on social, climatic, and historical factors. The distribution of turbans and caps was therefore rooted 19

20

21

22

Corneille Le Brun, Voyage au Levant (Paris: Guillaume Cavelier, 1714,) i, 130; Jerome Dandini, A Voyage to Mount Libanus (London: J. Orme and A. Roper, 1698), 29, 46; Thévenot, Travels, i, 30; Niebuhr, Travels, i, 114; Constantin-François Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt, in the Years 1783, 1784, and 1785 (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1788), ii, 458. The Greek style was to reserve ‘a place of the bredth [sic] of a dollar, left bare upon the top of their crowns; and then let the hair grow round it, the bredth of two fingers, more or less; after which they shave all the rest of their head and wear it bare’. See Edward Brown, A Brief Account of Some Travels (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1673), 60; see also Edward Dodwell, A Classical and Topographical Tour through Greece (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1819), i, 133. In contrast, Croats shaved one side of the head and let the other grow long. Michel Febvre, Théâtre de la Turquie (Paris: E. Couterot, 1682), 285. In Egypt, Mamluks who entered the corps as slaves did not generally grow a beard until they had obtained formal emancipation; Browne, Travels, 55. Dandini, Voyage, 53–4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

577

578

james grehan

in geography, not religion, and almost certainly pre-dated the Ottoman period. To take the turban: it is a deceptively simple term, which really comprises a multitude of wrappings, from the most elaborate headpieces to mere strips of cloth wound around the head. At the high end of fashion, turbans had three main components: a stiff cap (tarbush) that served as the foundation; the cloth (whether of muslin, satin, or linen) that swaddled it and imparted bulk; and a sash of one colour or another wrapped around the base. The biggest turbans required great care. Owners might have to resort to specialists, who hired themselves out to build them or were called on to handle the delicate task of rewinding the fabric.23 Ottoman officials – above all, those at the imperial court – had the tallest turbans, which they might decorate with jewels, small pendants, and even exotic feathers if they were to appear for some public parade or ceremony.24 Outside Istanbul, local notables announced their own rank with towering piles of cloth, which were to be found most conspicuously on the head of members of the religious establishment. One style which found favour in Arab towns around the turn of the seventeenth century was to form the turban in the shape of a great ball.25 Many other variations were possible: a single glance at a turban was often enough to confirm a man’s status and position. Such questions of shape and bulk were, of course, the privilege of the social elite. Most townsmen had to settle for lesser impressions – as was precisely the point of this visual vocabulary. It was usually enough for tradesmen and others of middling status to wrap a small cap loosely with cloth.26 The urban poor had to make do with cheap felt caps or tied cloth directly around their head. The social gradations were impossible to miss. At the small Palestinian town of Tiberius, one eighteenth-century traveller came across the 23

24

25 26

See for example the biography of `Abd al-Rahim al-Ustuwani (d. 1613), a Damascene muezzin who had a sideline in winding turbans; Najm alDin al-Ghazzi, Lutf al-samar wa qatf al-thamar, ed. Mahmud Shaykh (Damascus: Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa al-Irshad al-Qawmi, 1981–2), ii, 510–11. See for example Antoine Galland, Journal d’Antoine Galland, ed. Charles Schefer (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1881), i, 73–4; ii, 107–9. See for example al-Ghazzi, Lutf, i, 249–50; ii, 645–6. Compare Cairo and Aleppo: Niebuhr, Travels, i, 115; Russell, Natural History, i, 104–5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

son of Zahir al-`Umar (d. 1775), the chief notable of northern Palestine. The young commander sported a black turban, while the men in his retinue had ‘only linen rags’ on their heads.27 Among the peasantry, such simplicity was the norm. But even the poorest men would ensure that they had some sort of headcovering, no matter how filthy or worn. The turban was not the first choice everywhere in the Ottoman domains. It coexisted with a variety of caps. Geography determined many elements of style and material. In the mountainous zones of eastern Anatolia, the signature cap was the tall kalpak, which was most closely associated with the Kurds.28 Manufactured from animal skins, it was ideal for the cool climate. The best models were lined with fur; others made do with cheaper felt. A version of the kalpak was also found throughout much of the Balkans (Figure 17.2). Evliya Çelebi mentions the ‘Bosnian kalpak’ (Boşnak kalpağ ı) in Sarajevo, and finds it again in Belgrade and Serres.29 When the Orthodox Metropolitan of Edirne visited the French ambassador (1673), no one was surprised to see a kalpak on his head.30 Only towards the Croatian borderlands, as one approached the Venetian cultural zone, did Italian-style hats come into view.31 A separate zone of fezzes and cloth caps stretched across the Ottoman Mediterranean, from North Africa to the Aegean Basin (Figure 17.3). Of short or cylindrical design, perhaps with a decorative tassel attached at the top, most cloth caps soon lost their shape and sagged downwards. Greek peasants were known to use the floppy ends ‘as a handkerchief and sometimes for the purse’. The poorest resorted to small red 27 28

29

30 31

Van Egmont, Travels, ii, 35. Entering the imperial camp (1774), Kurdish troops were immediately identified by their kalpak; Ahmed Efendi, III, Selim’in Sırkatibi Ahmed Efendi Tarafından Tutulan Ruzname, ed. Sema Arıkan (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1993), 66. For the kalpak worn by Kurds in Aleppo, see Russell, Natural History, i, 104. Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, v, 198, 227; viii, 59. The poor of Varna preferred a variation that he called ‘Tatar kalpağ ı’; ibid., v, 51. Galland, Journal, ii, 77. The difference was unmistakable in the port of Split; Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, v, 262. In many parts of Thessaly, too, headgear resembled Italian styles; ibid., viii, 89; Brown, Brief Account, 63.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

579

580

james grehan

Figure 17.2 A Bulgarian man wears a version of the kalpak. This headpiece was found throughout the Balkans and eastern Anatolia, from Jacques Le Hay, Recueil des cent estampes representant differentes nations du Levant (Paris, 1714). Original painting by Jean-Baptiste Vanmour. Getty Images.

skullcaps.32 Different versions of this headgear, which was very popular among sailors, were in vogue as far off as Cyprus, where the islanders preferred black caps and refused to shave their heads in the prevailing Ottoman fashion.33 One might 32

33

François-Réné Chateaubriand, Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt, and Barbary, trans. Frederic Shoberl (Philadelphia: Moses Thomas, 1812), i, 271; Dodwell, Tour, i, 134. In seventeenth-century Thessaly, some peasants wore these caps with small brims, which were facetiously likened to ‘Frankish’ styles; Brown, Brief Account, 63. Dandini, Voyage, 20.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

Figure 17.3 Albanian soldiers wear a version of the caps which would have been familiar throughout much of the southern Balkans, the Aegean Basin, and as far away as the North African littoral, from Marie-Gabriel Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage Pittoresque de la Grèce (Paris, 1782). Original painting by Jean-Baptiste Hilair. Brown University Digital Collections.

interpret these tastes as a lingering remnant of an older medieval insular culture, once held together under Venetian rule. Setting off further to the east, travellers at once became aware of entering the land of turbans in Syrian ports. It was much easier for turbans than caps to cross these sartorial frontiers. Turbans carried a double significance, representing both the urban order and the Ottoman state; they were the favoured headgear both in the suave and cultured circles of the towns and among members of the political elite. This symbolism was most obvious in the Balkan provinces, where they were a decidedly urban fashion. Evliya Çelebi was startled by the ‘marvellous and strange turbans’ that he observed in the small Macedonian town of Serfiçe (modern Servia).34 In this case, the surprise was not that Balkan townsmen would wear turbans; any urban gentleman of

34

Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, v, 315.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

581

582

james grehan

means and ambition – not to mention Ottoman officials – would have donned them as a matter of course. Far more arresting were the local designs, which seemed somewhat exotic even to the seasoned Ottoman traveller (and in their own way mirrored the parochial peculiarities of female headgear). Turbans, then, were utterly commonplace in Balkan towns. Wandering through the streets of Athens in the early nineteenth century, one European traveller beheld a ‘crowd of Greeks and Turks, seen at a distance with their colored turbans, with the predominant tints of red, blue, yellow, and white’. The older fashions persisted, even on the eve of the Greek war of independence.35 Among those who shared this taste were powerful Christian officials, like the leaders of the Phanariot families who acted as translators for the Ottoman court and would serve in the eighteenth century as governors of Wallachia and Moldavia (the future Romania) on the northern frontier. In nearly every way, they dressed and lived like Ottoman grandees, and would not have thought of taking off their turbans.36

clothing the body Like the turbans and caps put on the head, the garments draped over the body varied immensely in cut, style, and proportion across the social spectrum. Standing at the pinnacle of fashion was the court in Istanbul. Officials and pages wore an ensemble that one could also find, in one version or another, among the well-to-do of the provinces. Over a loose shirt (gömlek) and baggy trousers (çakşır), held with a sash around the waist, the well-groomed gentleman wore a short vest or robe (dolaman or cübbe). Over these inner clothes came one, or even two, long-sleeved cloaks that hung down almost to the ground.37 The use of multiple layers of clothing often proved the best defence against cold air and draughts. Indoor heating techniques, 35 36

37

Dodwell, Tour, i, 286. Angela Jianu, ‘Women, Fashion, and Europeanization: The Romanian Principalities, 1750–1830’, in Amila Buturovic and İ rvin Cemil (eds.), Women in the Ottoman Balkans (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 201–30. Hülya Tezcan, The Topkapı Saray Museum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986), 25. For contemporary descriptions, see Edmund Chishull, Travels in Turkey and Back to England (London, 1747), 68; John Covell, ‘Extracts from the Diaries of John Covell’, in Theodore Bent (ed.), Early Travels and Voyages in the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

confined mainly to braziers and charcoal pans, were relatively ineffective. So the fashionable man was also eminently practical. The clothes that one wore indoors would usually suffice, except in winter, for the streets and fields as well. Never would the proper gentleman appear in company without an outer mantle or cloak. When one eighteenth-century Dutch traveller gained an appointment with the head of the Ottoman legal establishment (şeyhülislam), the latter still made a point of greeting him in a ‘robe of fine cotton’ even as he dispensed with official finery.38 One might think of such luxurious robes as the official ‘business jacket’ of respectable social circles. The same articles of clothing marked upper-class fashion nearly everywhere in the empire. At most, they might carry different names or perhaps bear slightly different designs and cuts. One can find this sense of a common ‘official’ wardrobe in the travelogue of Evliya Çelebi. In his various accounts of local fashions, compiled over a career that took him around the empire, he uses remarkably consistent terminology. As he ranges over the clothing of rich and poor, he seems to assume that his readers will be able to form a good picture without requiring extra words or details. What did such an Ottoman gentleman lavish the most attention on? The short answer is that he would closely note the outermost clothes which were open to view and most obviously meant to be viewed. As he roved from one region to another, Evliya Çelebi came back repeatedly not only to headpieces, the most conspicuous signposts of fashion, but also to robes and cloaks, which were the final proof of social status. Ottoman estates reveal that no other items of clothing came in such a wide variety (if one is to judge from the unusually varied and differentiated terminology for identifying them).39 Only the North African coastline and Aegean region – corresponding roughly to the Mediterranean cap-wearing zone – shed these outer layers and cultivated a distinctive taste for closer-fitting tunics and vests (what Evliya Çelebi calls the ‘Algerian’ fashion). Trousers, hanging down no farther

38 39

Levant (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), 227–8; Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, i, 93; Thévenot, Travels, i, 29–30. Van Egmont, Travels, i, 161. See the case of Damascus; see James Grehan, Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Damascus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 202.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

583

584

james grehan

than the knees, were held with a loose belt into which soldiers and other self-styled toughs would slip a dagger.40 Women’s fashions, particularly among the urban and affluent, were more restrictive and consistent. The paramount concern was to obscure and de-emphasize the form of the body. In Istanbul, no respectable woman of any class would have ventured out into the streets without a large overcoat (ferace) (Figure 17.4). Lady Mary Montagu compared it to a ‘riding-coat’ which had ‘long straight sleeves that reach to their finger-ends’.41 So ample was this outer garment that, as Jean Thévenot observed in 1655, women would grasp one side and hold it over the other.42 If worn properly, it would completely hide the rest of their attire. In exchange for this formal display of modesty, women had, as Lady Mary assures us, such complete freedom of movement that they might even engage in discreet trysts and flirtations.43 In private settings, the rules were more relaxed. Overlong underpants, which usually extended to the feet, standard Istanbul fashion called for a shirt and ankle-length trousers (şalvar), to be worn with a waistcoat. The final piece was a full-length gown (entari) or robe held with a sash or belt around the waist (Figure 17.5).44 These indoor clothes were tighter and rather accentuated the shape of the body. The ideal effect was to show off a woman’s ‘corpulence’, as one European traveller put it, and highlight ‘prominent breasts’ (Figure 17.6).45 An assortment of chains, necklaces, and bracelets, often set with jewels among the affluent, would finish the ensemble. On their feet, elegant women wore thin leather slippers, although in the mud of the

40 41

42 44

45

See for example Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, viii, 106–7, 279; ix, 37; x, 366. Montagu, Letters, 127. See also Antoine Laurent Castellan, Lettres sur le Morée, l’Hellespont, et Constantinople (Paris: A. Nepveu, 1820), ii, 297; Le Brun, Voyage, i, 129. Thévenot, Travels, i, 56. 43 Montagu, Letters, 127. For various contemporary descriptions, see Thévenot, Travels, i, 56; Montagu, Letters, 124; Elizabeth Craven, A Journey Through the Crimea to Constantinople (Dublin: H. Chamberlaine et al., 1789), 225; van Egmont, Travels, i, 224. For an overview of female fashion in Istanbul, see Jennifer Scarce, Women’s Costume of the Near and Middle East (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), ch. 4. Van Egmont, Travels, i, 93.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

Figure 17.4 An upper-class woman from the town of Bursa in northwestern Anatolia swathes herself in standard street attire: an overcoat (ferace) with a white face-veil (yaşmak). She has wrapped her head in a loose translucent veil. Miniature painting by the Ottoman artist Levni (c. 1720s). Turkish Cultural Foundation, Nurhan Atasoy Archive (with permission).

streets, or at the bathhouse, elevated wooden clogs were the favourite apparel (Figure 17.1). These refined tastes were not representative of the working population, whether urban or rural. Few individuals could hope to own many clothes and were doing well if they could afford to keep an extra set of finery for holidays and private celebrations. In Egypt, men and women might wear nothing more than a blue shirt

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

585

586

james grehan

Figure 17.5 Women from Istanbul drinking coffee at home. They relax in layers of shirts and waistcoats, necessary for their draughty room. The ornate headdresses announce their upper-class status. Painting by JeanBaptiste Vanmour (c. 1720s). Oil on canvas, 590 × 370 cm. Getty Images, from the collection at Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey.

and loose trousers.46 Their choices, though abetted by the warm climate, really testified to material constraints that dictated plain and minimal wardrobes for Ottoman subjects everywhere.

fashion and distinction Ottoman fashion spoke, in large part, through a well-known hierarchy of materials and fabrics. At the summit were fur-fringed coats and mantles, whose costliness, comfort, and sumptuousness would have instantly confirmed wealth and power. Fur was the ultimate status symbol (Figure 17.7). In Ottoman ceremony, like that of other great Eurasian empires, it functioned as a token of official favour, bestowed both on the dynasty’s own officials and visiting dignitaries.47 The

46

47

Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, x, 274; Lane, Account, 32; Niebuhr, Travels, i, 113; Thévenot, Travels, i, 248; van Egmont, Travels, ii, 57–8, 140; Volney, Travels, i, 4. Jonathan Schlesinger, A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 37, Table 1.1.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

Figure 17.6 A sleeping girl reclines in a gown, whose pronounced décolletage was becoming more fashionable by the eighteenth century. She has dyed her fingertips and toenails with henna. Miniature painting by the Ottoman artist Levni (c. 1720s). Turkish Cultural Foundation, Nurhan Atasoy Archive (with permission).

practice of imperial robing followed many shared conventions. In identical fashion to the Qing court, for example, the Ottomans designated sable (samur) as the royal fur. This association with the palace was so direct that one Ottoman decree (1756) commanded members of the imperial council to wear only sable and eschew other furs.48 Meanwhile provincial elites had long appropriated it for themselves. In seventeenth-century Bursa, notables proudly donned sable as an emblem of their own elite status, whatever the regulations might say.49 Well-to-do townsmen had several other choices as well: ermine, marten, and fox, all of which made much the same social point.50 Most of these furs reached Ottoman markets either from the Balkan provinces or from farther north in Russia, which sent annual exports. The less privileged found their own niche in the market and could count on the availability of inferior furs, like cat, or ‘imitation’ furs like those manufactured from felt.51 48

49 51

Ahmed Vasıf, Mahasinü’l-Asar ve Haka’ikü’l-Ahbar (Istanbul: Dar al-Taba`a al-`Amira, 1804), i, 76. Schlesinger, World Trimmed with Fur, 37, Table 1.1. Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, ii, 22. 50 Tezcan, Topkapı, 43. See for example the prevalence of fur-lined clothes in eighteenth-century Damascus; Grehan, Everyday, 215–16.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

587

588

james grehan

Figure 17.7 A gathering of leading officials from Aleppo: (seated from left) the chief judge (kadı), the head of the local Janissary corps, and the governor. They wear the large turbans and fur-trimmed garments corresponding to their social rank. From Alexander and Patrick Russell, The Natural History of Aleppo (1794).

Beneath fur was a spectrum of textiles worked up into many different weaves. Silk was the most esteemed. The Ottoman market was mostly self-sufficient in all but the luxury trade. Leading the way were the workshops of Bursa and Aleppo, whose output European merchants rated from good to mediocre in quality. The best silks, everyone agreed, were the high-grade imports that arrived from India and Iran. By the seventeenth century, this Eastern silk fuelled a lucrative international trade with its main outlets in Izmir and Aleppo, where European merchants had established themselves in small trading communities. Long associated with luxury, silk still retained a hint of scandal and decadence. Religious opinion ruled against the wearing of pure silk cloth, relenting only for mixed weaves. Ottoman markets largely obliged. Only small items like scarves might be made entirely of silk. Probably on account of cost, as much as any moral scruples, it was usually woven into blends of cotton or wool. Many urban consumers

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

would have at least a few items that contained silk in their wardrobes.52 More practical was cotton, which was commonplace at all socio-economic levels. One has to distinguish among a large range of fabrics, from fine to coarse weaves. Drawing on domestic cultivation, mainly from Anatolia and Syria, the Ottoman market met most of its own demand. Cotton was worked into nearly every kind of clothing and so ubiquitous were cotton shirts and trousers that most of the population could afford them. By 1800, even Albanian villagers in remote highlands were long used to having cotton shirts and underpants (probably supplied by the rural workshops around Thessaly).53 The coarse cloth was no doubt reserved for the countryside. Urban markets offered more choices. At the bottom end of the market, poor townsmen might still be able to afford shirts of twilled cotton (boğ ası). Among the affluent, the finest and fanciest weaves could fetch prices comparable to fine silks. Very much like the silk market, cotton was also part of a longrunning international trade. Most coveted were Indian fabrics, such as women’s belts and sashes for turbans, which generated a booming demand, centred mostly in Istanbul.54 Ottoman artisans paid the compliment of manufacturing their own imitations, which went under different names and sought to reproduce the colourful designs for which their Indian competitors were admired.55

52

53

54

55

See for example the frequency with which silk blends appeared in Damascus during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Colette Establet, Des Tissus et des hommes: Damas vers 1700 (Damascus: Institut Français de Proche Orient, 2005), ch. 4; Grehan, Everyday, 214–15. Hobhouse, Journey, i, 121. On Balkan cottons, see Sokratis Petmezas, ‘Patterns of Proto-Industrialization: The Case of Thessaly’, Journal of European Economic History, 19 (1990), 575–603. Katsumi Fukasawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant (Paris: CNRS, 1987), 40–1. Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Ottoman Cotton Textiles: The Story of a Success That Did Not Last, 1500–1800’, in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (eds.), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 97–8; Fukasawa, Toilerie, 45–55. On the Anatolian workshops that were most successful in producing these imitations, see Olivier Raveux, ‘Spaces and Technologies in the Cotton

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

589

590

james grehan

Woollens were another mainstay. Town dwellers commonly owned garments made from broadcloth (çuka), woven with cotton, or less frequently, silk. Both comfortable and sturdy, broadcloth was suitable for both inner and outer garments, while purer weaves of wool were popular for cloaks and mantles. One of the most frequent compliments that Evliya Çelebi pays to Ottoman towns has do with the abundance of stylish woollens that he observed on the streets. Even in balmy regions like Crete, Palestine, and Egypt, woollens were indispensable.56 Domestic production took place throughout the empire, most notably in the Balkans and Anatolia and nearly everywhere the poor could afford to clothe themselves with at least a coarse woollen cloak (aba) for decency and comfort. Among the finest woollens were the Mohair fabrics, which were the speciality of Ankara, where chic men and women boasted colourful cloaks and robes.57 Among foreign woollens, ‘London broadcloth’ (lundura çuka) was the most successful. Available in a wide range of price and quality, it was woven into lengths suitable for robes and cloaks and became popular with middling and even poor townsmen.58 By 1700, it had long pushed aside other European competitors. Ottoman fashion had its uses for all of these fabrics. In judging taste and discernment, it looked not so much to particular styles and weaves as to overall quality of workmanship. The fabric itself would testify to the status of its wearer. Among Ottoman Greeks and Albanians, the use of gold and silver coins as external decoration was left to the peasantry and disdained as rustic crassness. Elite society would distinguish itself through the fineness of clothes and headpieces, confident that it did not have to show anything more.59 Among high-end consumers, additional flourishes were likely to take the form of gold or silver brocade or

56 57 58

59

Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Example of Printed Calicoes in Marseilles’, Textile History, 36/2 (2005), 131–45. See for example Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, iii, 79–80; viii, 248; x, 274. Ibid., ii, 226. On the popularity of English broadcloth among all social segments in eighteenth-century Izmir, see Van Egmont, Travels, i, 87. On the production and sale of English woollens in the Levant, see Ralph Davis, Aleppo and Devonshire Square (London: Macmillan, 1967), ch. 6. Dodwell, Tour, i, 134.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

fancy patterns or stripes. Evliya Çelebi could recall an acquaintance, famous as a ‘lady’s man’ (zen-dost), who dressed in cottonsilk fabrics (hitayi alacalar) of gold brocade and pinkish tones.60 By the seventeenth century, Ottoman silks and cottons were already embracing new decorative tastes. Whereas earlier Timurid fashions, brought from the east, had revolved around abstract designs, Ottoman craftsmen had begun to incorporate floral themes, which were becoming popular throughout the Eurasian textile trade.61 In any case, such adornments and accents, whether new or old, would have remained out of reach for most of the Ottoman market. The mere addition of brocade was sufficient to raise a garment’s worth substantially – probably several times over, if gold or silver thread was used. Many of the garments available to the urban market were in some way striped or dyed. Ottoman craftsmen were most accomplished with the dark end of the palette and excelled at making various reds, purples, and browns.62 Ottoman dyes were prized for their fastness and deep hues, whether for textiles or carpets. Most famous for their techniques were the workshops of the southern Balkans, whose output of cottons and woollens reached its apex in the late eighteenth century. The red dyes used at Ambelakia, in particular, were the envy of European craftsmen.63 In the Ottoman market, colourful ostentation was most fully the privilege of the urban and affluent. Early modern commercialization seems to have encouraged these tastes, which slowly pushed the boundaries of convention. By the eighteenth century, upper-class Istanbul ladies were competing with one another to adorn their cloaks with bright colours: rose, pink, lilac, green, and red.64 The state did not take long to respond to these many-hued provocations. It repeatedly warned women against such exuberant use of colour, which was 60 61

62 63

64

Çelebi, Seyahatnamesi, ii, 252. Suraiya Faroqhi, A Cultural History of the Ottomans: The Imperial Elite and Its Artifacts (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 171–2; Amanda Phillips, Everyday Luxuries: Art and Objects in Ottoman Constantinople, 1600–1800 (Dortmund: Verlag Kettler, 2018), 80–1. Tezcan, Topkapı, 18. Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 33–6. Sevin, Kıyafet, 120.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

591

592

james grehan

impossible to overlook on their long picnics and promenades on the outskirts of the capital. The frequent repetition of the decrees only confirmed their futility.65 Complaints about colourful cloaks were only one side of a much larger problem that obsessed imperial authorities. In 1725, sumptuary regulations sounded the alarm over Istanbul women who were imitating ‘infidel’ fashions – perhaps an oblique reference to European styles which may have been transmitted by Greek families who served as translators for European embassies. Particularly objectionable were ‘the freakish shapes’ of the collars that they were now attaching to their outer cloaks.66 The novel fashions were leading, it was said, to reckless expenditure among the lower orders of society. The wives of mere tradesmen were not to dress like their social superiors. An imperial decree fixed the amount of fabric that women could use for their collars, and neighbourhood headmen were empowered to snip off any offending material. This policing of women’s wardrobes would reach its crescendo in the second half of the century.67 By the reign of Selim III (1789–1807), in which the empire’s afflictions were acquiring a new urgency, official attention had shifted to economic concerns. In Istanbul, affluent women were now accused of succumbing to a fondness for ‘English broadcloth’, which was so excessively fine that it could reveal clothing worn underneath. Imperial decrees harped on the perils of buying foreign cloth, and once again castigated women for helping to undermine the social order.68 These anxieties had everything to do with the repeated 65

66

67

68

Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 129–32, 167–8; Zilfi, ‘Goods’, 297–308. Ahmet Refik, Hicri On İ kinci Asırda İ stanbul Hayatı (Istanbul: Devlet Matbaası, 1930), 86–8. For a slightly later decree (1731), see Mustafa Sami, Tarih-i Sami ve Ş akir ve Subhi (Istanbul, 1784), 34. For an overview of these regulations, see Madeline Zilfi, ‘Women, Minorities, and the Changing Politics of Dress in the Ottoman Empire, 1650–1830’, in Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 393–415; Donald Quataert, ‘Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 29 (1997), 403–25. Refik, Hicri On İ kinci, 100–2; Ahmet Refik, Hicri On Üçüncü Asırda İ stanbul Hayatı (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1988), 4, 11–12. On earlier

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

defeats that Ottoman arms suffered in the final decades of the eighteenth century. The Ottomans brought the same sensitivities to the clothing of Christians and Jews. Under the terms of Islamic law, non-Muslims had to distinguish themselves by wearing specific colours – usually in the sash of their headpiece – that would identify their ‘protected’ (and politically subordinate) status. This colour code was never entirely uniform throughout the empire. In most places, Christians would wear dark blue or black. The colour assigned to Jews was more subject to variation. In Istanbul, it was violet; in Egypt and Syria, most wore red.69 Nor were these colours, once designated, necessarily fixed for all time. At Aleppo, local Jews wore violet, like those of Istanbul; prior to 1600 or so, they had used red. The whims of a single governor had caused the switch.70 Muslims laid claim mainly to green. By custom, no one else was to wear it, either in headgear or garments. Only a few high-ranking Christians and Jews received official exemptions, which could be a point of great sensitivity in the towns. White turbans, also reserved for Muslims (especially religious notables), required the same permission. The authorities sometimes tried to keep Christians and Jews from wearing brightly coloured fabrics, but did not generally meddle in their clothing beyond the rules of the ‘Islamic’ colour scheme. It was mainly in footwear that townsmen had to show some care. Most wore soleless slippers (mest) inside leather shoes (pabuç); or among the less sedentary, calf-high boots (çizme). Yellow was restricted to Muslims of high status, or to

69

70

Ottoman reservations about Indian textile imports – which did not, however, lead to restrictions – see Halil İ nalcik, ‘The Ottoman Economic Mind and Aspects of the Ottoman Economy’, in M. A. Cook (ed.), Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 207–18. On the colours for non-Muslims in the central Rumi lands of the empire, see Dumont, New Voyage, 300; Le Brun, Voyage, i, 130; Thévenot, Travels, i, 83. Russell, Natural History, ii, 59. In Damascus, Ottoman troops entered the town in response to Napoleon’s invasion of Syria (1799) and demanded that Christians and Jews wear black sashes; Mikha’il al-Dimashqi, Tarikh hawadith al-Sham wa Lubnan, ed. Ahmad Ghassan Sabbanu (Beirut: Dar Qutayba, 1982), 23. On the continuing use of red for Damascene Jews, see Yusuf Nu`aysa, Mujtama` Madinat Dimashq (1772–1840) (Damascus: Dar Talas, 1986), ii, 624.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

593

594

james grehan

those few non-Muslims who qualified for special exemptions. All others would have to wear red shoes (or perhaps violet for Ottoman Jews).71 Only peasants, with their rough leather sandals, black boots, or skin buskins, were effectively spared this supervision.72 Was the state actually able to monitor this colour code? The truth is that non-Muslims were constantly trying to evade or blur the customary distinctions. One could not necessarily tell Muslims apart from their Christian and Jewish neighbours at a glance. The flouting of the official sartorial order went farthest in the countryside, where the state had fewest eyes and ears. On Mount Lebanon, Maronite Christians freely wore green turbans. So casual and unthinking were these habits that they might forget themselves when crossing into an urban environment. In 1807, three Lebanese Christians were arrested in Damascus for having green belts. They vainly protested that it was customary to wear them in their villages.73 Even in the towns, some sartorial regulations might be honoured only in the breach. In late seventeenth-century Izmir, Christians could wander the streets in white turbans without objection from local Muslims; and a generation later in Istanbul itself, some got away with wearing green.74 The Ottoman state was not oblivious to these infractions. By the mideighteenth century, it was more actively trying to shore up official distinctions. During the reign of Osman III (r. 1754–7), the palace went so far as to summon the leaders of the Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish communities of Istanbul and demand that their flocks 71

72

73

74

On eighteenth-century attempts to regulate footwear, see Matthew Elliott, ‘Dress Codes in the Ottoman Empire: the Case of the Franks’, in Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph Neumann (eds.), Ottoman Costumes: From Textiles to Identity (Istanbul: EREN, 2004), 111–14. On rural footwear in Bulgaria, Greece, and western Anatolia, see for example Richard Chandler, Travels in Asia Minor (London: J. Booker and R. Priestly, 1817), 149; Dodwell, Tour, i, 136; Charles Frankland, Travels to and from Constantinople in the Years 1827 and 1828 (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), i, 53. Browne, Travels, 435–6; Volney, Travels, ii, 21–2. On the incident in Damascus, see al-Dimashqi, Hawadith, 41; Hasan Agha al-`Abd, Tarikh Hasan Agha, ed. Yusuf Nu`aysa (Damascus: Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa alIrshad al-Qawmi, 1979), 142. See respectively Dumont, New Voyage, 283; Le Brun, Voyage, i, 140. On the convergence of fashion at Tripoli, on the Lebanese coast, see Dandini, Voyage, 27. For an overview, see Zilfi, ‘Goods’, 301.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

conform to the imperial regulations.75 As we have already seen with women’s fashions, repeated military defeats in the final decades of the century would impart a more frantic motivation to this policing of symbols, as the state came to insist ever more vehemently on its legitimacy and cast itself as the champion of an Islamic social order. One must not make too much of this flurry of vestimentary legislation in Istanbul. The capital did not speak for the empire. In no other Ottoman town did the authorities mount any comparable campaign.76 The sensitivities of the court did not automatically become the preoccupation of provincial officials. Nor could officials have systematically imposed such regulations across their vast empire. Perhaps the final proof of these limitations is that, outside the towns, any decrees about clothing remained little more than a dead letter, either loosely observed and enforced, or irrelevant to the prosaic realities of everyday attire. The early modern state could not really hope to dress its subjects.

conclusion: how much did fashion change? By the eighteenth century, the sultan’s officials seemed to believe that fashion, at least in Istanbul, was entering a new era of rapid and fickle innovation. Were they right? In one sense, they understood the society of the capital. Of all the places in the Ottoman domains, it was by far the boldest and most willing to tinker with received styles. Elite taste in other large towns, such as Cairo and Aleppo, always looked to Istanbul as the ultimate guide and arbiter. This leadership in fashion derived from more than the presence of the palace. Like other early modern capitals, Istanbul was a huge collection trough for state revenue and various dues, fees, and emoluments. This enormous wealth, expressed in uncommonly high prices and wages for the Mediterranean Basin, allowed it to act as 75

76

Vasıf, Mahasinü’l-Asar ve Haka’ikü’l-Ahbar, i, 103–4; Teş rifatçı Mehmed Akif Bey, Tarih-i Cülus-ı Sultan Mustafa Han-ı Salis (Istanbul: Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Baş kanları Yayınları, 2012), 21b; Refik, Hicri On İ kinci, 182–3. See for example the experience of eighteenth-century Damascus; Grehan, Everyday, 219–22.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

595

596

james grehan

the paramount stage for social display. It positively invited competition and ostentation, which found outlets in sartorial experimentation. The general economic expansion of the eighteenth century (at least until the 1770s) would provide its own stimulus to these impulses as well.77 On the other hand, this experimentation did not proceed very far. The basic shapes and cuts of garments remained more or less recognizable across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The pictorial evidence confirms that official clothing, and even hairstyle, evolved very little. The ceremonial outfits of Ottoman viziers were practically identical across the entire period.78 European visitors noticed this stability and contrasted the seemingly placid Ottoman tastes with the frenetic fashions of their homelands.79 By the late eighteenth century, the difference between the Ottoman and European tempos was so great that Mouradgea d’Ohsson, an Ottoman Armenian, could take it as an article of faith. Women’s fashions, he assured his readers, had hardly departed in his own day from received styles.80 Having observed the state’s intense interest in women’s fashion, we might well wonder about d’Ohsson’s verdict. Why all the imperial decrees if their clothing was so unchanging? Here a note of caution is in order: if Ottoman fashions did not shift as energetically as those in Western Europe, we cannot simply declare that there was absolute continuity. For, in spite of their purported conservatism, women actually led the way in the search for variation. Their tastes, to be sure, were never radical. The innovations that so vexed the eighteenth-century state had to do with decorative embellishments, such as the colours of outer cloaks, the height 77

78

79 80

On eighteenth-century economic expansion, Mehmet Genç, ‘18. Yüzyıla Ait Osmanlı Mali Verilerinin Iktisadi Faaliyetin Göstergesi Olarak Kullanılabilirliğ i Üzerinde Bir Çalış ma’, Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Dergisi, 10/2 (1981), 33–77; André Raymond, Artisans et Commerçants au Caire au XVIII siècle (Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1973–4), ch. 3. Tezcan, Topkapı, 26–7; Faroqhi, A Cultural History, 166; Christoph Neumann, ‘How Did a Vizier Dress in the Eighteenth Century?’, in Faroqhi and Neumann (eds.), Ottoman Costumes, 184. Febvre, Théâtre, 196; Le Brun, Voyage, i, 129. Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Tableau general de l’empire Ottoman (Paris: Didot, 1791), iv, 149.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

everyday fashion in the ottoman empire

or fullness of headpieces, or the length of collars.81 Upper-class women continued to wear more or less the same ensemble of garments. Substitutions were discreet. If some women began to gird their waist with a sash instead of a belt, they did not disrupt fashion; they tended, rather, to produce new twists on well-known themes.82 But if we instead take a cumulative view of female dress over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we can detect a series of modifications which favoured lightness and comfort.83 Floral decorative patterns on gowns and jackets became the new rage. By the eighteenth century, affluent women in Istanbul had begun to prefer plunging necklines on their shirts. Their white veils became gauzier, almost translucent. The same search for comfort overtook men’s fashion too. Again, the slow tempo of alterations could make it hard to recognize them. Alexander Russell, long-time resident in eighteenthcentury Aleppo, insisted that ‘Eastern’ fashion had ‘undergone little or no change’. He could nonetheless detect a shift towards ‘extravagance and effeminacy’ among well-to-do Aleppans, who were more willing to wear ‘costly furs and flowered garments’. More interesting still was the spread of the same tastes to ‘people of the middle sort’.84 Such townsmen did not invent new styles for themselves; they more quietly sought out finer fabric and needlework. Fashion remained familiar. In any case, all these questions of decoration and design were distant considerations to most Ottoman subjects. Outside the towns, the official sartorial order was largely irrelevant. Rural folk wore more or less the same kind of dress regardless of social status. As urban fashion gave way to the social codes of village life, regional styles quickly asserted themselves. The coarse garments of the peasantry would always set the real standard for the overwhelming part of the Ottoman population.

81

82 83

84

Madeline Zilfi, ‘Whose Laws? Gendering the Ottoman Sumptuary Regime’, in Faroqhi and Neumann (eds.), Ottoman Costumes, 129. Sevin, Kıyafet, 101. Jennifer Scarce, ‘Principles of Ottoman Turkish Costume’, Costume, 22 (1988), 24–6. Russell, Natural History, i, 108. For a similar impression of subtle shifts in eighteenth-century fashion, see Niebuhr, Travels, i, 111.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

597

598

james grehan

select bibliography Çelebi, Evliya, Evilya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, 2 vols., ed. Yücel Dağ lı et al. (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1999–2006). Establet, Colette, Des Tissus et des hommes: Damas, vers 1700 (Damascus: Institut Français de Proche Orient, 2005). Faroqhi, Suraiya, ‘Ottoman Cotton Textiles: The Story of a Success That Did Not Last, 1500–1800’, in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (eds.), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 89–103. Fukusawa, Katsumi, Toilerie et commerce du Levant (Paris: CNRS, 1987). Grehan, James, Everyday Life and Consumer Culture in EighteenthCentury Damascus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). Hamadeh, Shirine, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). Jianu, Angela, ‘Women, Fashion, and Europeanization: The Romanian Principalities, 1750–1830’, in Amila Buturovic and İ rvin Cemil Schick (eds.), Women in the Ottoman Balkans (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 201–30. Phillips, Amanda, Everyday Luxuries: Art and Object in Ottoman Constantinople, 1600–1800 (Dortmund: Verlag Kettler, 2018). Quataert, Donald, ‘Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 29 (1997), 403–25. Scarce, Jennifer, Women’s Costume of the Near and Middle East (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987). Sevin, Nureddin, Onüç Asırlık Türk Kıyafet Tarihine Bir Bakış (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığ ı, 1990). Stillman, Yedida, Arab Dress: A Short History (Leiden: Brill, 2000). Tezcan, Hülya, The Topkapı Saray Museum: Costumes, Embroideries, and Other Textiles (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986). Zilfi, Madeline, ‘Whose Laws? Gendering the Ottoman Sumptuary Regime’, in Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph Neumann (eds.), Ottoman Costumes: from Textile to Identity (Istanbul: EREN, 2004), 125–41. Zilfi, Madeline, ‘Women, Minorities, and the Changing Politics of Dress in the Ottoman Empire, 1650–1830’, in Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 393–415.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.019 Published online by Cambridge University Press

18

w

IMPERIALISM AND FASHION: SOUTH ASIA, C. 1500–1800 jagjeet lally

What (not) to wear? A mirza should never wear brocade or cloth of gold; these are beneath his dignity, intended for adorning domestic spaces, not the body. In winter, a shawl – plain or imprinted with gold and silver leaves – would keep out the cold over garments of Indian material fastened with pearl buttons, ‘for pearl is natural while other jewels have to be cut’. In summer, ‘when he sits on a wooden seat with a white covering, he should wear the silverthreaded cap round the head and ears [. . .] and a silver threaded upper garment (bala-band)’.1 From its initial use as a title for princes or noblemen, mirza had become the watchword of (courtly) refinement, denoting a gentlemanly bearing by the seventeenth century. Flushed with cash through burgeoning trade, the Mughal Empire reached its zenith; home to an increasingly cosmopolitan nobility whose ranks had increased rapidly, an expanding population of theologians and administrators, and a prosperous mercantile elite. To gain a surer footing, dastur al-amal (advice literature, manuals) could be consulted, authors guiding these social elites in the proper execution of their duties, whether accountancy techniques for bureaucrats or equine management and farriery for the gentry.2 1

2

Aziz Ahmad, ‘The British Museum Mı̄ rzā nā ma and the Seventeenth Century Mı̄ rzā in India’, Iran, 13 (1975), 99–110, here 105. Najaf Haider, ‘Norms of Professional Excellence and Good Conduct in Accountancy Manuals of the Mughal Empire’, International Review of Social History, 56, special issue 19 (2011), 263–74; Jagjeet Lally, ‘Empires and Equines: The Horse in Art and Exchange in South Asia, c. 1600–1850’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 35/1 (2015), 96–116, here 100 and 106–7.

599

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

600

jagjeet lally

Penned in Persian in the mid-seventeenth century, a Mirzanama (‘Book of the Mirza’) now deposited at the British Library is the source of the tenets of sartorial advice, above.3 To be a real mirza was not a matter of ‘merely pinning flowers to one’s [turban] [. . .] and strolling through a garden’, but to be fully transformed: to stand in the garden and ‘inhale and imbibe the fragrance of the flower’, metaphorically and literally.4 In this is evidence of an archetypal early modern sensibility – a belief in the power of selfpresentation, if not the process of self-fashioning.5 But what of fashion itself? India is said to have clothed the early modern world. Indian textiles were a long-standing medium of exchange in the intraAsian spice trade before the coming of the Europeans, thereafter also becoming a medium of exchange in the Atlantic slave trade, not to mention objects of desire in their own right in Europe.6 If this ‘world of goods’ – the new forms of fashion and material culture spurred into existence by unprecedented long-distance trade – is now identified as one of the hallmarks of a ‘global’ early modern period, then India certainly played a critical part in this development.7 Yet the burgeoning scholarship constitutive of global material culture studies still tends to see Asia as the progenitor of developments brought to fruition in other places, not least in Europe, and Asians as producers of many of the consumables or 3 4

5

6

7

Ahmad, ‘Mı̄ rzā nā ma’, 99. Ibid., 100. For discussion of the purpose and use of such books by the anxious newly-elevated social elite: Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 42/1 (1999), 47–93, here 72–84. For a placement of India(ns) within the early modern world of the ‘self’: Jagjeet Lally, India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2021), 125–59. J. Bohorquez, ‘Linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans: Asian Textiles, Spanish Silver, Global Capital, and the Financing of the PortugueseBrazilian Slave Trade (c. 1760–1808)’, Journal of Global History, 15/1 (2020), 19–38, for a recent example of such scholarship, one that examines India’s role afresh within the framework of the ‘Global South’ and contains a digest of the wider literature (especially fn. 3 and 10). Indian (and Chinese) productions were even central to what has hitherto been seen as quintessentially ‘English’ – namely, the country houses and interiors of Britain’s gentry – such was India’s place in early modern material culture: Margot Finn and Kate Smith (eds.), The East India Company at Home, 1757– 1857 (London: UCL Press, 2018).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

‘things’ transformed into ‘fashions’ by other people, namely by Europeans.8 Did the locus of inquisitiveness, innovation, and the love of novelty lie in Europe, possibly fuelled by the encounter with the ‘other’ if not entirely resulting from endogenous developments, or did the uptick in mobility after c. 1500 engender experimentation and change in non-European contexts, too?9 Can we even speak of such a thing as ‘fashion’ in pre-modern South Asia? Unpicking the very necessity of posing such a prior is illuminating. In the first place, ‘oriental’ societies were held by the eighteenth century as a sort of mirror to Western progress and cultural achievement. India, for instance, was imagined as a land of petty despots, peopled by bare-breasted women and wandering fakirs caked in ash and cloaked in animal skins when not entirely naked, the very picture of the monstrous and barbarous ‘other’.10 Represented by such topoi in illustrations to travellers’ accounts and engravings, for example, India was thus frozen in time as it was rendered for comparison and entered the European popular imagination. Religion was critical to this development.11 India – or, rather, Hindu society, for that was misapprehended as authentically Indian – was static, steeped in ritual, stagnating under the weight of ancient custom and tradition; thus, hardly the space for cultural innovation, let alone fashion. Such tropes were already being interrogated before the ‘material turn’ in history, but another major problem continues to plague

8

9

10

11

See most recently, Evelyn Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Note, however, work on the Pacific Ocean and Russia that is contributing to a decentring of material culture studies away from Europe; for a summary discussion: Lally, Silk Roads, 158–9. Carlo Marco Belfanti, ‘Was Fashion a European Invention?’, Journal of Global History, 3/3 (2008), 419–43, begins to examine this issue, with a brief and impressionistic analysis of the Indian context on 422–6. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 129, 136. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 22–6, 38–40, and – for an analysis focused on Bernard Picart’s output of 1723–37 on Indian religion – 103–43.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

601

602

jagjeet lally

historians wishing to study Indian dress and fashion: a relative paucity of sources, especially when compared to their counterparts working on European societies.12 The surviving examples or even remnants of Indian dress date mostly from c. 1800, or else consist of older flat textiles from which Indian clothes might have been fashioned, not to mention Indian textiles made up into European garments.13 Indeed, textiles and craft – rather than dress and fashion – are paradigmatic of how the Indian case has been understood; traceable to the lament of the late nineteenth century about the state (and fate) of India’s so-called ‘traditional’ industries and ‘crafts’, not to mention associated preservationist discourses and collection practices that focused on the art of the weaver or printer rather than the tailor.14 Yet, for their part, historians of India have not been especially curious about fashion or even material culture. Those working in South Asia, most especially, for numerous reasons shunned as frivolous the study of consumption – let alone material culture and fashion – in the decades after Independence.15 12

13

14

15

Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), represents a canonical contribution to the interrogation of these tropes. Take, for example, the excellent collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, some sense of the scope and content of which can be found in the catalogue to a landmark recent exhibition on Indian textiles: Rosemary Crill (ed.), The Fabric of India (London: V&A Publishing, 2015). This is not to say that India’s royal collections, or the Calico Museum in Ahmedabad, could not be mined and studied more deeply and examined in conjunction with other visual and literary sources, the value of which is so stunningly demonstrated by Ritu Kumar, Costumes and Textiles of Royal India (London: Christie’s Books, 1999). On the colonial collection of ‘specimens’ and craft discourses: Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). The reasons for this neglect have been well described in a volume that aimed to turn the tide: Douglas E. Haynes, Abigail McGowan, Tirthankar Roy, and Haruka Yanagisawa (eds.), Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010). Compare the disinterest of ‘professional’ historians, tasked with writing histories of the new Republic, with more popular works, such as Charles Fabri, A History of Indian Dress (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1960). Compare this neglect by historians with interest among historical anthropologists, such as Cohn’s famous essay on cloth, clothing, and colonialism, or Bayly’s contribution to Arjun

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

Against these odds, this chapter strives not so much to produce a survey of a large body of work on fashion and dress, as knit together ideas from a diverse and disparate scholarship. At its height, the Mughal court (1526–1858) was the pre-eminent cultural centre on the Indian subcontinent. This chapter focuses on the Mughal Empire as well as those polities at its edges with which it had relations, and its ‘successor states’. The first section starts by sketching the sartorial transformation – crudely, from draped to stitched – underway before the Mughal conquest, occurring under the aegis of the rulers of Delhi sultanates and other Muslim dynasties, then examining the changes in what the emperor and the elites wore during the high Mughal period of the late sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries. The second section journeys beyond the Mughal court, in part because changes in dress affected elites outside that rarefied space even at its zenith – evinced by the appetite for the sorts of guidance provided by mirzanama texts – but also because the emperor and his court never quite exercised cultural hegemony. This fact became apparent when the power of the imperial centre waned from the late seventeenth century, resulting at once in the codification of Mughal sartorial styles even as these were subtly altered with local twists by regional powerholders, not to mention the appropriation of new styles by the burgeoning middle layer of society. The concluding section evaluates how best to describe these shifts and the value of thinking with ‘fashion’.

dressing in style at india’s ‘islamicate’ courts, c . 1500– c . 1700 The codes contained within the mirzanama genre emphasized the importance of connoisseurship and cosmopolitanism, such attributes possible in consequence of the prosperity of the Mughal world and its increasing connectedness with other parts of Appadurai’s interest in the ‘social life of things’: Cohn, Colonialism, 106–62; C. A. Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 285–322.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

603

604

jagjeet lally

Afro-Eurasia.16 The fussiness of the mirza’s life was thus novel, the result of the more hierarchic and formalized codes of masculinity that had come into being by the mid-seventeenth century in reflection of a court culture increasingly oriented around conspicuous consumption as a marker of authority. Thus writers of archly satirical mirzanama texts, such as Mirza Kamran, lampooned the aspirations of parvenus and mocked the foppishness of their gentlemanly mores.17 To better understand these shifts in fashion and style in Mughal India, therefore, we must first situate the changing presentation of the padshah (the ‘great king’ or emperor) and his court. A distinction, albeit a rather crude one, can be made between ‘Indic’ drapery and ‘Islamicate’ clothes of cut and stitched cloth.18 In north India, several centuries of rule by Muslim dynasties from Central Asia – the succession of five sultanates ruled from Delhi – brought into political life at large many of the technologies of administration and cultural forms of the Islamicate world: a paperbased bureaucracy, the use of the Persian language, and garments made of cut and sewn fabric.19 An example of a sultanate-era Indian cotton tunic (kamiz) survives because it was worn as a talisman, covered in all the verses of the Qur’ā n – inscribed in coloured ink and gold paint – and thus preserved by successive recipients (Figure 18.1).20 In south India, three successive Hindu dynasties ruled the Vijayanagara state for almost 300 years until the midseventeenth century. Hardly a ‘Hindu bulwark against Muslim conquest’ – as these dynasties were portrayed in colonial historiography – the contact between their rulers and the Muslim courts of the north left, in fact, an indelible and deep 16

17 18

19

20

Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom, Household and Body History, Gender and Imperial Service under Akbar’, Modern Asian Studies, 41/5 (2007), 889–923. Ibid. Cohn, Colonialism, 130–1. For explanation of the more open-ended and flexible terms ‘Indic’ and ‘Islamicate’ – consciously used in place of Indian/ Hindu and Islamic/Muslim – see David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (eds.), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 2. Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India Before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 22–4, and passim. For another example of the same period, in poorer condition: Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 134-1873.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

Figure 18.1 Talismanic tunic. India, fifteenth to sixteenth century. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T.59-1935.

impression.21 Of numerous impacts, ranging from military technology to the material culture of the court, Phillip B. Wagoner has argued that ‘the most profound’ were ‘in the system of men’s court dress’ in Vijayanagara and its dependencies.22 In place of lengths of cloth tied at the waist and an uncovered upper body, courtiers – when performing political rather than private duties – wore kabayi (a term derived from the Arabic qaba‘).23 This was a long tunic of plain white cloth – probably of cotton, perhaps silk – with a circular neck, a slit opening down to the chest to enable (dis)robing, long and fairly fitted sleeves, and tied at the waist with colourful sashes. This was worn in the Islamicate world as an outer robe over a kamiz. On their heads, they wore kullayi (derived from the Perso-Turkic kulah): a conical cap with a rounded top around one and a half times the height of the head made from a brocaded fabric, the pattern of which was variable, including 21

22 23

Phillip B. Wagoner, ‘“Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 55/4 (1996), 851–80, here 851–3 for a survey of these historiographical ideas. Ibid., 853, 856–61. Ibid., 868–71, for code-switching, i.e. between Indic and Islamicate dress in the private and public domains, respectively.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

605

606

jagjeet lally

geometric designs or floral (for example, lotus) motifs. Among the Hindu rulers of the Malla kingdom in Bengal, but also in such places as Ceylon and Siam, a similar process had taken effect by the seventeenth century, part and parcel with the re-articulation of political authority with reference to those ‘Islamicate’ idioms of kingly power that became increasingly familiar due to the sway of Muslim rule over the subcontinent and across the Indian Ocean.24 On the eve of the Mughal conquest, therefore, many – but certainly not all – of India’s major royal courts were already part of an Indo-Islamicate or Indo-Persianate world, with sartorial transformation a conscious and visible manifestation of political and cultural (ex)change.25 At the same time, there was also a flow of long standing in the opposite direction, from India’s major textile centres to central and West Asian courts and bazaars.26 A sale recorded in 1589 between a merchant from Multan in Punjab and a Samarkandi nobleman, for example, included the following: Bengali handkerchiefs, napkins, coarse and fine calico, Khairabadi chintz, and Gujarati silk brocade.27 And the fashion in Safavid Iran for silk velvets woven of metal-wrapped thread with figurative motifs – including flora, fauna, and human figures – sparked imitation in Mughal workshops over the seventeenth century, the cloth used for domestic spaces and clothing.28 Indeed, once rule by the Mughal dynasty was placed on a surer footing and enlarged under Akbar (r. 1556–1605), imperial power became imbricated in the patronage of such specialist textiles in imperial workshops (karkhanas) – as the Delhi sultans had also done – and weaving centres, for this was part

24

25

26 27

28

Asher and Talbot, India, 219; John Guy, ‘“One Thing Leads to Another”: Indian Textiles and the Early Globalization of Style’, in Amelia Peck (ed.), Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013), 19–20 and 26 for illustrations of other Asian monarchs in stitched clothes. See also Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 61–87. Lally, Silk Roads, 1–19. Muzaffar Alam, ‘Trade, State Policy and Regional Change: Aspects of Mughal-Uzbek Commercial Relations, c. 1550–1750’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 37/3 (1994), 202–27, here 205–6. Crill, Fabric, 62–3.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

of the exercise of wise and good kingship, while robes of honour imbued with the emperor’s sacred touch played a central part in ceremonies of ritual investiture or gift exchange as elsewhere in the Indo-Islamicate world.29 Such ceremonies might include as many as seven items: a turban (pagri), a long overcoat or robe (jama), a qaba‘, a close-fitting coat (alkhaliq), trousers, a tunic or shirt, and a sash or scarf (kamar band, patka).30 As the shadow of God on Earth, the emperor Akbar was not only the font of justice but also the insan-i kamil (perfect man), his body – and by extension his household – the exemplary centre for the kingdom.31 A cursory examination of Mughal paintings gives credence to the view that there was little change in court dress from sultanate times; the Mughals largely gave up wearing the leatherwear suitable to the cooler climes of their homeland in Central Asia – and abhorrent to some of their new subjects – in favour of Indian cottons, deepening their movement into the Indian sartorial ecumene thereby.32 A new relation was being drawn between notions of ‘manliness’ and imperial service but, rather than stimulating a shift in attire, these were visually enunciated with reference to existing items of clothing. The ‘strength of a man’s waist and back were critical markers of his manliness, in a way which parallels the English sense of “girding the loins”’, Rosalind O’Hanlon notes, ‘but also goes beyond it’, for a man ‘who was kamar band, “waist bound up,” signified one ready for action, service and battle.’33 These newly articulated metaphors for the virile and valorous serviceman gave new significance to the sash tied at the waist over the long tunic, and into which a dagger could be securely lodged.34 In a picture of 29

30 32 33

34

Ibid., 103–6; Tripta Verma, Karkhanas Under the Mughals from Akbar to Aurangzeb: A Study in Economic Development (New Delhi: Pragati Publications, 1994); Stewart Gordon (ed.), Robes of Honour: Khil’at in PreColonial and Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). On the connection of weaving, clothing, and Islam depicted in a Mughal painting: Crill, Fabric, 9–10. Cohn, Colonialism, 115. 31 O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom’. Kumar, Costumes, 38. O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness’, 64 for discussion, which draws on the writing of Muhammad Baqir Najm-i Sani, an émigré who left Iran for India around the late sixteenth century, working under the patronage of Jahā ngı̄ r at the Mughal court. Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

607

608

jagjeet lally

a young man at rest – engrossed in his book but ready for combat, combining the ideal of the mirza and the warrior (ghazi) – can be seen the short-sleeved Timurid variant of the tunic likely worn by the Mughal dynasty’s founders and also in fashion in Persia, but which would give way to the Mughal-style jama (robe), itself probably an adaptation of the jamas worn by Rajputs during later sultanate times.35 On his head, the youth wears a turban of a chequered cloth, different sorts of which were produced all over India (Figure 18.2).36 A closer inspection reveals subtle changes; less in their forms or styles than in the quality of craftsmanship and the materials used in the making of clothes worn by those presenting themselves at court. They were a reflection of changes within the composition of the nobility, which became more cosmopolitan but also a far more elaborately layered hierarchy by the end of the Akbarid era than before (or in comparison to other Indian courts, described below).37 There was a global dimension to this too: the greater connectedness of various royal courts – the Ottoman and the Habsburg, the Mughal and the Safavid, these, in turn, with the English or Portuguese – prompted mimesis and rivalry, or the ‘competitive kingship’ of early modern monarchs, to paraphrase a recent contribution by Jeremy Adelman.38 35

36

37

38

Jos J. L. Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Frontiers and the High Roads of Empire 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 2002), especially 39–40, for contrast of the mirza and ghazi ideals. Gommans has, as part of his analysis, applied Norbert Elias’ famous ‘civilizing process’ to the Indian context, an evaluative review of which can be found in Jagjeet Lally, ‘Introduction to the Third Edition: Afghans and Their History between South Asia and the World’, in Jos J. L. Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c. 1710–1780 (Delhi: Manohar, 2018). See Cohn, Colonialism, 131, for discussion of pre-Mughal Rajput dress. Regard, for comparison: ‘A Youth Reading’ (Mughal court, c. 1610, by Muhammad Ali), Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, F1945.93. John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 58–78. Jeremy Adelman, ‘Mimesis and Rivalry: European Empires and Global Regimes’, Journal of Global History, 10/1 (2015), 77–98. See also Peter Fibiger Bang and Dariusz Kolodziejczyk (eds.), Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

Figure 18.2

‘Seated Youth’, Mughal court, by Abu’l Hasan, c. 1600. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, F1907.161.

In a masterful painting of an allegorical scene, we see an imagined audience (darbar) given by Jahā ngı̄ r (r. 1605–27) to his contemporaries, thus permitting a comparison of the dress worn in different courts (Figure 18.3).39 The Mughal emperor, seated on an hourglass, wears a turban of chequered fabric on his head; his head, 39

For discussion of this picture: A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 207–9.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

609

610

jagjeet lally

Figure 18.3 ‘Jahā ngı̄ r Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings from the St. Petersburg Album’, by Bichitr, Mughal court, c. 1615–18. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, F1942.15a.

neck, wrists, and fingers all dripping in jewels; his waist girded in a jewelled belt. In an almost Indic style, he wears no kamiz and is topless – the contrast of his skin against the darker-coloured circles of his areolae just discernible – but for a long Islamicate tunic of an extremely fine, sheer Indian cloth. Underneath, he wears only loose trousers of a two-tone striped fabric, the artist’s skill in painting the layering of these materials in miniature a match for the weaver’s magic on the loom. Because of the injunction against

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

Muslims wearing pure silk against the skin, the fabrics are probably the finest cotton or a cotton–silk mix.40 In favouring the Sufi, who wears traditional robes made of heavier-weighted material (wool, most likely) in duller colours, as befitting his renunciation of worldly concerns, the emperor overlooks the three kings present, including the Ottoman sultan and King James I of England.41 The figure at the bottom left dressed in a Mughal-era jama is likely an Indian raja under Mughal authority or the artist himself, for his robe is fastened to the left (customary for Hindus at court) rather than the right (as for Muslims), these tie fastenings becoming decorative features in their own right in this period.42 Other seventeenth-century imperial miniatures show that the jama had become a standard component of court dress, the emperor singled out in darbar scenes by the superlative craftsmanship of his jamas, sometimes made of threads of precious metals, for example.43 The fabrication of the emperor’s attire – rather than its form, colour, or decoration – and his ‘accessorizing’ with exquisite jewellery thus placed him at the apex of imperial society; his nobles dressed as befitted their rank.44 His clothes also changed with the seasons, incorporating heavier fabrics in winter, and upon the occasion. Jahā ngı̄ r wrote in his memoirs of a new sleeveless, thighlength jacket of an Iranian style he adapted for the Mughal court, possibly for riding.45 As for the rest of the imperial household, the maintenance of pardah (literally ‘screen’, referring to the seclusion of the female household) has not only meant that pictures of specific women are relatively rare, but also that artists constituted images of women from idealized forms. Yet, the pictures that 40 41

42

43

44

45

Bayly, ‘Origins’, 290. Jahā ngı̄ r’s disdain for the merchants whose interests James I’s ambassador represented matched the Englishmen’s refusal to abandon – in the hot climate of north India – their European clothes: Cohn, Colonialism, 112–13. Ibid., 131. For an extant example: ‘Lappets’ (north India, c. 1740–60, cotton), Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IS.110-1950. This is also evident in portraits of favoured nobles produced under imperial patronage: an unusual – for its incorporation of four separate full-body portraits by different artists – example from the ‘Shāh Jahan Album’ in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 55.121.10.29. On the ranking and ordering of clothing received at the imperial court itself: Cohn, Colonialism, 117. For reproduction of such a riding jacket and discussion: Crill, Fabric, 108–10.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

611

612

jagjeet lally

survive give a glimpse of the attire of Mughal elite women. This was a variation of men’s dress, often incorporating a length of fine fabric over the head or draped about the arms and shoulders and distinctive forms of headgear.46 A late seventeenth-century Rajput picture from Bikaner of a lady at her toilette draws into one frame several different dress styles seen in Mughal imperial pictures (Figure 18.4). There is the bejewelled and bare breasted central figure, with her carefully teased tresses of a style common to many pictures; to her left, her lady’s companion wearing a long jama of delicate fabric over a short-sleeved choli (bodice or blouse) and loose trousers; and the attendant at her feet wearing more Indic dress – a choli, either a sari (a general term for a length of cloth draped about the body, often with a pallav, the often ornately decorated end-piece sometimes drawn over the head) or a skirt and separate head-cover.47 If the Mughal court ought also to be understood as the cosmological centre of the realm, as A. Azfar Moin has so powerfully argued, then the emperor’s outward appearance – not least, his sartorial choices – were neither incidental nor frivolous. They reflected prevalent ideas about sacred kingship, existing as material revelations of the padshah’s duty in the earthly and otherworldly domains. Take, for example, Humāyūn’s selection of the colour of his clothes based on ideas about the correspondence of different days of the week to different planets and colours, as detailed in the Qanun-i Humayuni (‘Canons of Sovereignty’) penned by the historian Khwandamir (d. 1537). Tuesday, for instance, was ‘associated with the bloodthirsty Mars (bahram-i khun asham), and its colour has redness (hamriyyat) in it’, and so the emperor wore ‘red on the throne on this day, and evildoers received their due and the doers of good, peace and security’.48 These ideas about the relationship of the chromatic-cosmological 46

47

48

For an exquisite early seventeenth-century picture, see: ‘Court Lady’ (Mughal, c. 1620, attributed to Bishandas), Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, F1984.43. For an analysis of the picture, see www.harvardartmuseums.org/tour/women-in-south-asian-art/slide/10393 (accessed 13 April 2020). Compare with the pictures and accompanying discussion in Crill, Fabric, 106, 118–20. Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 121 for citation, and 121–3 for discussion.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

Figure 18.4 ‘A Lady at Her Toilette with Two Maids’, by Rodu. Bikaner, 1678. Harvard Art Museums / Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 1983.93.

cause to earthly effects were novel, their invention the result of Humāyūn’s interest in astrology and alchemy, not least in consequence of his patronage of the Shattari Sufi order in northern India, whose leaders drew on popular, elite, and more esoteric Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit intellectual traditions.49 49

Ibid., 79 and 101–23. Note that forms of esoteric knowledge – including of magic and the occult – were not a relic, preserved in India but abandoned in ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Enlightenment’ Europe, but were pervasive and proved durable in the early modern world at large, in both popular and educated circles. See, for instance, Michael Hunter, ‘The Decline of Magic: Challenge and Response in Early Enlightenment England’, Historical Journal, 55/2 (2012), 399–425.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

613

614

jagjeet lally

Humāyūn’s interest in what, even at the time, was disdained by his critics as magic or occult knowledge was sparked before his ascent to the Mughal throne; evinced, for example, by his patronage in 1529 of a book by Muhammad ibn Ashraf al-Husayni alRustamdari – the Javahirnama-yi Humayuni – on gemstones.50 Its format followed older works in wide circulation and frequently copied in the early modern Indo-Persianate world.51 It listed the types of stones and their auspicious properties in keeping with current Islamic science, which ‘regarded natural substances as part of the manifold strange and wonderful forms of nature ‘(aja’ib al-gharib).’52 Precious stones of the haft rang, the seven celestial colours – turquoise blue, night blue, black, green, red, ochre, and white – of Persianate tradition, had become ‘embedded in the culture of kingship and empire across Islamic Eurasia and known as [victorious stones] adorning conquerors and kings’.53 Turquoise was especially praised in the (post-)Timurid Islamicate world, where it was connected to kingly power and thus control over its sources and mining was the object of imperial rivalry between the Safavids, Uzbeks, and Mughals.54 True ‘to Timurid sensibilities’, Arash Khazeni notes in a study of the stone, al-Rastamdari’s text also ‘deems turquoise as having the best properties – an imperial stone favoured by royals, such as King Solomon’.55 Many aficionados will find this surprising, for use – in particular – of pearls, diamonds, rubies and spinels, emeralds and nephrite (jade) is more prevalent in surviving examples of Mughal jewellery and objets, visibly depicted in paintings of the imperial family and the nobility, and also commented upon by contemporaries.56 Jahā ngı̄ r’s superlative interest in the natural world meant he was drawn to all manner of strange and wondrous (aja’ib) things, emeralds being no exception, and this passion was also shared by his 50

51 55 56

Arash Khazeni, Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 47–8. Ibid., 10, 31–8. 52 Ibid., 134. 53 Ibid., here esp. 14, 36. 54 Ibid., 42–7. Ibid., 48. Kris Lane, Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 140–1, for the observations of European lapidaries and dealers. For the mirza’s preference for rubies and pearls: Ahmad, ‘Mı̄ rzā nā ma’, 104.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

successor, Shāh Jahan (r. 1627–58).57 The discovery of Colombian mines and the growth of a global gemstone trade connecting the New and Old worlds at once increased the availability of emeralds and made possible their working by Indian craftsmen into fineries for the imperial elite as never before.58 With their green colour of long-standing association with Islamic Paradise and the Prophet, they were worn in the Jahā ngı̄ ri and Shāh Jahani eras on or near the body, or used in objects handled by the emperors themselves: plumed aigrettes and strings of stones for adorning turbans (kalgi, jigha, sarpech), necklaces, pendants, rings, belts, prayer beads, the hilts and scabbards of swords, and even a goblet.59 If popular and esoteric knowledge about the apotropaic powers of precious stones were drawn into Humāyūn’s Qanun, for example, it should be of little surprise that these beliefs also percolated more widely via the advice literature.60 ‘He should consider it obligatory to wear a dagger or jamdhar [an Indian dagger]’, wrote the author of the British Museum Mirzanama in a concluding section on the security of person, continuing that: ‘He should regard as obligatory the wearing of rings of ruby, emerald, turquoise and cornelian on his fingers, as they have different [protective] properties.’61 The evolution of ideas about sacred kingship over the high Mughal period – the result of a shifting engagement with diverse bodies of learning and their practitioners – necessarily entailed changes in the emperor’s self-presentation. The subtle shift in significance and favour from turquoise to emeralds is one example; the changing style of facial hair sported by the emperor is another. In north India, O’Hanlon notes, facial hair ‘was closely associated with warriorship’, with ‘folk and literary celebrations of battle very 57

58 59

60

61

‘Shah Jahan Holding an Emerald’ (Agra, 1631–2, by Muhammad Abed), Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IM.233-1921. Lane, Emerald, 143–60. Some of the most awe inspiring and impressive seventeenth-century examples are to be found in the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar: a carved emerald pendant (JE.185.2003), an emerald wine cup (JE.180.2003), and two breathtaking inscribed large stones (JE.86.2002, JE.181.2004), the latter of 217.8 carats. On Hindu ideas about kings as controllers of the Earth and its products, and of precious stones as concentrated essences of that Earth, making them potent symbols to kingship: Cohn, Colonialism, 116. Ahmad, ‘Mı̄ rzā nā ma’, 106.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

615

616

jagjeet lally

often depict[ing] warriors chewing or twirling their moustaches as a sign of martial rage’.62 Akbar and Jahā ngı̄ r had both worn neatly drooping whiskers of a rather Indic style. Shāh Jahan and Aurangzeb, however, wore beards intended as outward presentation of their inner piety as Muslims, for Islamic tradition – in keeping with the Prophet’s statement that beards should flow freely but moustaches be cut – had emphasized beards as markers of true belief.63 Whatever the true depth of feeling belying these changes of appearance, the very fact of these changes, and their being captured in portraiture for posterity, is testament to a conscious process of self-fashioning and to the power of selfpresentation.64

dressing for success in the long eighteenth century The notion of the emperor as the perfect guide (murshid-i kamil) or perfect man, and his court as an exemplary centre from whence notions of proper conduct flowed downward and outward, was a fabrication of the centre, a technology of imperial ideology and control. The role model authors of mirzanama texts had in mind might as likely have been a nobleman as the emperor; rather than radiating from the court centre, developing notions of style and taste emerged in multiple sites, produced by numerous actors on slightly different rungs of the top of the social ladder, including the author himself.65 More broadly, the centre’s power has long been taken for granted but lately taken to task by historians such as Munis Faruqui and Farhat Hasan. By examining princely households as alternative loci of power to the emperor’s court, and studying not the exertion of the centre’s power but its bargains 62 64

65

O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom’, 915. 63 Ibid.; Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 212. Note that the opposite process was underway among the fin de siècle Ottoman elite, who wished to show their secularism and break with sultanic conservatism and religious orthodoxy, as lately demonstrated by Avner Wishnitzer, ‘Beneath the Moustache: A Well-Trimmed History of Facial Hair in the Late Ottoman Era’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 61/3 (2018), 289–326. Ahmad, ‘Mı̄ rzā nā ma’, 103, where the author acknowledges an amir (imperial noble) as the source of one point of advice, for instance.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

and negotiations with powerholders in the provinces, they have effectively ‘decentred’ authority in the Mughal world, demonstrating its dominance without hegemony.66 If the topography of power was less hub-spoke and more lumpy during the heyday of Mughal rule, it would become lumpier still as the empire ‘decentralized’ from the late seventeenth century before its control gradually slipped away over the eighteenth. Indeed, the significance of each of the above-noted points for a study of Indian fashion becomes apparent if one examines the Mughal long eighteenth century, a time of some dislocation and conflict, but also of creativity and cultural vibrancy. This period saw the mushrooming of kingdoms and states, large and small, some old but many of much newer pedigree and ruled by men recently elevated from rusticity, as well as the rapid expansion in the numbers and fortunes of functionaries – bureaucrats, bankers, theologians, and other learned specialists – undergirding this transformation of the landscape of power and authority.67 Advice literature formed a flourishing set of genres through the later Mughal period, therefore, catering to the aspirations of everyone from noblemen to magnates.68 As this literature grew, it also diversified, reflecting the flourishing of vernacular cultures in the courts of numerous (new) regional kingdoms. There was a new marriage between the Mughal idiom and local styles, one reflective of the new balance of power between the two, which was as true of dress as of art, architecture, and literary production.69 In south India, as Lennart Bes has shown, sartorial change did not stop with the adoption of ‘Muslim’-style stitched garments and conical

66

67

68

69

Munis D. Faruqui, The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504–1719 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 12–41, and passim. Some, including Ranjit Singh, even collected Mughalia or else referenced Mughal styles and renovated Mughal physical structures: Susan Stronge (ed.), The Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms (London: V&A Publishing, 1999), 63–73. The latter have been well studied; for a synthesis, see Asher and Talbot, India.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

617

618

jagjeet lally

caps in Vijayanagara.70 Through a process of emulation, these became fashionable in the new Hindu kingdoms emerging from the weakening of the Vijayanagara state from the late sixteenth century, such as Madurai, Ikkeri, Ramnad, and, more indirectly, Tanjavur.71 Then, over the seventeenth century, there was another shift towards dress typical of contemporary Indo-Persianate styles and Mughal grandeur: turbans replacing conical caps, the wearing of large quantities of gold and gemstones, and the bearing of (finely crafted and elegant) weapons, for instance.72 (South Indian royal women’s attire, according to Bes, did not undergo any major transformation over the early modern period, remaining ‘traditional’ or ‘Indic’.) Yet, the rulers of these kingdoms looked not only to their predecessor or their neighbours – the Persianate Deccani sultanates, such as Bijapur – but also to the styles of the expanding Maratha state. This was itself a successor both to the Deccani sultanates of the south and to the Mughal Empire, the Maratha state’s ascendance palpable over much of Peninsular India by the eighteenth century even where its territorial reach had not been effected through conquest. The Maratha polity had been carved out of the Bijapur sultanate by Shivaji Bhonsle (c. 1630–80), who variously allied with or opposed the Bijapuri and Golconda sultans as well as the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, and who was in 1674 crowned the first Maratha chhatrapati (literally ‘lord of the umbrella’, used analogously to padshah). In a posthumous portrait, Shivaji is depicted holding a blossom in one hand and a sword in the other, his body covered by a Mughal-style jama made of chintz – tied at the waist with a sash – with tight-fitting trousers of a striped fabric beneath and open slippers, and his turban and upper body adorned with fine jewels.73 In all, his attire is typical of seventeenth-century Mughal and Deccani sultanate styles, combining the refinement of the mirza and the readiness for battle of the ghazi. Again, the 70

71

72 73

Lennart Bes, ‘Sultan among Dutchmen? Royal Dress at Court Audiences in South India, as Portrayed in Local Works of Art and Dutch Embassy Reports, Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries’, Modern Asian Studies, 50/6 (2016), 1792–845. Ibid., esp. 1836–8, where Bes’ findings also complicate and texture those of Wagoner, described above. Ibid., 1808–9, 1811. Asher and Talbot, India, 240, and 241 for a reproduction of this picture.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

variations are subtle, not least the substitution of cloth of local speciality.74 Shivaji’s grandson, Shahu (r. 1708–49), is represented in another picture as a typically Indic ruler, bare-chested and wearing only a dhoti on the lower body, while surrounded by courtiers dressed in Islamicate sewn tunics and tight trousers. In this way, Maratha authority was visibly represented – in the present and for posterity – through the overlapping of Indic and Islamicate, Mughal and local styles and materials. In turn, within the Hindu kingdoms of south India looking to Maratha hegemony for inspiration or even legitimacy, subtle shifts are discernible – in facial hair, headgear in a style associated with the Marathas, or the wearing of a kamar band as per the Mughal-toMaratha sartorial repertoire – amidst code-switching to more typically Indic styles of dress when necessary.75 At court and in other royal settings, clothing was part of a visual language of the political that remained malleable yet was becoming more multivalent even as certain elements had become codified. And, by the latter half of the century, such attire was worn outside the court, as depicted in a picture of an elite Hindu man and woman of Tanjore, one of thirty-six ‘ethnographic’ pictures commissioned by a European to represent the castes and occupations of south India (Figure 18.5).76 The woman in this picture, notably, wears a choli, thus prefiguring the call to Indian women to cover their breasts made vocal in the nineteenth century by colonial moralists and Protestant missionaries, the result of which was widespread adoption of stitched garments under saris.77 If this was the case in newer courts on the edges of the former Mughal world, whose rulers had in some cases even risen in opposition to Mughal authority, what of the former Mughal heartland – the Rajput courts, for example? The same topoi of representing the 74 75

76

77

Crill, Fabric, 131. Bes, ‘Sultan among Dutchmen?’, 1821, 1839. See also Crill, Fabric, 131, 139; Asher and Talbot, India, 183. Their elite status is designated not only by their attire, but also by the fact that they are not labelled by their caste, unlike in the other pictures. They are probably Hindu, for a companion picture of a ‘Moor’ (Muslim) man and woman exists in the series ‘A Muslim Man and Woman’ – Victoria and Albert Museum, London, AL.9128:7. Cohn, Colonialism, 136–43.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

619

620

jagjeet lally

Figure 18.5 ‘A Tanjore man in a white jama holding pan’, by unknown artist. Tanjore, c. 1770. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, AL.9128:2.

mirza-ghazi utilized in the Maratha picture described above are at work in this picture (Figure 18.6): the holding of blossoms and the wearing of fine-stitched clothes, the girding of waists and the bearing of weapons. The central figure is possibly Raja Ajit Singh of Marwar (Jodhpur) but might also be a lesser ruler, so far had the popularity of portraiture – and of the courtly style – spread. A good example of this gentrification can be seen in the portrait of Thakur Padam Singh, the ruler of the small town of Ghanerao between Marwar and Mewar (Udaipur), who nevertheless presents himself in the courtly style of the times, surrounded by nobles, musicians,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

Figure 18.6 A group of Rajput nobles, possibly Raja Ajit Singh, by unknown artist. Jodhpur, c. 1720. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IS.257-1952.

attendants, and a female cup-bearer (sans choli).78 Yet, there are also differences in these pictures reflective of regional styles as well as of broader changes in fashion across the subcontinent. Of the former, most notable are the almost conical turbans that are a distinguishing feature of Marwari (from other Rajput) paintings of the period, themselves so different from those in Tanjore pictures of the sort described above.79 Of the latter, is the changing style of jama. Over the seventeenth century, these became more voluminous – indicated in these pictures by the numerous pleats or folds of the cloth – with the top and bottom parts made separately and stitched together rather than of a single panel.80 78

79

80

‘Thakur Padam Singh of Ghanerao with Courtiers’ (Ajmer, 1721, by Manna), Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IS.12-1978. Indicatively, see Rosemary Crill, Marwar Painting: A History of the Jodhpur Style (Mumbai: India Book House, 2009). Hence the ease of separating the torso-covering upper part, one such part surviving because of its ‘deconstruction’: ‘Fragment of a Robe’ (Indian, c. 1628–58, cotton and silk), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 31.47.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

621

622

jagjeet lally

By the eighteenth century, the length of the coat had dropped from the knee to the ankle; one such example preserved in the Metropolitan Museum is probably of Deccani origin (Figure 18.7).81 With extra-long sleeves so the fabric might be elaborately ruched on the forearm, this jama is also detailed in material woven of fine gold around the neck and borders of the sort seen in seventeenth-century portraits of the Mughal emperor. Its fabrication from more – and much finer – fabric reflects the competitiveness and aspirations, if not the actual bounty, of the wearer and his court. The major beneficiaries of this hunger for grandeur were magnates, whether as revenue farmers for cash-strapped rulers who sold the perquisites of kingship (tax collection) to fund their expansionary campaigns and their acquisition of luxuries, as the latter’s creditors in times of dire need, or as financiers of the production and long-distance trade in specialized productions, including cloth. For their part, merchants wore unbleached white cloth draped about the body in the Indic style, eschewing conspicuous consumption – and the distrust in their scruples it drew from debtors and princes – in favour of spending on spiritual merit.82 That merchants eschewed coloured cloth is not to say the same was true of other members of Indian society. The material, weave, weight or thread count, colour, and pattern of cloth not only had healing or protective properties but also stood as markers of distinction and signifiers of identity, if not individuality, as were the styles of drapery, the cut of stitched cloth, or the way in which saris or turbans were tied, even if historians have been insufficiently curious about each of these.83

81

82

83

Compare this with two eighteenth-century jamas in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London: one possibly from Burhanpur in printed cotton, IM.3121921, the other of printed muslin embroidered with gold and faced in satin, IS.8-1968. Bayly, Rulers, ch. 8. On ritual notions of purity and pollution – hardening over the nineteenth century but of earlier origin – and associated concerns for the materiality, tightness of weave, and colour of cloth: Bayly, ‘Origins’. Take, for example, the bright indigo-blue turbans covered in weapons worn by Nihangs – members of a Sikh warrior order famed for their guerrilla fighting – which are probably of late seventeenth- or early eighteenthcentury origin. For an example: ‘Sikh Warrior Turban (Dastaar Boonga)’ (Punjab, nineteenth century, cotton and forged steel), British Museum, London, 2005, 0727.1.a-p.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

Figure 18.7 Man’s robe (jama) with poppies. South India. Cloth of cotton and gold thread, block-printed with natural dyes and gold leaf. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 29.135. Photo by Sepia Times / Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

That said, merchants, manufacturers, and even guilds and other institutions each played their part in birthing new fashions in various sections of early modern European society.84 Was this true in South Asia, too? Several recent global histories recite Indian craftsmen’s ability to produce the designs in pattern books

84

See, for instance, Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern, 111–33, 169–85, 187–214 for the research of Amanda Wunder, Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset, and Lesley Ellis Miller, respectively.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

623

624

jagjeet lally

shown to them by European traders, such agility taken as a sign of their aptitude for novelty and as tacit evidence that they might have adapted to or even cultivated changing tastes.85 For the precolonial period, the evidence is very remote: in place of merchants’ or producers’ testimony, there are only European records that give details about these groups. Yet, there are traces. In a rather unassuming-looking scrapbook compiled after the annexation of Punjab are around eighty samples of silk fabrics manufactured in Lahore, the capital of the erstwhile Sikh kingdom.86 The earliest known examples of Punjabi silk textiles, they are distinguished either as pre- or post-annexation patterns, the former representing roughly two-thirds of the swatches. They are relatively plain but brightly coloured, a few of single colours (daryai), the greater part striped (gulbadan). Some types of gulbadan are annotated in the book as having been introduced by the city’s weavers during the reign of Maharaja Sher Singh (r. 1841–3), thus standing as evidence of innovation and of changing fashions in the closing years of Sikh rule.

conclusion Can we speak of fashion in the context of early modern South Asia? In a recent essay, John Styles has argued that what early modern Britons called ‘Indian designs’ were actually imitations or else based on European patterns. In so doing, the inventive capability of Indian artisans and tastemakers is downgraded, while the possibility of such a thing as fashion existing in South Asia is dismissed by mere (yet fairly routine) omission.87 In contrast,

85

86

87

Crill, Fabric, 140–79. Few historians today would suggest that Asians imitated rather than innovated, preferring to leave the matter unsaid, although Zoltán Biedermann has called out the elephant in the room: ‘Diplomatic Ivories: Sri Lankan Caskets and the Portuguese-Asian Exchange in the Sixteenth Century’, in Biedermann et al. (eds.), Global Gifts, esp. 116–18. V&A, ‘Samples of Silk Fabrics Manufactured in Lahore Shewing the Patterns &c Peculiar to Mahomedans, Hindus, Sikhs &c.’ [c. 1849–c. 1862], Accession No. IS.7915. John Styles, ‘Indian Cottons and European Fashions’, in Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello, and Sarah Teasley (eds.), Global Design History (London: Routledge, 2011), 37–46.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

Michelle Maskiell’s study of Kashmiri shawls demonstrates an intra-Asian trade predating the ‘discovery’ of these fine cloths by Euro-American merchants and consumers in the nineteenth century, as well as distinct design innovations before c. 1800 originating from within the relationships of Indian artisans and patrons (namely, the Mughal emperors).88 Without overstating the significance of the latter case study, it serves as a reminder of the obvious fact that Indian cloth had a significance in India itself and not only in Europe, and that (albeit slow) developments in use and design constantly remade what appeared to outsiders as timeless tradition. We may even turn on its head Styles’ proposition that European fashion and textile design innovation were more the product of the competitive political economies of the Western European states system than of the competitive effects induced by Asian imports.89 Rather than explaining what was singular about Europe, they remind Indian historians that the famously competitive post-Mughal ‘successor state’ system was the source of cultural – including sartorial – imitation and differentiation, convergence and competition, as the latter part of this chapter has shown. One way of conceptualizing ‘fashion’ is in relation to temporality; it captures, as John Styles notes, ‘forms of self-conscious, avant-garde innovation in dress’ resulting in waves or even cycles of change.90 In India, as in Europe, some of the most significant transformations in dress occurred before the sixteenth century. If what thus marks as distinct the period after c. 1500 in Europe is the rapid acceleration of sartorial innovation, with modifications to existing articles of dress complemented by the invention of wholly new garments, accessories, or adornments, the same cannot be said of South Asia, where change was far more subtle, even over an immense geographic and temporal horizon.91 From the outset, however, this chapter has given substance to Peter McNeil’s astute 88

89 90

91

Michelle Maskiell, ‘Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500–2000’, Journal of World History, 13/1 (2002), 27–65, here esp. 30–5. Styles, ‘Indian Cottons’, explicitly on 44. John Styles, ‘Fashion and Innovation in Early Modern Europe’, in Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern, 33, 36, and passim. Ibid.; Evelyn Welch, ‘Introduction’, in Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern, 6–7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

625

626

jagjeet lally

observation that ‘Fashion can [also] be conceptualised as a form of knowledge; one requires knowledge of what is in fashion to be a participant.’92 From dastur al-amal, social elites could gain one form of such knowledge: mirzai was not about the conspicuous display of wealth – and authors of mirzanamas were attentive to the differences in readers’ rank, income, and wealth – but about belonging to this shared world and its social networks of erudition and cultural exchange.93 Indian society at large was visually and verbally more literate than it was textually, especially compared to other parts of early modern Asia, giving greater significance to those non-textual forms of knowledge transmission that were operative.94 By overlooking fashion as a subject, however, historians have not enquired into the mechanics of the diffusion or emulation of dress from one courtly setting to another, let alone whether and how new styles of dress were embraced by the denizens of towns and cities.95 There was a trade in second-hand and ready-made clothes across AfroEurasia, including the Indian Ocean world.96 The role played by such trades in the Indian context remains a mystery, for Indian historians have instead fixed their attention on the connection of discourses of purity and pollution to the preference for cloth unblemished by other 92

93 94

95

96

Peter McNeil, ‘“Beauty in Search of Knowledge”: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the World of Print’, in Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern, 223–53. O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness’. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 36–44. Certainly, in the nineteenth century, demonstrations by travelling salesmen played an important part in creating and plying a market in new consumer goods: David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Cf. Paula Hohti, ‘Dress, Dissemination, and Innovation: Artisan Fashions in Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Italy’, in Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern, 143–65. Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 114–22; Miki Sugiura, ‘Garments in Circulation: The Economies of Slave Clothing in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Cape Colony’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 104–30.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia

hands.97 If nothing else, the spread of clothing styles described in this chapter raises important yet unexamined issues around technical know-how: how tailoring developed where only draped cloth had been worn, how skills were learnt, who produced stitched garments (and where), whether second-hand or discarded clothes circulated as prototypes for these garments, and so forth. ‘Clothes are not just body coverings and matters of adornment, nor can they be understood only as metaphors of power and authority, nor as symbols’, remarked the Indian historical anthropologist Bernard Cohn; ‘in many contexts’, he continued, ‘clothes literally are authority’.98 Indeed, fashion is most commonly defined by scholars, as Styles has highlighted, as loosely denoting forms of embodied identity and their construction.99 In this direction, this chapter has shown that the early moderns in South Asia took great pains as to their self-presentation (if not their ‘self-fashioning’). Clothes were forms of authority; the appropriation and adaptation of particular forms of dress was already part of the moulding of new political and social identities from the fifteenth century and acquired even greater reach and pace from the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. If fashion was seen by some contemporary critics in Europe as a ‘foreign invasion’, but one that could ultimately serve to reinvigorate local craftsmanship through imitation and competition, the same was to some extent true in India too.100 Indian rulers’ patronage of local artisans and regional styles even as they took to ‘imperial’ sartorial styles is one example of this similarity. Just as the study of luxury and the material culture engendered in Europe by Euro-Asian trade was about to take off, C. A. Bayly wrote the following in his landmark study of late eighteenth-century India: ‘luxury production and consumption were the life blood of the pre-colonial order and [. . .] had a social and ritual value which cannot easily be conveyed by the glib term “luxury”’.101 In some ways, ‘fashion’ might be a similarly glib term.102 If nothing else, 97 98 100 102

On cloth, purity, and pollution: Bayly, ‘Origins’. 99 Cohn, Colonialism, 114. Styles, ‘Fashion’, 34–5. 101 Welch, ‘Introduction’, 11. Bayly, Rulers, 266. Styles has critically examined whether or not fashion is a European or even a Eurocentric category, noting its broader applicability but also differences between Europe and other parts of Eurasia: ‘Fashion’, 36–7 and notes 13–18.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

627

628

jagjeet lally

however, this chapter has shown that thinking with ‘fashion’ is immensely productive. It has thrown into perspective how much more is known about the manufacture of Indian cloth than about clothing, and thus how much remains to be studied of Indian dress and the ways in which it was worn, about how this changed, and why.103

select bibliography Ahmad, Aziz, ‘The British Museum Mı̄ rzā nā ma and the Seventeenth Century Mı̄ rzā in India’, Iran, 13 (1975), 99–110. Bayly, C. A., Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Bayly, C. A., ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 285–322. Bes, Lennart, ‘Sultan among Dutchmen? Royal Dress at Court Audiences in South India, as Portrayed in Local Works of Art and Dutch Embassy Reports, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries’, Modern Asian Studies, 50/6 (2016), 1792–845. Cohn, Bernard, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). Crill, Rosemary (ed.), The Fabric of India (London: V&A Publishing, 2015). Finn, Margot and Kate Smith (eds.), The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 (London: UCL Press, 2018). Flood, Finbarr Barry, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Gordon, Stewart (ed.), Robes of Honour: Khil’at in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Haynes, Douglas E., Abigail McGowan, Tirthankar Roy, and Haruka Yanagisawa (eds.), Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010). O’Hanlon, Rosalind, ‘Kingdom, Household and Body History, Gender and Imperial Service under Akbar’, Modern Asian Studies, 41/5 (2007), 889–923. 103

Sylvia W. Houghteling’s The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022) is a welcome step in this direction.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

imperialism and fashion: south asia Stronge, Susan (ed.), The Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms (London: V&A Publishing, 1999). Styles, John, ‘Indian Cottons and European Fashions’, in Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello, and Sarah Teasley (eds.), Global Design History (London: Routledge, 2011), 37–46. Wagoner, Phillip B., ‘“Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 55/4 (1996), 851–80. Welch, Evelyn (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.020 Published online by Cambridge University Press

629

19

w

FASHION SYSTEMS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN WORLD, FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO C. 1850 sarah fee In his pioneering studies on the longue durée in the Indian Ocean world, K. N. Chaudhuri stressed the dynamism of dress in this vast region, finding in some instances ‘all the ingredients for high fashion’.1 He forcefully argued for revising Fernand Braudel’s earlier conclusions, based on studies of the greater Mediterranean, that fashion originated in (and was exclusive to) Europe.2 Although not immediately ‘intelligible or accessible to outsiders’, wrote Chaudhuri, the ‘dress habits of the people of the Indian Ocean changed’.3 The basic garment shape or silhouette might endure over time, but those-in-the-know gauged fashionability in subtle modifications of cut, length, pleating, and, above all, in details of fibre, fabric, and ornamentation. Sumptuary laws and cultural norms strongly guided garment choice in many times and places, but even so, dress was continually modified as a powerful signifier of status and allegiance, further open to ‘expressions of individual tastes and preferences’.4

My thanks to Khushi Nansi and Jane Liu for research assistance, and to Philippe Beaujard, Peter Lee, Fahmida Suleman, and volume editors Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello for their insights and comments on all or parts of this chapter. The usual disclaimers apply. 1 K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 185. See esp. 182–90, 306–23 of the latter work. 2 See BuYun Chen’s chapter in this volume. 3 Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 188; Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 31. 4 Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 188.

630

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

Since Chaudhuri’s writing, historians have captured in great detail textile making and trading in the Indian Ocean world, recognizing cloth as the most widespread of export-oriented manufactures, ‘the backbone that integrated . . . trade into a system’.5 Yet, they have paid much less attention to Chaudhuri’s ‘dress habits’ – namely, fashion, or the consumption of this same cloth. Fashion scholars, meanwhile, tend to mask maritime connectivities by organizing chapters around landmasses (Africa, the Middle East, etc.) and to see the fashion impulse only in tailored dress forms. This chapter aims to survey the major patterns and shifts in fashion systems, trades, and industries of the vast interconnected Indian Ocean world from early times to c. 1850. For over 12,000 years, monsoon winds carried ships and connected shores from the Red Sea and Gulf, along southern Arabia, the coastlines of India and mainland Southeast Asia to the South China Sea and island Southeast Asia. While waiting for reversing winds, ships were obliged to remain for months in ports of call, engendering millennia of mobility and mixing, diasporas and cosmopolitan port towns, emporia filled with local and imported goods. The result was a ‘mosaic’ of interrelated but unique and changing fashion systems and industries, each uniquely drawing on local and translocal traditions. While noting the important symbolic, identitarian aspects of dress, as well as articulations with Afro-Eurasia’s land routes and empires, the focus here is on mobile, shared, and changing trends, on island and littoral societies, particularly those at the crossroads.

fashion inventions, innovations, and connections in deep time, c . 2000 bce to 500 ce Studies on dress in the Indian Ocean world typically begin with reference to the first-century text the Periplus of the Erythraean 5

Eivind Heldaas Seland, ‘Here, There and Everywhere: A Network Approach to Textile Trade in the Periplus Maris Erythraei’, in Kerstin Droß-Krüpe and Marie-Louise Nosch (eds.), Textiles, Trade and Theories: From the Ancient Near East to the Mediterranean (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2016), 211–20, here 218; Philippe Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), ii, 653–4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

631

632

sarah fee

Sea. But appreciating the deep roots and distinctive features of the region’s fashion systems and industries (as well as its great contributions to world fashion), requires reaching back thousands of years earlier.6 Archaeological studies in recent decades have revealed more than ever how the Indian Ocean is the ‘oldest ocean’, the ‘cradle of globalization’. Dating to prehistory, knowledge of the monsoon winds and boat technologies continually improved in Neolithic times, creating at first two distinct contact zones to the east and west. In China, urbanization and increasing exchange networks occurred in the Yellow and Yangtze River basins, and by 6000 bce southern China and maritime Southeast Asia shared cultural ties. To the west, there emerged by 2300 bce an interconnected ‘Mesopotamia-Persian Gulf-Iran-Indus space’, which later linked to Anatolia, Assyria, Africa, Arabia, and the Mediterranean. Few early fabrics have survived in the zone’s monsoonal and tropical core, especially in comparison to northern hemisphere land empires and routes. Yet, combined evidence from archaeological textiles – however few and fragmentary – from archaeobotany, texts, imagery, and linguistics reveals a key role for fashion systems, industries, and trades in building and connecting Indian Ocean societies and zones from earliest times. By 4000 bce at the latest, the regional fibre, craft, dress, and export specializations that would shape dress and trade patterns for millennia were in place, namely the domestication of the four major textile crops and animals: cotton (Gossypium arboreum) in India, filament silk (Bombyx mori) in China together with its mulberry food source (Morus alba), and flax plants for linen (Linum usitatissimum) and wool-bearing sheep in Southwest Asia and Egypt.7 By 2000 bce, additional fibre domestications include ramie (Boehmeria cf. nivea) in China; hemp (Cannabis sativa) in India or China; and the abaca banana cultivar (Musa 6

7

Unless otherwise noted, chronologies, events, and periodization of Indian Ocean history come from Beaujard, Worlds of the Indian Ocean. Peng Hao, ‘Weaving from Antiquity to the Zhou Dynasty’, in Diether Kuhn (ed.), Chinese Silks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 65–113; Dorian Q. Fuller, ‘The Spread of Textile Production and Textile Crops in India beyond the Harappan Zone: An Aspect of the Emergence of Craft Specialization and Systemic Trade’, Linguistics, Archaeology and the Human Past, Occasional Papers, 5/7 (2008), 10.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

textilis), likely domesticated in the Philippines and diffused to Taiwan and southern China.8 Associated technologies arose simultaneously, from splicing, spinning, reeling, and dyeing (including India’s mordant dyeing and commercial indigo production) to loom weaving; Austronesian speakers spread weaving over thousands of miles, through maritime Southeast Asia and on to Madagascar.9 Philippe Beaujard and Dorian Fuller have forcefully argued that these textile inventions developed as a ‘technology of social differentiation’ in the early Indian Ocean world, underwriting urban revolutions in Mesopotamia, China and later the Indus Valley.10 Put simply, social hierarchy, elite fashion, and trade appeared in tandem. To materialize hierarchy, rulers and elites of the new cities supported innovations and craft specialization to perfect distinctive luxury dress – fine fibres, patterning, and colours. They strategically redistributed finery to clients and allies, while sumptuary laws materialized the lowest strata, the enslaved and prisoners, by denying them footwear and headgear. A social divider, cloth was also a connector. Some fibre and technology innovations were driven with the aim of creating surpluses for trade.11 Silk weaving in China improved alongside commerce, while cloth was the main commodity in increasing exchanges between the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia from 2600 bce, much passing through the Gulf.12 Exporting textiles both generated wealth and brought in much-desired exotic imports, increasingly integral to elite dress. 8

9 10

11

12

Fuller ‘The Spread’, 7, 10; Judith Cameron, ‘The Archaeological Textiles from Ban Don Ta Phet in Broader Perspective’, in Berenice Bellina (ed.), 50 Years of Archaeology in Southeast Asia: Essays in Honour of Ian Glover (Bangkok: River Books, 2010), 141–51, here 144–5; Roy W. Hamilton, ‘Bast and Leaf Fibers in the Asia-Pacific Region’, in Roy W. Hamilton and B. Lynne Milgram (eds.), Material Choices: Refashioning Bast and Leaf Fibers in Asia and the Pacific (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2007), 29. See the chapter by Ruth Barnes in this volume. Fuller, ‘The Spread’, 3; Beaujard, Worlds of the Indian Ocean, i, 24–9, 113, 123, 159. Beaujard, Worlds of the Indian Ocean, i, 24, 29. Beaujard further argues these early exchanges set up millennia of economic exploitation, with dominant polities (‘cores’) setting fashion trends and exporting manufactured goods in exchange for raw materials (and great profits) from subordinate trading partners (‘peripheries’), ibid., 28. Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

633

634

sarah fee

In these very early times, too, appeared the two classic dress cuts or silhouettes of the Indian Ocean world: wrapper garments and stitched garments. Wrapper garments are rectangles of cloth made of a single loom-width, or several joined widths, the two ends sometimes stitched into a tube.13 Men and women wrapped the rectangles of cloth about the body, typically at waist or chest. Waist wrappers are known around the Indian Ocean rim by a variety of names – lungi, futa, dhoti, sari, sompot, pha nung, lamba, sikina, shuka, wizar, sarong, or kain. An alternative form in some areas (Egypt, Austronesia), was the loincloth, a narrow band of fabric wound tightly around the hips and between the legs. Additional cloths might be wrapped or draped over chest, head, and/or shoulders. Generally, these wrappers aimed not to conceal the body, ‘but to reveal, frame, and accentuate its forms’.14 In some places and times, unstitched clothing represented purity or continuity, the prescribed dress of Brahmin priests or leaders when performing essential rituals.15 However, it cannot be overemphasized that, no less than stitched garments, wrappers were potential slates for status and fashionability, read in terms of fibre, weaves, patterns (including striped patterns), fringes, tassels, and manners of wrapping, sometimes quickly changing. Wrappers clothed elites in ancient Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley (Figure 19.1), and Southeast Asia; elite female veiling was practised in Assyria by c. 1075 bce.16 Most wrappers were likely plain, monochrome-dyed, striped, or checked. But more complex patterning also appears and matures in this early era. In western zones, rosettes and roundels, gossamer fabrics, brightly coloured tapestry, weft-faced brocades and pile fabrics characterized fashionable fabrics.17 Some iconic 13

14

15 16

17

Wrappers may be variously termed in the literature as draped garments, skirts, kilts, cloaks, blankets, etc. Phillip B. Wagoner, ‘“Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 55/4 (1996), 851–80, here 864. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 183; and Barnes this volume. Mary Harlow and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, ‘Pre-Islamic Dress Codes in the Eastern Mediterranean and Southwest Asia’, in Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 5: Central and Southwest Asia (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 24, 26. Patricia Rieff Anawalt, The Worldwide History of Dress (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 27, 41; Harlow and Llewellyn-Jones, ‘Pre-Islamic Dress

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world (a)

(b)

Figure 19.1 Figure of a priest, steatite, from the Indus Valley, c. 2000 bce. H 17.8 cm. National Museum of Pakistan. This figure, identified as a priest, wears a patterned rectangular wrapper draped over one shoulder. The centres of the circles and trefoils were originally filled with a red pigment, the surrounding areas in dark blue or green. © J. M. Kenoyer / Harappa.com, Courtesy Dept. of Archaeology and Museums, Govt. of Pakistan.

motifs of Southeast Asian dress – for example, triangular sawtooth design (tumpal), rhombs, and keys – appear on pottery and metalwork from the third millennium bce.18 Stitched garments formed the second basic Indian Ocean silhouette, cloth yardage sewn into shapes to encase trunk and limbs: tunics, robes, shirts, trousers. Three distinct constructions or technologies emerged: first, woven to shape garments (Egypt); second,

18

Codes’, 34; Irene Good, ‘Early Iranian Textiles and Their Influence on PreIslamic Dress’, in Vogelsang-Eastwood (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia, 283. Ruth Barnes and Mary Kahlenberg (eds.), Five Centuries of Indonesian Textiles (Munich and London: Prestel, 2010), 227, 262; Robyn Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia: Tradition, Trade and Transformation, revised edition (Hong Kong: Periplus Editions, 2003).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

635

636

sarah fee

Figure 19.2 A fourteenth-century illustration of a seventh-century scene of the king of Aksum (Ethiopia) receiving envoys from Arabia, pigments on paper, in Jami’ al-Tawarikh of Rashid al-Din, 1314, produced in Tabriz. The Axumite king more likely would have dressed in tailored garments, but the patterns on the Ethiopians’ wrapper cloths appear faithful to medieval Indian printed cottons imported into the Red Sea, and to a farreaching Indian Ocean fashion for intersecting circles. ‘Rashid al-Din Habib, c. 1306 ce or 1314/15 ce. World History. Edinburgh University Special Collections. Or.MS.20 f.52 r.

textile widths stitched without cutting (Figure 19.2); and finally cutting, pleating darts, and gussets. By the late Bronze Age at least, elite men and women in the courts of China, Mesopotamia, northern India, and Egypt wore stitched upper garments.19 Scholars trace the fashion shift in the first three areas to the influence of invading nomadic horsemen from Central Asia, their long sleeves, flared skirts, and trousers suited to equestrian lives and colder climates.20 Typically first adopted as military dress, robes were localized into regional styles, the Persian robe distinctive for its

19

20

In Egypt by the sixteenth century bce, the short-sleeved tunic represented the new female fashionable silhouette. Anawalt, Worldwide History, 24; Kalyan Krishna, ‘Stitched and Shaped Garments’, in Jasleen Dhamija (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 4: South Asia and Southeast Asia (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 129. See the chapter by Susan Whitfield in this volume.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

curved side seam, tight bodice, flaring skirt, bright dyes, elaborate embroidery, typically worn belted.21 Although the basic cut might change little over time, status and fashionability were read in details of sleeve or hem length, fibre, colour, pattern, trim, lining, weave, ornamentation, fastenings, and style of draping or pleating, with changes sometimes rapid. Despite familiarity with tailored garments, many littoral groups rejected them in medieval times or later. The uptake of trousers along the Indian Ocean rim was especially slow and uneven, with many areas retaining the waist wrapper, worn underneath robe or tunic, into modern times (see below). Dress was of course contextual, with leaders and ritual specialists particularly adopting various cuts and colours of garment depending on the occasion. Thus, peoples residing outside of ports, courts, and empires were not passive imitators. To the contrary, at geographic margins and crossroads, smaller polities and communities created unique fashion systems and industries. ‘Folk’ or rural styles in the hinterlands were typically less concerned with socio-economic status than with clan, kin, age, or gender affiliations, often made locally and slower to change; some groups chose to dress in beaten bark cloth into the twentieth century. However, rural traditions, too, were rarely isolated from global networks or the fashion impulse. Local textile makers continually appropriated new fibres, dyes, yarns, embellishments, designs, and technologies – like silk weaving and the use of cowries. All selected or ‘authenticated’ imports to fit their own cultural expectations, and ‘localized’ or ‘domesticated’ foreign cloth by draping or stitching it into local garment styles. By commissioning special products from distant manufacturing centres, peoples in the ‘periphery’ further effected what Jeremy Prestholdt calls ‘global repercussions’, impacting fashion industries and economies in distant ‘cores’.22 In the maritime Indian Ocean world, 500 bce to 500 ce represents a phase of intensification, innovation, and dispersal in fashion industries, systems, and trades. Land empires grew to absorb 21

22

Good, ‘Early Iranian Textiles’, 285; Harlow and Llewellyn-Jones, ‘PreIslamic Dress’, 26. Jeremy Prestholdt, ‘On the Global Repercussions of Eastern African Consumerism’, American Historical Review, 109/3 (2004), 755–81.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

637

638

sarah fee

littorals and strategic ports along the Gulf, Red Sea, India, southern China, and the Malay peninsula. Navigation and boatbuilding techniques improved, and more than ever, waters connected people. Ships typically frequented one of three zones – the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, or southern China and Southeast Asia – the three intersecting spheres connecting the Red Sea to China. As new kingdoms and empires emerged in many ‘in-between’ places, they, too, increasingly sought to distinguish themselves with exotic rarities as discussed in chapters in this volume. Scholars generally agree that by the first century ce the Indian Ocean world was an integrated system with interdependent trades in both luxury goods and staple products, ‘producers and traders catering to local demand’, cloth and clothing prime among them.23 Beyond the well-known overland East–West ‘Silk Roads’ connecting China to the Mediterranean,24 there existed north–south ‘maritime silk routes’ in antiquity, shaping (and shaped by) sartorial praxis in the Indian Ocean world. The earliest routes radiated from southern Chinese ports, their great age attested by the Bombyx silk fibres found in Thailand dating to 900 bce.25 Eventually formalized by the Han dynasty, one maritime route went to Korea and Japan, the other to Southeast Asia.26 Whole silk garments have not survived in maritime zones, but fragments and texts show they ranged from simple tabby weaves to luxurious polychrome jin silks dressing powerful rulers.27 Silks flowed both as commodities – exchanged for Southeast Asia’s ‘precious curiosities’ such as pearls and tortoise shell – and as diplomatic gifts to Southeast Asia’s rising empires, such as Tonkin, Annam, and Champa.28 Rome’s growing demand for silk yarn and cloth further intensified maritime 23 24 25 26

27

28

Seland, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, 218. See the chapters by Scott and Whitfield in this volume. Cameron, ‘The Archaeological Textiles’, 146. Xiong Zhaoming, ‘The Hepu Han Tombs and the Maritime Silk Road of the Han Dynasty’, Antiquity, 88 (2014), 1229–43, here 1231. Cameron, ‘The Archaeological Textiles’; Liang Shu, volume 54, paragraph 15, line 3, Electronic Chinese Text Project, https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb& chapter=26343&remap=gb (accessed 7 March 2021). Tansen Sen, ‘Early China and the Indian Ocean Networks’, in Philip de Souza, Pascal Arnaud, and Christian Buchet (eds.), The Sea in History: The Ancient World (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017), 536–47, here 542.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

routes, with Chinese goods trans-shipped from ports along India’s eastern and western coasts.29 In addition to China, the preIslamic empires of Iran and Iraq (Parthians and Sasanians) spread silk, and probably elite silk fashions, in the Indian Ocean world. Their vast state silk weaving industries invented revolutionary new weaves (samite, taqueté) that facilitated weaving gold thread and new polychrome designs, such as roundels and confronting animals.30 By 400 ce Iran was farming silkworms and exporting large quantities of filament from the port of Hormuz, a ‘longitudinal’ maritime silk route with much destined for India.31 As the prescribed dress of client kings, Parthian tailored dress forms – tunics, vests, sleeved jackets, trousers – spread widely across its vast empire, and were further embraced by rulers from Rome to China, as shared signs of ‘an international elite habitus’.32 Surely Parthian fashion fabrics and garments travelled as well over maritime routes, given Parthian control of Gulf ports, their transoceanic commerce and diplomacy, and institutionalized gifting of ‘robes of honour’ (see below). The Sasanians, too, as a major maritime power, came to control the silk supplies transiting through emporia of southwestern India and Sri Lanka, possibly channelling roundel fashions to maritime Southeast Asia.33 Indian cottons in antiquity built a denser backbone to Indian Ocean transregional trade networks and spurred wide ‘populux’ 29

30

31

32

33

Lionel Casson (ed.), The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 19. Louise Mackie, Symbols of Power: Luxury Textiles from Islamic Lands, 7th– 21st Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Ruldoph P. Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 27–8, 37. Matthew P. Canepa, ‘Textiles and Elite Tastes between the Mediterranean, Iran and Asia at the End of Antiquity’, in Marie-Louise Nosch, Zhao Feng, and Lotika Varadarajan (eds.), Global Textile Encounters (Oxford: Oxbow, 2014), 1; Richard E. Payne, ‘The Silk Road and the Iranian Political Economy in Late Antiquity’, Bulletin of SOAS, 81/2 (2018), 227–50, here 240; and Whitfield’s chapter in this volume. David Whitehouse, ‘Sasanian Maritime Activity’, in Julian Reade (ed.), Indian Ocean in Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1996), 339–49, here 339; Sandra Sardjono, ‘Tracing Patterns of Textiles in Ancient Java (8th–15th Century)’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2017).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

639

640

sarah fee

fashions. Soft, absorbent, washable, and potentially receptive to dyes – especially India’s native Indigofera blue and Rubiaceae reds – Indian cottons were in many ways superior to bast fibres (linen, ramie, hemp) and more affordable than silks. Although by the early centuries ce cotton cultivation and weaving had spread throughout the Indian Ocean world (see below), from Egypt to Arabia to Indonesia – as had Indian dyes and dye cultivars – nevertheless, peoples continued to crave and import India’s unequalled cotton dress fabrics.34 Large-scale, sometimes state-run, cotton weaving centres in the Indus Valley, the Deccan, and the Ganges connected to great ports that served into modern times: the Indus and Ganges River mouths, the Gulf of Cambay, and the southeast coast.35 They produced ‘cotton cloths of all kinds’, coveted for their quality, colour, and design, customized to suit the dress preferences of nomads and kings, from today’s Eritrea to the Gulf of Thailand.36 The Ganges region and southeast coast were already renowned for ‘cotton garments of the very finest quality’.37 Even India’s so-called ‘ordinary cottons‘, likely undecorated plain weaves, seemingly inspired new aspirational fashions from Socotra to Southeast Asia, areas hitherto dressing in palm leaf or hides.38 In the first decades of the first century ce, the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia sought extra-wide cloth known by Sanskrit trade names (sagmatogene, monache). The king of Adulis in today’s Eritrea patronized several varieties, including piled cotton cloth (kaunaki) and fine molochinon, perhaps a muslin. Archaeological finds from Red Sea ports reveal the splendour in texture and pattern of early Indian trade cottons, from checked cloth to ‘laid-in floccati-like pile’ to delicately resist-painted indigo-dyed rosettes39 (Figure 19.3). 34

35

36 37 39

Beaujard, Worlds of the Indian Ocean, i, 363, 426, 514, 551, 567; Fuller, ‘The Spread’, 18–19; John Peter Wild and Felicity Wild, ‘Berenike and Textile Trade on the Indian Ocean’, in Kerstin Droß-Krüpe (ed.), Textile Trade and Distribution in Antiquity (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014), 91–109; Casson, Periplus, 55. Himanshu Prabha Ray, ‘Far Flung Fabrics: Indian Textiles in Ancient Maritime Trade’, in Ruth Barnes (ed.), Textiles in Indian Ocean Societies (London: Routledge, 2005), 24. Casson, Periplus, 81; Cameron, ‘The Archaeological Textiles’, 142–3. Casson, Periplus, 91. 38 Ibid., 71. Wild and Wild, ‘Berenike and Textile Trade’, 96; John Peter Wild and Felicity Wild, ‘Rome and India: Early Indian Cotton Textiles from Berenike, Red Sea

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

Figure 19.3 Indian cotton fragment with white resist-dyed floral pattern on an indigo-blue ground, found in Berenike (coastal Egypt), dated to before the sixth century ce. Scholars suggest it may have been worn by resident Indians. Photograph taken at the excavation site by J. P. Wild. BE 96 0219 © J. P. Wild.

At the same time, peoples increasingly appropriated cotton cultivation and weaving, creating unique local industries and fashions, often at crossroads. Nubia’s Meroitic Empire, with its exceptionally large finds of archaeological cotton garments and tools, beautifully illustrates this trend. Implicated in the rising Rome–India exchanges through the Red Sea corridor, and perhaps stimulated by its own imports of Indian cotton cloth, Meroë developed a ‘revolutionary’ local cotton textile culture in the early centuries ce.40 This unique hybrid industry drew on a new

40

Coast of Egypt’, in Barnes (ed.), Textiles in Indian Ocean Societies, 11–16, here 15. Felicity Wild, ‘Fringes and Aprons – Meroitic Clothing: An Update from Qasr Ibrim’, in Antoine De Moor and Cäcilia Fluck (eds.), Dress Accessories of the 1st Millennium AD from Egypt (Tielt: Lannoo, 2011), 110–19; Elsa Yvanez, ‘De la Fibre à l’Etoffe: Archéologie, Production et Usages des Textiles de Nubie et du Soudan Anciens à l’Epoque Méroïtique’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., Université Charles de Gaulle – Lille III, 2015); Charlène Bouchaud, Alan Clapham, Claire Newton, Gaëlle Tallet, and Ursula Thanheiser, ‘Cottoning on to Cotton (Gossypium spp.) in Arabia and Africa During Antiquity’, in Anna Maria Mercuri, A. Catherine D’Andrea, Rita Fornaciari, and Alexa Höhn (eds.), Plants and People in the African Past: Progress in African Archaeobotany (Cham: Springer International, 2018), 380–426.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

641

642

sarah fee

African cotton cultivar (Gossypium herbaceum) domesticated further to the south, and on spinning and weaving technologies from Egypt and the Mediterranean. Cotton fibre was both traded outward and locally woven to dress the empire’s own elites, largely supplanting linen. New Meroitic elite cotton garments were equally distinctive and novel in form, colour, ornamentation, and designs: large and elaborately fringed sashes, increasingly complex openwork, typically rendered in blue and white. Rare for the time, embroidery was a major decorative device, embellishing hems or entire garments, with motifs including scorpions and floral heads. Breaking (temporarily) with the systems of Egypt and the Mediterranean, the fashion looked instead to archaic Kushitic styles for inspiration. For the western side of the Indian Ocean more broadly, a snapshot of overlapping and distinct fashion systems in c. 30 ce emerges from the remarkable text Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Written by a trader or shipowner living in Roman Egypt, its sixtysix short chapters reveal the ‘multicultural nature of ancient Indian Ocean trade’, conducted by Arabs, Indians, and GraecoRoman merchants, some residing in cosmopolitan port towns where up to twelve written scripts coexisted.41 Lining the rim of the western Indian Ocean, 57 centres or nodes offered 110 commodities, 25 of them textiles of wool, linen, cotton, and silk, made in China, India, Persia, and Roman Egypt, including ready-made and used garments. John Peter Wild and Felicity Wild have recently refined translations of Periplus garment terms and brilliantly matched some to archaeological textiles found in Egyptian ports.42 Ports along the southern Red Sea and Arabian Sea (Adulis, Muza, Omana, Barygaza), yet heavily influenced by Graeco-Roman styles, shared a taste for linen and wool tunics and cloaks made in Roman Egypt, as well as elaborate fringes. Only Muza (Yemen) and Barygaza (Gujarat) seemingly participated 41

42

Casson, Periplus; Eivind Heldaas Seland, ‘Archaeology of Trade in the Western Indian Ocean, 300 BC–AD 700’, Journal of Archaeological Research, 22/4 (2014), 367–402, here 381–5; Seland, ‘Here, There and Everywhere’. Wild and Wild, ‘Berenike and Textile Trade’. Casson defined the term ‘nothos’ as ‘printed’, but the Wilds suggest instead ‘resist dyed’, 94.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

in the wider ‘purple-gold-silk’ porphyra international elite habitus of the time (see above); Muza imported from Persian ports both ‘superior and cheap’ purple cloth, the second likely coloured by overdyeing woad with madder. By contrast, the kings of Kane and Adulis on the Horn of Africa favoured undecorated fine-quality cloth, or cloaks of heavy pile, made of wool in Egypt or cotton in India. Import patterns reveal other regional fashion styles or trends: Adulis (Eritrea) alone wanted unfulled woollens, better suited for its warmer climes; Muza uniquely sought sashes in a colourful ‘rainbow effect’; southern Arabia imported ‘long-sleeved Arab robes’, custom woven of wool or linen in Egypt’s great weaving centres, some plain, some embellished with gold thread or checks, effected perhaps in a damask weave to refract light.43 The Ocean’s eastern side likewise articulated with Afro-Eurasia through overland and maritime routes, albeit in different patterns, embracing some international trends while developing distinct regional wrapper fashion systems. Southeast Asia – located at the critical crossroads between India and China – actively leveraged its control of exports in gold, spices, and forest products to obtain imported luxuries, especially for dress.44 Here, too, new fashions accompanied growing urbanization, hierarchy, long-distance trade, and wealth. As early as the Neolithic, shared styles of stone ornaments and bark cloth connected societies on both sides of the South China Sea, while in Thailand, imported silk, cotton, and abaca cloth appeared with the rise of elite groups.45 Active shapers of this trade, in the early centuries ce, Malay sailors traded as far as eastern Africa, while Funan as the first powerful trading state maintained a fleet of trading ships and regularly sent embassies to India and China. At this time, elites residing in the ports of Java, Funan, and southern China participated in some international fashions, for example patronizing asbestos textiles fabricated in

43 45

Ibid., 94–8. 44 See the chapter by Barnes in this volume. Cameron, ‘Archaeological Textiles’, 148; Bérénice Bellina, ‘Maritime Silk Roads’ Ornament Industries: Socio-Political Practices and Cultural Transfers in the South China Sea’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 24/ 3 (2014), 345–77; Judith Cameron, ‘The Archaeological Evidence for BarkCloth in Southeast Asia’, in Michael C. Howard (ed.), Bark-Cloth in Southeast Asia (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2006), 65–74.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

643

644

sarah fee

the Mediterranean and conveyed over Indian Ocean routes.46 Chinese silks flowed with the envoys travelling between Southeast Asian and Chinese courts; nobles of Funan in the third century ce were specifically observed to dress in wrappers made of jin (polychrome warp-faced tabby) silks.47 Commoners widely embraced cotton wrappers, either Indian imports or of local manufacture, as Funan, Sumatra, and Vietnam by the early centuries ce had in place sophisticated local cotton industries that dyed wrappers with up to five different colours.48 The major cultural and fashion shift in antiquity in Southeast Asian was rulers’ patronage and blending of Buddhism and Hinduism. In this ‘Indianization’, sovereigns in today’s Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and Indonesia, patronized Indian art, architecture, ritual, and dress. While still dressing in wrappers and leaving the chest bare, elites replaced summary loincloths with long, ankle-length wrapper skirts elaborately draped and folded – sometimes Indian dhoti style – secured with belts or sashes.49 In some regions, nobles alone had the rights to colourful shoulder cloths, golden belts and earrings, and Buddhist necklaces, the splendour only increasing in following centuries.

islamic connections and fashions, 700–1500 ce The eighth century ushered in a new era for the Indian Ocean, with the rise and spread of Islam and the emergence of China’s outwardlooking Tang dynasty, stimulating ‘an increase in trade and the spread of knowledge between China, India and the Muslim Empire’.50 Persian merchants sailed directly to southern Chinese ports, where they were joined by Austronesian and Indian traders, creating diasporic trading communities numbering over 100,000. Following the destruction of the foreign enclave of Guangzhou in 46

47 48 49 50

Judith Cameron, ‘Asbestos Cloth and Elites in Southeast Asia’, Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, 19 (2000), 47–51. Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia, 244–9; Liang Shu, vol. 54, paragraph 15. Liang Shu, vol. 54, paragraph 2. Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia, 153, 175. Beaujard, Worlds of the Indian Ocean, ii, 11.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

879, trade reverted to three spheres: the Arabian Sea to southern India, southern India and Southeast Asia, and Southeast Asia to China.51 By the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Fatimids of Egypt, the Colas in south India, and the Song in China revived high demand and stable conditions for exchanges in exotic luxuries and more mundane products.52 The Mongols and the Yuan government actively promoted maritime trade, sending fleets as far as India and Java.53 In the fifteenth century the Mamluk sultanate (Egypt), large Indian states, the Ming Empire, and new city-states again stimulated exchanges, the Ming in the mid-1400s sponsoring giant tradecum-diplomatic missions as far as Hormuz and eastern Africa. Fashion systems, trade, and industries of the Indian Ocean world shaped and were shaped by these major events, promulgated by new ‘in-between’ ports and emporia, notably Hormuz, Aden, Mogadishu, Khambhat (Cambay), Nagapatinam, Palembang, Melaka, and Zaiton (Quanzhou), which offered raw materials, cloth, and clothing from across the Ocean. Typical of increasingly cosmopolitan port cities, Calicut, on the southwest of the Indian subcontinent, was home to people from ‘China, Sumatra, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yemen and Fars’, and a gathering place for merchants ‘from all quarters’, while in Melaka by 1500, over eighty languages were spoken.54 New cosmopolitan maritime societies, such as the Swahili, created distinctive new fashion systems. While many general patterns continued in trade and consumption – silk, gold thread, rich dyes, fine weaves, and complex patterns defined elite clothing most everywhere – new weaves and designs appeared, spread, and fell from favour. China developed or perfected satin-stitch embroidery, complex printing and dyeing, and tapestry weaving (kesi).55 Artisans in Iran introduced from the eleventh century lampas and satin weaves that sped patterning and enhanced the shimmer of silk, while the Mongols spread 51 52

53 54

55

Ibid., ii, 12. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 104. Beaujard, Worlds of the Indian Ocean, ii, 207. Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 59. Zhao Feng, ‘Silks in the Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties’, in Diether Kuhn (ed.), Chinese Silks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 203–57.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

645

646

sarah fee

China’s new damask weaves; novel designs – some of them ‘startling’ – included continuous stars, asymmetrical fluid designs, and curved lattices that gradually replaced static roundels.56 Well documented for land empires and routes, these novelties also spread via maritime spheres; Iranian weaving centres in or near Gulf port towns – Siraf, Shustar – exported cottons, linens, and brocaded silken stuffs, while southern Chinese ports shipped textiles of new techniques to Southeast Asia.57 Gujarat’s influential silk, double ikats (patola), were consumed in Southeast Asia from at least medieval times which, together with new Chinese designs, contributed to Java’s new thirteenth-century intersecting circles designs.58 In a major technological transfer, Bombyx sericulture spread to much of mainland Southeast Asia by the eleventh century, as well as to Java, Sumatra, Fatimid Egypt, and Bengal by the fifteenth century.59 Bengal joined Iran as a major supplier of raw silk in the Indian Ocean world.60 At the same time, the popularity of Indian cottons grew even greater (see Figure 19.2). In landmark studies, Ruth Barnes’ radiocarbon dating of archaeological fragments revealed the great quantities, vibrant colours, and vast design range of the Indian mordant and resist-dyed cottons exported to the Ocean’s far ends, to the Red Sea and Indonesia.61 She identified pan-Indian Ocean fashions for certain bird and vegetal designs, as well as regional tastes: Arabic inscriptions for Egypt, obligatory red elements for Indonesia. Altogether, the emergence of Islam arguably most impacted fashion systems, industries, and trades in the medieval Indian Ocean world. Within decades following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 ce, the new religion spread across Arabia and 56 57

58 59

60 61

Mackie, Symbols of Power, 38, 132–3, 151, 214, 231, 238, 259. R. B. Serjeant, Islamic Textiles: Material for a History up to the Mongol Conquest (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1972), 41–3, 58. Sardjono, ‘Tracing Patterns’, 12. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), i, 93; Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia, 249; John Guy, Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 26. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 308. Ruth Barnes, Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt: The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

along the coasts of the Red Sea and Gulf, then along the coasts of western India and eastern Africa, and was finally embraced in major ports of Southeast Asia from the fourteenth century. The result was a ‘vast network of Muslims all around the periphery of the Indian Ocean’, and ‘a large share of both coastal and oceanic trade was handled by the adherents of this new religion’.62 They hailed from various schools of thought, ‘nationalities’, and socioeconomic standings, with diasporic communities of Muslim Persian, Arab, Indian, and Chinese merchants settled in port towns. ‘Islamic dress’ thus unsurprisingly displayed elements of both unity and diversity. Muslim merchants and rulers built on many pre-existing fashion industries and trades. In Southwest Asia, rulers assumed control of pre-existing Byzantine and Sasanian royal weaving workshops – known as tiraz (from Persian ‘embroider’) – and textile manufacturing remained the largest employer.63 Royal workshops emerged as well in Yemen and India, and throughout the Mongol Empire and Yuan China. More broadly, Aden emerged as the ‘gateway to China’, an emporium of fibres and dyes, while Yemen’s striped and brocaded silks and ikats ‘enjoyed a high reputation in centers of fashion’, worn by the ‘dandies of the age’, and imitated in Egypt and Iran.64 Private tiraz workshops emerged as well in coastal Iran and Fatimid Egypt, supplying wealthier classes who commissioned imitations of fashions from the ruling class, or made to suit their personal preferences.65 The main product of royal tiraz workshops were ‘robes of honour’ (khil‘a), typically a full set of clothing – robe, shirt, trousers, and turban – which rulers gifted to officials, subjects, and dignitaries, as well as fellow rulers.66 Presented with other goods at great public gatherings, the clothing not only honoured the recipient but usually 62 64 65

66

Pearson, Indian Ocean, 62, 76. 63 Serjeant, Islamic Textiles. Ibid., 80, 127. Yedida Stillman, Arab Dress: From the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times (Leiden: Brill, rev. 2nd edition, 2003), 125, 132. Stewart Gordon, ‘A World of Investiture’, in Stewart Gordon (ed.), Robes of Honour: The Medieval World of Investiture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 1–19; Stewart Gordon, ‘Introduction: Ibn Battûta and a Region of Robing’, in Stewart Gordon (ed.), Robes of Honour: Khil’at in PreColonial and Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1–30.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

647

648

sarah fee

also indicated allegiance to the giver. Predating Islam, robe gifting amplified via growing Islamic courts and networks. In 1122, the Fatimid ruler of Cairo distributed some 14,000 sets of garments – from turbans to underdrawers – to court officials and their families, including women and retainers, their cost and finery commensurate with rank.67 As other rulers, the Sultan of Delhi maintained enormous stores, both locally made and imported, with some 200,000 robes from China, Iraq, and Egypt. They bestowed robes on allies of all religions, including Christians, Jews, with the practice adopted by some Hindu courts. Worn by far-flung governors, envoys, and religious and economic elites, robes of honour became influential aspirational dress. Well-to-do merchants commissioned and gifted robes to family and friends, purchasing from private workshops.68 Initially embellished with Christian and Sasanian figural motifs, robes were increasingly adorned with stripes, birds, animals, and inscriptions: the names of rulers, workshops, and/or pious phrases (Figure 19.4); all of these, even aniconic embellishments, knew fashion vogues in terms of fibre, calligraphic styles, technique (embroidery stitches, painting, weave structure), and all-over opulence.69 Regional styles varied widely. Fatimid robes of honour were mostly ‘white and embroidered with gold and silver threads in accordance with the official Fatimid imagery of luminous splendour and divine light’.70 Abbasid robes, by contrast, were black, while Muhammad Shah’s Delhi workshop produced a wide range, including ‘blue silk embroidered with gold and spangled with jewels’.71 The Mongols and Yuan favoured gold brocades. Travelling the Indian Ocean in the 1300s, the scholar Ibn Battûta was gifted robes while visiting Calicut, Sumatra, Hangzhou, and Mogadishu. At the last port he received a localized ensemble: a tunic and turban made of imported Egyptian linen with embroidered borders (tiraz), but in place of trousers was a silk hip wrapper, the preferred lower-body male garment of eastern Africa. Battûta observed that robe gifting served oceanic trade ritual as well: shipowners, captains, and scribes in one southern Arabian port customarily received ‘a complete set of robes’ upon arrival; in 1700s Mocha, port governors were still gifting 67 69 71

Stillman, Arab Dress, 54, 131. Mackie, Symbols, 84–125, 133. Serjeant, Islamic Textiles, 112.

68 70

Ibid., 56. Stillman, Arab Dress, 54.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

Figure 19.4 Illustration of an Arabo-Persian boat in the Maqamat alHariri (Assemblies of Hariri), pigments and gold on paper, by Yahyâ ben Mahmûd al-Wâsitî, 1237. 37 x 28 cm. Created in 1237, this AraboPersian boat scene depicts a hierarchy of dress: the ship’s captain in a dark-blue straight-cut robe with long sleeves and inscriptions at the shoulder, the merchant passengers wearing colourful turbans with inscriptions, crew in hip wrappers with bare torso; one, perhaps a skilled sail master, additionally wears a short-sleeved tunic with armband inscription. Although illegible, the garment inscriptions were rendered on gold grounds, signalling high prestige. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Ms. Arabe 5847, fol. 119v. © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

649

650

sarah fee

robes – typically ‘Arab cloaks in shades of red’ – although now at the time of merchants’ departure.72 The great hajj pilgrimage to Mecca strengthened and expanded networks. While in Mecca, pilgrims dressed in simple ihram ritual wear – a pair of white seamless rectangular wrappers for men, while women dressed in plain coverings of their choice. But hajjis also brought and sold textiles to fund their journeys and carried home cloth acquired in Mocha, Cambay, or Jedda.73 The textile fair held from ancient times in the vicinity of Mecca, offering everything from Yemen’s famed striped silks to Arab cloaks, became ‘one of greatest commercial events in the economic life of the Indian Ocean, and it was to impart a strong stimulus to the textile industries’.74 Many pilgrims set sail from Cairo or Gujarat, further carrying new fashions and textiles through these ports. Stillman’s observations on dress practice in Southwest Asia from the ninth century apply to the Indian Ocean at large: as wealth and middle classes grew, ‘many new garments and fabrics came into general use . . . and cultured people became ever more fashionminded and concerned about their appearance’.75 They set aside earlier proscriptions by the Prophet who ‘considered silk, satin, and brocade clothing together with gold jewelry to be intemperate luxury (isrā f)’ for the dress of men.76 ‘Countertraditions’ included wearing silks outside of mosque, cloth with small silk elements – stripes or trim – or made in a special weave (mashru¯) that pushed the silk warp to the surface leaving only the cotton weft touching the skin. Generally, women were free to wear silk and gold jewellery and were observed to do so in profusion. While the success of Muslim merchants and diasporas in the Indian Ocean was due in part to a shared religious identity, many subcommunities existed, their individualities materialized in dress. The main Qur’ā nic verse on dress stipulates merely covering pudenda, but in terms of practice, from early times headgear or 72

73 75

H. A. R. Gibb (ed.), The Travels of Ibn Battûta, 4 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1962), ii, 383; Nancy Um, Shipped but not Sold: Material Culture and the Social Protocols of Trade during Yemen’s Age of Coffee (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2017), 57, 87, 94. Pearson, Indian Ocean, 27. 74 Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation, 46. Stillman, Arab Dress, 43. 76 Ibid., 31.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

tailored tunics/robes became key signs of the Muslim faith. The basic garments for elite men and women in Southwest Asia were a long dress, gown, or tunic, underdrawers and overgarment whether a mantle wrap or coat, footgear and a variety of headcoverings – hats, caps, headcloths, with composite headgear of several caps and cloth reigning in medieval times.77 Linguistic, visual, and textual information point to Arabo-Persian prototypes as most influential for men’s robes in the Indian Ocean world.78 Some new converts, such as the Mappila of coastal southwest India, quickly adopted even rudimentary versions of caps and tailored garments.79 Yet most littoral societies maintained their preference for textile wrappers. Men in Yemen, Oman, the Maldives, much of Southeast Asia, and the Malabar and Swahili coasts rejected trousers, and under their tunics or robes continued to wear hip wrappers, oftentimes checked.80 Similarly, with the coming of Islam, elite Javanese women initially covered breasts with wrappers – albeit sometimes of see-through fabrics – rather than tailored tunics.81 Turbans, a pre-Islamic convention, only in later medieval times became associated with the faith. So, too, fashion influences flowed between Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Arab and Persian merchants residing in southeast Chinese ports who obtained rank in the Song bureaucracy wore imperial Chinese robes as formal dress.82 Some animist peoples of the southern Philippines embraced trousers, while the Vijayanâgar Hindu rulers of southern India (1336–1672) adopted Persian robe cuts and headgear, as would rulers later in Sri Lanka, Bengal, and Thailand.83 Three snapshots from the Red Sea, Swahili coast, and Malay peninsula offer glimpses of the wide variety in ‘Islamic dress’ of 77

78 79 80 81 82

83

Ibid., 3. By late medieval times, trousers of Muslim land empires ranged from ‘pantaloons, kneebreeches, long trousers, and close-fitting drawers’, ibid., 11. Wagoner, ‘“Sultan”’, 865; Lee, Sarong Kebaya, 23–5. Pearson, Indian Ocean, 79. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 185; Wagoner, ‘“Sultan”’, 865. Reid, Southeast Asia, 88. John Chaffee, ‘Diasporic Identities in the Historical Development of the Maritime Muslim Communities of Song-Yuan China (960–1775)’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 49/4 (2006), 395–420. Wagoner, ‘“Sultan”’; see also Lally’s chapter in this volume.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

651

652

sarah fee

the medieval Indian Ocean, and the ongoing change and scope for self-fashioning. The Shi’i Fatimid Caliphate (969–1171) made its capitals, Fustat and Cairo, the most cosmopolitan urban cities in the medieval world, a critical entrepôt of the Indian Ocean, and the most ‘clothes conscious’ empire.84 Archaeological fragments reveal a remarkable range of fabrics, from locally made linens and woollens to imported silks and printed and painted cottons from India that were locally tailored. Using textual sources, notably trousseau records, Stillman offers evocative details of Fatimid female dress.85 Layering in wrappers and tailored garments, a woman had considerable licence to self-fashion. Over her undergarments or drawers (sirwâl) and a long shirt (qamī ş ) or a light tunic, she wore a long tunic with or without sleeves; for her outer robe, she could choose from four different styles, and belt it with either a sash or hip wrapper; for headgear she might select a cap, veil, turban, or one of many new forms of head scarves, and complete it with a jewelled headband or flowing ribbons. Outdoor wear required her to choose additional veils, wrappers, and/or robes. Her fabric choices ranged from lightweight cottons and linens to heavy silk brocades, ornamented with stripes, checks, embroidered with gold thread, jewels or pearls, and variously fringed. She might select a sash to either match or contrast her headgear or outer robe. While formal state events required white dress, for special occasions she chose from a rainbow of hues, including ruby, pomegranate, pistachio, cloud-blue, or the colour of mandrake or sand grouse. Jewish women dressed similarly, they, too, going unveiled. Residing along the littoral of eastern Africa, the Swahili peoples created a unique fashion system, distinct from their trade partners from Arabia or interior Africa. By the early 800s the Swahili had begun to convert to Islam, and by 1200 ce, ‘Swahili coastal entrepôts such as Mogadishu, Mombasa, Zanzibar, and Kilwa had become culturally vibrant city-states integral to the wider Indian Ocean 84 85

Alpers, Indian Ocean, 54–55; Stillman, Arab Dress, 53. This section is based on Stillman, Arab Dress, 53–61; and Yedida K. Stillman, ‘Female Attire of Medieval Egypt: According to the Trousseau Lists and Cognate Material from the Cairo Geniza’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 1972).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

World commercial network’.86 Jeremy Prestholdt underscores that sartorial displays were intrinsic to Swahili notions of ‘culturedness’ (uungwana); showing mastery of both local dress conventions and individual flair was a key means through which ‘power and status were understood, maintained and contested’.87 In the 1300s, tailored garments remained as yet rare, a pair of wrappers clothing commoners and most elites alike. Rulers patronized power textiles of the wider Muslim world, tiraz from the Red Sea and Middle East, while more widely the region imported cottons – red, white, and blue – from Arabia and Gujarat.88 Tailored jackets and turbans were allowed only to rulers and courtiers, fitness to rule expressed in costly gold thread and colourful silks, green and purple damasks and velvets. In 1330, the ruler of Mogadishu was observed to dress in a unique combination of imported luxuries, ‘a large green mantle of Jerusalem stuff, with fine robes of Egyptian stuffs’, a waist wrapper of silk and a large turban.89 In 1498, the ruler of Mozambique island favoured new cuts and velvets: ‘a robe [cabaya] of white cotton, which is a garment open in the body and reaching to the ankles; above this he wore another of Mecca velvet. On his head was a turban of silk velvet of many colors adorned with gold.’90 The hierarchy of men’s headgear varied from skullcaps and embroidered caps to turbans. Elite women too dressed in ‘rich garments of gold and silk and cotton’, but even more conspicuous was the profuse gold and silvery jewellery covering arms, legs, and ears.91 At the same time, the Swahili were active cloth producers and traders; catering to regional fashion demands, Swahili weavers unravelled Chinese and Indian fabrics and re-wove them into new styles for trade along the coasts and into the Zimbabwe gold fields. Cloth 86

87

88

89

90

Gwyn Campbell, ‘Africa and the Early Indian Ocean World Exchange System in the Context of Human–Environment Interaction’, in Gwyn Campbell (ed.), Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World (Cham: Springer International, 2016), 11. Jeremy Prestholdt, ‘As Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain: The Social Fabric of Material Consumption in the Swahili World, circa 1450–1600’, PAS Working Papers, 3 (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1998). The Chinese chronicler Zhao Rugua, 1226, cited in Beaujard, Worlds of the Indian Ocean, ii, 340. Gibb (ed.), Travels, ii, 377. Gibb’s translation of clothing terms merits reworking. Prestholdt, ‘Artistry’, 7. 91 Vasco da Gama, quoted in ibid., 38.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

653

654

sarah fee

woven in Mogadishu was especially renowned, and exported as far as Egypt.92 Islam and its dress codes spread relatively late in maritime Southeast Asia, from the thirteenth century, when some coastal Malay rulers began to adopt mystical strains that integrated local beliefs and ‘offered a new source of ritual prestige [to] . . . distinguish their regime from that of their Indonesian rivals’.93 The mightiest early Islamic city-state emerged in Melaka, on the west coast of the Malay peninsula. It was founded around 1400 by a prince who had fled Sumatra and allied himself with China; receiving and sending envoys, and himself making visits to the Ming court, he acquired enormous quantities of Chinese silks and tailored dress, ‘spangled gold’ suits of clothing embroidered in gold, and a set of qilin robes.94 His descendants converted to Islam and further developed Melaka as the new pivot point and emporium connecting the South China Sea to the Mediterranean, welcoming merchant communities of many origins, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish. New laws forbade wearing sheer fabrics at or near court and, at least on one occasion, in 1432, the sultan himself was observed simply dressed, in ‘a fine white foreign cloth to wind round his head; on his body he wears a long garment of finepatterned blue cloth, fashioned like a robe’.95 Commoners dressed in white wrappers, men adding small square head cloths, and women short jackets.96 If many provisioning pathways endured – sultans dispatching agents to south India to acquire specific fabrics – merchants returning from hajj now brought fashions from Syria and Egypt.97 92

93 95

96

97

Gibb (ed.), Travels, ii, 374. As early as the thirteenth century, in interior southeast Africa, commercial cotton weaving centres were active along trading trails. Bianca Steyn and Alexander Antonites, ‘Plant Use in Southern Africa’s Middle Iron Age: The Archaeobotany of Mutamba, Azania’, Archaeological Research in Africa, 54/3 (2019), 350–68. Alpers, The Indian Ocean, 61. 94 Reid, Southeast Asia, 88. Ibid. Wheatley’s rather different translation as ‘a white turban of fine local cloth, a long floral robe of fine green calico’ points again to the need to revisit clothing translations. Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula before A.D. 1500 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1961). Unlike men, women of the islands of Southeast Asia largely retained waist wrappers. Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia, 310. J. Kathirithamby-Wells, ‘The Islamic City: Melaka to Jogjakarta, c. 1500– 1800’, Modern Asian Studies, 20/2 (1986), 333–51, here 344.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

More generally in this time period, Southeast Asia’s HinduBuddhist courts continued to select dress fabrics and designs from India and China. Srivijaya and Majapahit reached new heights of wealth and splendour, their pageantry and statecraft spreading to Sumatra, Borneo, and Sulawesi. Elite dress remained largely untailored with the torso bare, although jackets and trousers appeared in Java, perhaps as ritual and military attire.98 Gold defined sumptuousness at court, with divine kings dressed like gods in heavy gold jewellery and heavily gold brocaded silks. Denoting status and wealth, the new silk-and-gold cloth, according to Robyn Maxwell, was ‘readily adapted to changes in fashion’, with Southeast Asia’s own court workshops devising local brocading technologies.99 Roundels were popular textile designs for centuries, but their designs changed continually, according to Sandra Sardjono’s study of textile depictions on sculptures and architectural elements in Java, Burma, and Cambodia. She links changing border and infill patterns, from animals to florals, to wider Afro-Eurasian trends, including ‘High Tang’, Sogdian, and Sasanian styles.100 The new widespread thirteenth-century fashion for intersecting circles, which replaced roundels, on the other hand, was likely inspired by Indian and Chinese textiles (Figure 19.5).101 Working from texts, Derek Heng has mapped Southeast Asia’s changing patronage of silks from China.102 From 900–1100, high-value yardage and sets of silk garments were sent as part of diplomatic exchanges. The ruler of Champa, in 1076, was observed to dress in Sichuan tabby-weave silk. After 1200, high-volume low-cost silks of simple weaves and ornamentation (resist-dyed and printed) became a trade medium, 98

99

100 102

Jiri Jakl and Tom Hoogervorst, ‘Custom, Combat and Ceremony: Java and the Indo-Persian Textile Trade’, Bulletin de L’Ecole française de l’Extrême Orient, 103 (2017), 209–35. Robyn Maxwell, Sari to Sarong: Five Hundred Years of Indian and Indonesian Textile Exchange (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2003), 73–7. Sardjono, ‘Tracing Patterns’, 22–4. 101 Ibid., 50–75. Derek Heng, ‘Distributive Networks, Sub-Regional Tastes and Ethnicity: The Trade in Chinese Textiles in Southeast Asia from the Tenth to Fourteenth Centuries CE’, in Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell (eds.), Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 159–80, here 161, 162, 168.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

655

656

sarah fee (a)

(b)

Figure 19.5(a) and (b) King Kertarajasa as Harihara (combination of Vishnu and Shiva), andesite, Sumberjati Temple, East Java, fourteenth century. H 2 m. Intersecting circles became a fashionable wrapper design in Java from the thirteenth century. Museum Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta, No. 256/103a/2082. Photograph by Christopher Buckley.

China producing to satisfy niche tastes: blue and white lotus motifs for the Malay peninsula and polychrome resist-dyed silks for Java. Maritime overtures of the Mongols and Yuan introduced new types of silks, although their famous gold brocades (nasij) seemingly met little success.103 Finally, in the 1400s, the new Ming silks – satin weaves, satin-stitch embroideries, and new iconography – renewed demand, with Java’s Majapahit Empire spreading these new silk fashions through its zone of influence.104 All the

103

104

South of the Yangtze River, Song styles were favoured over northern nasij (Zhao Feng, ‘Yuan Silk’, in Zhao Feng (ed.), Zhongguo sichou tongshi 中國絲 綢通史 [The General History of Chinese Silk] (Suzhou: Suzhou Daxue Chubanshe, 2005), 328, 366). Heng, ‘Distributive Networks’, 174.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

same, few maritime Southeast Asia societies adopted the tailored Chinese cut of robe.105 Indicative of the vibrant, varied, yet interconnected fashion systems across the Indian Ocean at the close of the medieval period, the great Ming ‘treasure ships’ dispatched on diplomatic-cumcommercial voyages in the 1400s carried enormous and assorted quantities of cloth and garments. To Aden, the Chinese admiral Zheng He distributed bed sheets, carpets, gilded clothing, dyed satin, generic silks, thin silks, and ‘sultan’s clothing’; to Hormuz he took broadcloth, brocade, woollen carpets, general cloth, woollen cloth, and velvets.106 Everywhere Admiral He ‘provided local chiefs with appropriate official caps and robes’, in what would prove a final gesture before China’s official withdrawal from maritime realms.107

trends of the early modern period, 1500 to c . 1850 Sixty-five years after Zheng He’s last visit, in 1498, Portuguese fleets led by Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached India and Indonesia in search of spices. From a base in Goa, the Portuguese for the next century occupied many of the Indian Ocean’s major ports and chokepoints. They were largely replaced from 1600 by chartered East India companies from the Netherlands, Britain, France, Denmark, and Sweden, each establishing trading posts in India and beyond, the Netherlands colonizing parts of Indonesia from 1620, and Britain parts of India from 1750. Scholars continue to debate Europe’s impact on the Indian Ocean’s commercial and socio-political life before 1800, with 105

106

107

Liao Dake, ‘The Portuguese Occupation of Malacca in 1511 and China’s Response’, in Geoff Wade and James K. Chin (eds.), China and Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 2019), 130–55, here 137; Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia, 248. Alexander Jost, ‘“He Did not Kiss the Earth between his Hands”: Arabic Sources on the Arrivals of the Zheng He Fleet in Aden and Mecca (1419– 1432)’, in A. Schottenhammer (ed.), Early Global Interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean World, Volume I: Commercial Structures and Exchanges (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 79–95, here 91–3. Dake, ‘The Portuguese Occupation’, 136.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

657

658

sarah fee

many asserting ‘the balance of Asian trade remained in Asian hands’.108 Initially, East India companies became just another – albeit large and influential – purchasing agent of Indian cottons and Iranian and Chinese silk. Beholden to local trade practices, they too had to procure Indian trade textiles to exchange for spices in Indonesia or for ivory and human captives in Africa, as well as distribute – and receive – local ‘robes of honour’ and prestige cloths.109 Although the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) soon monopolized the trade in Indian textiles to the Indonesian archipelago, it failed to suppress smuggling and local imitations, while Chinese merchants served as retailers.110 Fashion systems and industries in Europe were forever changed by encounters with the Indian Ocean world. Well-known instances include new Euro-American demands for Indian muslins and painted cottons (chintz), ‘Siamoises’ fashions in France, and elite European men’s adoption of the banyan, a T-shaped informal robe whose form was inspired by various Asian robe styles, including the Japanese kimono.111 Equally cosmopolitan and experimental – if less well known – are the fashion trends of the Indian Ocean world at this time, particularly those of littoral societies, which likewise selectively and creatively drew from the unprecedented flood of fabrics, designs, and silhouettes circulating and recirculating on local, regional, and global stages. Indian Ocean societies generally rejected European-made fabrics, the woollens and linens that East India companies carried in the hopes of finding new markets in Africa and Asia, with a few exceptions. British wool broadcloth was sought by the Mughals, Swahili, imperial China, in Yemen and Oman for robes, horse trappings, and furnishings, and was appropriated by the Madagascar court for

108 109

110 111

Guy, Woven Cargoes, 127. For a few examples of cloth and robes bestowed on, or bestowed by, Europeans in Southeast Asia, see ibid., 72, 127–9; Wagoner, ‘“Sultan”’, 867; Um, Shipped but not Sold, 37. Guy, Woven Cargoes, 81–3, 119. Ariane Fennetaux, ‘Behind the Seams: Global Circulation in a Group of Japanese-Inspired Cotton Nightgowns, c. 1700’, Textile History, 52/1 (2021), 507–29.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

royal dress.112 Ports in India and Malaysia appreciated Portuguese lace, and local women quickly embraced lace-making.113 Arguably more influential were new fibres and dyes from the Americas, introduced largely by the Spanish. Asian silk dyers embraced logwood and cochineal, the potent vermillion dye made from scale insects native to the Americas, which were shipped ‘in the enormous [Spanish] hulls that traveled between Mexico and the Philippines, and then along sea routes to China’, reaching India, the Middle East, and the Indonesian archipelago.114 To the Philippines, the Spanish brought a red pineapple cultivar, stimulating that nation’s famed weaving of piña cloth, tailored into new garment forms for elite Filipino and mestizo men and women. In this ‘interwoven globe’ of multi-directional design exchanges, Indian Ocean societies were likewise fascinated by novel patterns, such as European florals and woven silk designs, the latter often derived from Europe’s own meditations on Chinese and Indo-Persian motifs.115 The Mughals famously embraced European botanical drawings for textile design, while Thai royalty appreciated hybrid compositions mingling ‘Persian floral border scrolls, Indian stepped squares, and winged cherubs of European inspiration’.116 Indian fabrics continued to dominate fashion trends and trade. Indeed, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been called the ‘golden age of Indian trade textiles’, fuelled by rising merchant and middle classes.117 Europeans now, too, flocked to the ports of 112

113 114

115

116 117

Sarah Fee, ‘“Cloth with Names”: Luxury Textile Imports in Eastern Africa, ca. 1800–1885’, Textile History, 48/1 (2017), 49–84; Um, Shipped but not Sold. Velvets, too, became fashionable although their provenience – Europe or Asia – is unclear. Guy, Woven Cargoes, 122; Peter Lee, Sarong Kebaya: Peranakan Fashion in an Interconnected World 1500–1950 (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2014), 74. Lee, Sarong Kebaya, 160–4. Elena Phipps, Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), 27. Melinda Watt, ‘Panel of Chintz’, in Amelia Peck (ed.), Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 198–9. Guy, Woven Cargoes, 134. Peter Lee and Iwanaga Etsuko, Singapore, Sarong Kebaya and Style: Peranakan Fashion in an Interconnected World (Singapore: Omura Printing Co., 2016), 58; René J. Barendse, ‘Port Cities in the Gulf and the Red Sea During the Long Eighteenth Century (c. 1720–c. 1840): General

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

659

660

sarah fee

Gujarat and the Coromandel coast to procure cottons for trade elsewhere in the Indian Ocean world. Consumers in eastern Africa above all desired India’s indigo-dyed and striped wrappers, with striping patterns quickly going in and out of fashion.118 Other places preferred instead India’s block-printed and kalam-painted cottons (chintz). In Thailand sumptuary laws restricted Indian chintz to the royal court, which annually dispatched agents to purchase it, whereas in Safavid Iran ‘common people’ were able to dress in lower quality printed cottons.119 Thousands of eighteenth-century Indian trade textiles made for Iran, Egypt, maritime Southeast Asia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka have now entered museum collections. Some designs show distinct niche predilections, but as many reveal shared global tastes. One large kalampainted wrapper (dodot) made for Java features over twenty motifs, ranging from Islamic endless knots to patterns from Indian silk ikats to mythical creatures inspired by Chinese and Indian prototypes.120 Gujarati silks, too, remained in high demand at both ends of the Ocean: silk wrappers called acoutis to dress wealthy traders in Madagascar, striped silk-cottons (mashrū) for Swahili women’s head-coverings, and double-ikat (patola) silks for rulers of maritime Southeast Asia, who increasingly tailored the cloth into trousers.121 At the same time Chinese and Iranian silks enjoyed continued success, the king of Thailand, for instance, ordering in 1713 ‘gold and silver wrought stuffs’ from Iran.122 Among many fashion innovations, Mughal rulers patronized a new accessory, lightweight woollen shawls and sashes woven in Kashmir from fine mountain goat hair, subtly adorned with stripes and stylized florals; distributed as robes of honour, Kashmiri

118

119 121

122

Characteristics and Some Comparisons with Southeast Asia’, in Schottenhammer (ed.), Early Global Connectivity, Vol. I, 343–74, here 360. Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Guy, Woven Cargoes, 50, 129–34. 120 Ibid., 102. Fee, ‘“Cloths with Names”’, 64, 70; Sarah Fee, ‘ The Shape of Fashion: The Historic Silk Brocades (akotifahana) of Highland Madagascar’, African Arts, 46/3 (2013), 26–39. Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia, 245–9, 252–60; Guy, Woven Cargoes, 130.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

woollens were also widely traded over land and maritime routes, notably to Iran and southern Arabia.123 Rather than de-industrialize, imported cloth and raw materials (dyes, yarn, etc.) stimulated and inspired local fashion arts in an arguably equivalent ‘golden age’ of cloth making in littoral Asia and Africa. The weaving of embellished rectangular wrappers flourished from the Zambezi River to Roti for local dress and regional trade. Scholars link the rise or spread of Java’s batik art and industry to the seventeenth century, when rulers aimed to replace imports of Indian chintz. Some batik designs followed Indian chintz prototypes, but others were developed for Java’s central courts, combining motifs drawn from Hindu, Muslim, and local ideologies, or for cosmopolitan coastal merchant communities, all ‘the product of a very globalised world’.124 Regional cloth trades – from painted bark cloth to silk ikats – radiated from Java, Bali, and Sulawesi to smaller islands, from Cambodia to Thailand, from the Swahili coast to its deep hinterland, from Omani port towns to Somalia, Madagascar, and the Persian Gulf.125 Ongoing imports of Chinese cloth, materials, as well as growing Chinese diasporic communities inspired new trends, particularly in the coastal sultanates of Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, where women appropriated metallic thread embroidery to adorn court dress and ritual items, including for Islamic ceremonies.126 Amidst these innovations, cut tended to be the most stable element of fashion, and most Indian Ocean societies rejected European silhouettes in this period. An exception were European men’s hats and broadcloth military suitcoats; as other fine foreign items, they were desired by elites in some eras and places as 123

124 125

126

Michelle Maskiell, ‘Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500–2000’, Journal of World History, 13/1 (2002), 27–65. Lee, Singapore, 12. Barnes, this volume; Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia, 289; Fee, ‘“Cloth with Names”’; William Gervase Clarence-Smith, ‘The Textile Industry of Eastern Africa in the Longue Durée’, in Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn, and James A. Robinson (eds.), Africa’s Development in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 264–94. Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia, 257, 321.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

661

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 19.6 Jean Baptiste Louis Dumas, ‘Manger de cheval; Porteur d’eau; Domestique indien; Commandeur’, watercolour on paper, c. 1828. 19.5 × 20.5 cm. In the late 1820s, the dress of enslaved workers on the Saint-Gilles sugar plantation of Reunion Island (Bourbon) varied from the overseer (‘le commandeur’) in trousers, overcoat, and tall hat to manual labourers in small loincloths and tunics. Conseil général de La Réunion, Archives départementales / Iconothèque historique de l’océan Indien. 98F12.

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

‘rarities that others have not’; suitcoat details (lapels, collars, cuffs) could more widely influence local robe construction.127 Europeans imposed simple European cuts on their local militias as well as their enslaved populations, notably the ‘Cape Malays’ trafficked by the Dutch to colonial South Africa, and the Africans trafficked by the French to work plantations on the Mascarenes islands lying off Madagascar, dress calibrated to status and labour (Figure 19.6). Overall, however, people continued to dress in local silhouettes, and fashion leaders remained regional. In the equatorial zone, into the 1900s, rectangular wrappers remained the main article of dress of commoners and oftentimes elites. Never static, regional wrapper fashionability was gauged in fibre, colour, fabric, size, and ornamentation, the ongoing global ‘cotton revolution’ increasingly replacing bark, bast fibres, and hides with wrappers of cotton. Mozambicans continually demanded Gujarati cotton wrappers ‘of a new fashion’, causing Portuguese administrators untold procurement grief.128 For tailored garments, Persian, Chinese, Omani, and Mughal cuts proved influential (Figure 19.7). Persian envoys at the Thai court inspired an all-new male fashion for tailored robes and tall headgear, while the emperor of Vietnam in 1774 imposed a dress code of ‘Chinese-style tunic and trousers’.129 If the Achinese kingdoms modelled court dress on Mughal India, Swahili men increasingly emulated Omani fashions: white tunics, slim broadcloth over-robes, bulky striped silk sashes, and turbans.130 In Southeast Asian ports and sultanates, continuing Islamization encouraged the spread of trousers (sirwâl) and jackets (baju, jubah), together with a love of gold thread and colour in place of ancestral motifs.131 By the eighteenth century, notes Peter Lee, a long jacket made of chintz or other Indian textiles ‘was the height of fashion throughout the Malay archipelago, and was worn by high-ranking men and women from local and immigrant communities’, so that Muslims might be distinguishable only by their turbans.132 New trends and the fashion impulse might extend far

127 129 130 131

Reid, Southeast Asia, 88. 128 Machado, Ocean of Trade. Guy, Woven Cargoes, 139–42. Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia, 316. Maxwell, Sari to Sarong, 71–81. 132 Lee, Sarong Kebaya, 126, 74.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

663

664

sarah fee

Figure 19.7 ‘The Dress of Arab notables in Yemen’, illustration in Carsten Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien (Copenhagen: Nicolaus Möller, 1774), vol. 1. In this image Danish traveller Niebuhr models the garments he was gifted in 1763 by Imam al-Mahdi ‘Abbas of Sanaa, Yemen. The Arab men’s ensemble of hip wrapper, long-sleeved tunic, and over-robe proved highly influential in the Indian Ocean world. Courtesy of the John Hay Library, Brown University Library.

inland, with men fashioning jackets and trousers from imported coloured fabrics ‘as the fancy leads them’.133 Tastemakers more influential than European men were their local wives, who were often freed slaves. Peter Lee has mapped

133

Guy, Woven Cargoes, 70.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

Figure 19.8 ‘A Malay with his wife. A Sinhalese’. Georg Franz Müller, watercolour on paper, between 1669 and 1682. 13 × 19.5 cm. For fashions of Batavia in the 1670s Müller depicts striped hip wrappers and short white tunics, the man additionally wearing a head cloth and sash, the woman a shoulder cloth. The Sinhalese man’s dress differs in the use of a front opening short jacket, and red cap. St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 1311, p. 93 – The travel diary (‘Reisebuch’) of Alsatian world traveller Georg Franz Müller (www.e-codices.ch/fr/csg/1311/93).

the new, dynamic fashions created by the Asian wives of Portuguese and Dutch (and, later, Chinese) settlers in India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, and their mestiza offspring. Drawing on both maternal and paternal sartorial traditions, these Eurasian women created a ‘hybrid urban culture that seeped into the lifestyles of all communities’.134 The fashion epicentre in the sixteenth century was Goa, where, for formal wear, Asian wives and their Eurasian daughters donned European-style garments – skirts, bodices, and chopine shoes informed by European vogues. For informal wear, however, they preferred the hybrid ensembles of their mothers’ local communities: a waist wrapper and tunic or

134

Lee, Sarong Kebaya, 34–124, direct quote, 80. Lee importantly tracks trends in footwear, essential to fashion, but beyond the scope of this chapter.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

665

666

sarah fee

jacket, completed for formal occasions with a cloth draped over the shoulder (Figure 19.8). This wrapper-jacket ensemble (sarong kebaya) spread to Portuguese ports in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, continuing under Dutch occupation, to become the main dress of elite women. Fashionability in the upper garment was read in details of fabric, length, collar shape, front opening, addition of vests, stitching style, and presence or placement of buttons. An eighteenth-century wider Indian Ocean female fashion for seethrough blouses gave way to Indian muslin and chintz in myriad designs, as well as silks and locally woven gold brocaded cloth. The waist wrapper, depending on vogues and personal taste, was fashioned from imported Indian chintz, checked cottons, tie-resist patterns, or Javanese batik. With access to textiles circulating globally, Eurasian women in the great ports patronized international trends, including white grounds and cottons emulating woven silk designs. The local wives of Chinese merchants and labourers, who settled in increasing numbers from 1660, further contributed to the ‘exuberant, hybrid’ wrapper-robe fashion. These ‘Peranakan’ women of mixed Chinese ancestry, many successful entrepreneurs in their own right, competed and communicated success through conspicuous displays of clothing and jewellery. The Parsi community of western India initiated other dynamic Indian Ocean diasporic fashions, expressing a unique identity, local affiliations, and changing trade connections.135 With the Muslim conquests of Iran in the seventh century, some followers of the Zoroastrian religion migrated to Gujarat where they became known as Parsis. Retaining their distinct identity and faith, they worked as farmers, weavers, and small merchants. Although continuing to wear Zoroastrianism’s sacred undershirts and chords, by the seventeenth century they had adopted basic Indian cuts of dress: the sari for women, a Mughal-inspired long-sleeved jama of fitted bodice and flared skirt, and waist sash and trousers for men. Rising with the ports of Surat and Bombay, the Parsis became 135

Shilpa Shah and Tulsi Vatsal, Peonies & Pagodas: Embroidered Parsi Textiles: TAPI Collection (Surat: Garden Silk Mills, 2010); Pheroza J. Godreg, Firoza Punthakey Mistree, and Sudha Seshadri, Across Oceans and Flowing Silks: From Canton to Bombay 18th–20th Centuries (Mumbai: Spenta Multimedia, 2013), esp. 168–227.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

Figure 19.9 Parsi child’s tunic, satin silk and silk embroidery, c. 1880s. 64 × 44 cm. The chinoiserie imagery known as Chena Chini was fashionable with India’s Parsi communities in the later nineteenth century. Royal Ontario Museum, Object ID 2017.29.2. © ROM.

shipbuilders, financiers, and long-distance merchants, and from the 1750s joined British traders in the lucrative China trade. Shuttling between Bombay and Canton, Parsi men began to wear colourful silk trousers with Cantonese-embroidered hems and distinctive turbans made of dark lacquered cloth.136 In Canton, they also commissioned items for their wives, like uniquely patterned silk brocades (tanchoi) and embroidered saris (garas) and, for their children, distinctive embroidered tunics (jabhla). Soon, Chinese and Parsi artisans were replicating the fabrics in Surat and Bombay. Among the vogues in weaves, colours, stitches, and designs, some 136

Godreg et al., Across Oceans, 168.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

667

668

sarah fee

sacred Zoroastrian animal and floral motifs endured, while others proved short-lived; the latter included a chinoiserie style (Chena Chini), with scenes of Chinese pagodas, peasants, and animals (Figure 19.9). As Parsi business interests and travels increasingly connected to London, however, Parsi women turned to European fashion trends for the cut of their sari blouses.137 The pioneer in implementing European tailored forms at the state level was King Radama I of the island nation of Madagascar.138 Lying 300 miles off East Africa, at the crossroads of trade winds and currents, Madagascar was settled beginning 2,000 years ago by peoples from Indonesia, Africa, India, and Arabia. They developed a unique wrapper weaving tradition based on Austronesian techniques, yet also welcomed imported materials and silhouettes. By the 1700s, some coastal rulers had adopted Islamic robes and turbans, while kings and nobles residing in the central highlands devised a unique elite fashion comprising a medley of imported goods: Indian silk wrappers and carnelian jewellery, tall hats made of British scarlet broadcloth, and accessories fashioned locally from imported silver, beads, and wire. Around 1815, the king of highland Madagascar, Radama I, replaced this medley with European-cut military jackets, caps, boots, and trousers for his formal wear, mostly purchased from French merchants (Figure 19.10). Over the next decade, he required European tailored cuts of his court, military officers, their families and retinues, as well as the pupils of his new state-sponsored schools. Radama’s embrace of European-style dress was entwined with his political ambitions to rule the entire island. On local levels, the novel dress facilitated his creation of a new state bureaucracy that bypassed birth-status; on regional and international levels, in regard to French and British agents jockeying for control in the western Indian Ocean, Radama’s mastery of the symbols of the international order of monarchs legitimized his claim for independence and his fitness to make treaties. Even so, it was Radama and his subjects who authenticated, domesticated, and 137 138

Ibid., 226–7. Sarah Fee, ‘The King’s New Clothing: Re-Dressing the Body Politic in Madagascar, c. 1815–1861’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Politics of Fashion in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 153–81.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world

Figure 19.10 B. F. Leguével de Lacombe, Voyage à Madagascar et aux iles Comores, 1823 à 1830 (Paris: Louis Desessart, 1840), vol. i. Madagascar’s King Radama reviewing his troops in 1823, reportedly based on a sketchfrom-life by André Coppalle. Radama and his officers dress in Europeaninspired military ensembles; the royal women on the left appear to wear shoulder wrappers over tailored dresses or skirts. Wikipedia Commons.

adapted Western silhouettes. They combined, cut, and accessorized garments indifferent to the rules of Europe. By the late 1820s, hundreds of Malagasy seamstresses and tailors had mastered needlework, producing shirts, jackets, trousers, and dresses to clothe perhaps upwards of 20,000 of Radama’s subjects.

conclusion Sensitive to subtle changes in pleating, collar folds, and woven borders, K. N. Chaudhuri in the early 1990s recognized fashion trends and the fashion impulse in the Indian Ocean world from medieval times, leading him to openly challenge Fernand Braudel on the perceived stasis of dress outside of Europe. Since Chaudhuri’s writing, archaeologists have documented connections and change thousands of years earlier, as far back as the Neolithic, tying the very emergence of Indian Ocean world mobilities and connections to its fashion

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

669

670

sarah fee

systems, industries, and trades. A new generation of scholars has further added sub-Saharan African to his Asia-centric narrative, together with in-depth studies of regional societies and fashion systems. In foregrounding instances of north–south and south–south fashion connections, these studies enrich better-known east–west overland routes and histories and contribute to the decentring of Europe. The (re-)emergence of textiles and fashion as legitimate fields of enquiry, the global turn in the humanities, the phenomenal rising interest in the Indian Ocean world across the disciplines, together with transdisciplinary methodologies promise to reveal ever more about the vast, influential region’s historic ‘dress habits’, its ‘ingredients for high fashion’ and ‘expressions of individual tastes’.139

select bibliography Anawalt, Patricia Rieff, The Worldwide History of Dress (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007). Barnes, Ruth, Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt: The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Barnes, Ruth (ed.), Textiles in Indian Ocean Societies (London: Routledge, 2005). Beaujard, Philippe, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean: A Global History, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Cameron, Judith, ‘The Archaeological Textiles from Ban Don Ta Phet in Broader Perspective’, in Berenice Bellina (ed.), 50 Years of Archaeology in Southeast Asia: Essays in Honour of Ian Glover (Bangkok: River Books, 2010), 141–51. Canepa, Matthew P., ‘Textiles and Elite Tastes between the Mediterranean, Iran and Asia at the End of Antiquity’, in MarieLouise Nosch, Zhao Feng, and Lotika Varadarajan (eds.), Global Textile Encounters (Oxford: Oxbow, 2014), 1–14. Casson, Lionel (ed)., The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Chaudhuri, K. N., Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

139

Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 188.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion systems in the indian ocean world Chaudhuri, K. N., Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Fee, Sarah, ‘The King’s New Clothing: Re-Dressing the Body Politic in Madagascar, c. 1815–1861’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds.), Dressing Global Bodies: The Politics of Fashion in World History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 153–81. Gibb, H. A. R. (ed.), The Travels of Ibn Battûta, 4 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1962). Good, Irene, ‘Early Iranian Textiles and Their Influence on Pre-Islamic Dress’, in Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 5: Central and Southwest Asia (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). Gordon, Stewart, Khil’at in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003). Gordon, Stewart, Robes of Honour: The Medieval World of Investiture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Guy, John, Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998). Heng, Derek, ‘Distributive Networks, Sub-Regional Tastes and Ethnicity: The Trade in Chinese Textiles in Southeast Asia from the Tenth to Fourteenth Centuries CE’, in Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell (eds.), Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 159–80. Lee, Peter, Sarong Kebaya: Peranakan Fashion in an Interconnected World 1500–1950 (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2014). Maxwell, Robyn, Sari to Sarong: Five Hundred Years of Indian and Indonesian Textile Exchange (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2003). Prestholdt, Jeremy, ‘As Artistry Permits and Custom May Ordain. The Social Fabric of Material Consumption in the Swahili World, circa 1450–1600’, PAS Working Papers, 3 (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1998). Serjeant, R. B., Islamic Textiles: Material for a History up to the Mongol Conquest (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1972). Stillman, Yedida, Arab Dress: From the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times (Leiden: Brill, rev. 2nd edition, 2003). Wild, John Peter and Felicity Wild, ‘Berenike and Textile Trade on the Indian Ocean’, in Kerstin Droß-Krüpe (ed.), Textile Trade and Distribution in Antiquity (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014), 91–109.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.021 Published online by Cambridge University Press

671

20

w

FASHION AND FIRST PEOPLES IN EUROPEAN SETTLER SOCIETIES, C. 1700–1850 melissa bellanta In a portrait painted by Joseph Merrett in the mid-1840s, an unnamed Mā ori woman wears a distinctive blend of local and imported garb. This young Indigenous woman from Aotearoa (New Zealand) draped her korawai-ngore, a cloak decorated in red woollen pompoms and black string tags, over a cotton scarlet-and-navy print dress (Figure 20.1). In addition to her moko kauae (female facial tattoo), she wears a greenstone and blue ribbon ornament in one ear, and in the other what is probably a shark’s tooth carved in bone. Novel Indigenous fashions combining disparate styles and materials were evident in other European settler-colonies besides Aotearoa. Sitting for their portraits while visiting Washington city in the mid1820s, for example, leading Creek men wear eye-catching tunics, colourful finger-woven waist sashes, and symbolic headdresses fashioned from trade silver, feathers, and cloth (Figure 20.2).1 In what is now western Canada at the turn of the nineteenth century, Ojibwa women of the Anishinaabe nation wore blue pinafore-like strap dresses with detachable sleeves over leggings and moccasins, ‘carefully ornamented with white beads and trinkets’.2 On the Australian

Warm acknowledgements to Julie Gough, Kate Hunter, Lorinda Cramer, an anonymous North American reviewer, and Beverly Lemire for their invaluable feedback on early drafts of this chapter. 1 Kathryn H. Braund, ‘McKenney and Hall Portrait Gallery: Creek Treaty Delegation to Washington, 1825–1826’ (Auburn: Auburn University, n.d.), https://cla.auburn.edu/cah/assets/File/McKenney%20and%20Hall% 20Booklet.pdf (accessed 6 June 2020). 2 Peter Grant, cited in Cory Willmott, ‘From Stroud to Strouds: The Hidden History of a British Fur Trade Textile’, Textile History, 36/2 (2005), 203.

672

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and peoples in settler societies

Figure 20.1

J. J. Merrett, ‘Mā ori Girl in Cloak’, watercolour, c. 1845. National Library of Australia, NK1274.

island of lutruwita (the island south of the eastern Australian mainland where the British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land, later Tasmania, was founded in 1803) female Aboriginal survivors of a brutal frontier war wore voluminous dresses combined with red knitted caps or headscarves in and after the mid-1830s, sometimes adding traditional necklaces made of iridescent shells of a type now termed maireener or marina.3 This chapter explores dress in the ‘contact zones’ of North America, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand: places where First Peoples and European newcomers intermingled and clashed with each other, some on the frontiers of settlement and others in cities such as Washington.4 The period of focus for each of these regions ends in 1850. The point at which it begins depends on the 3

4

C. A. Woolley, ‘Portrait of Truganini’, 1886, National Library of Australia (NLA), PIC/7485/156 LOC Album 947; C. E. Stanley, ‘Natives at Oyster Cove, Nov. 1847’, NLA, PIC Drawer 73 #R4512. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 7.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

673

674

melissa bellanta

Figure 20.2 Anonymous (copy after Charles Bird King), ‘ApaulyTustennuggee’, Creek chief, oil on canvas, 1825. Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1985.66.387,322.

locality: 1700, in the case of North America; and 1788, in the case of Australasia, the year in which Britain founded the penal colony of New South Wales. While I pay some attention to what Europeans wore in zones of cross-cultural contact, my main interest is the distinctive fashions that Indigenous peoples produced through ‘selective adoptions and adaptations’ of European garments and materials, paying special heed to their decorative elements.5 This is not to say that fashion only emerged as a phenomenon in First Peoples’ dress during the eighteenth century. Changes in what Indigenous peoples wore had occurred long before the arrival of Europeans – it is just that the focus here is on the changes in colonial contact zones after 1700 and 1788 respectively.

5

Cory Silverstein [later Willmott], ‘Clothed Encounters: The Power of Dress in Relations between Anishinaabe and British Peoples in the Great Lakes Region 1760–2000’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., McMaster University, 2000), 188.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and peoples in settler societies

It is difficult to generalize about what happened on either side of the Pacific over the period between 1700 and 1850, not least because a diversity of Indigenous peoples and colonial histories is involved. (Terminology is also difficult. Wherever possible I have used the names for places and communities used by First Peoples at the time of discussion, although it is sometimes necessary to use overarching terms such as ‘North America’, ‘Australasia’, ‘Aboriginal’, ‘Mā ori’, ‘First People’, or ‘Indigenous’ – the latter two used interchangeably so as to avoid any single label). Having said this, a broad shift took place in all of the regions under consideration here. The shift was from an initial period of often intimate coexistence between First Peoples and European newcomers to one characterized by increasingly asymmetrical power relations and violence, amounting in some cases to what the Trawlwoolway historian Julie Gough (an Aboriginal scholar from northeastern lutruwita) calls ‘nigh near genocide’.6 Dress historians have had plenty to say about First Peoples’ dress in the initial period of coexistence, particularly in fur-trading regions of North America. Those focused on North America have shown that Indigenous participants in the fur trade sought cloth and clothing above all other European commodities.7 This chapter is not just concerned with North America, however, and its emphasis is more on ornament than cloth. It is important to focus on what Westerners call ‘ornament’ – symbolic headdresses, finger-woven sashes, kauae moko, and so forth – because such phenomena were profoundly linked to group identity and spirituality in Indigenous cultures. Small decorative items or trimmings were crucial to the ways in which First Peoples adapted, personalized, and thus ‘Indigenized’ European apparel. 6

7

Julie Gough, ‘Forgotten Lives: The First Photographs of Tasmanian Aboriginal People’, in Jane Lydon (ed.), Calling the Shots: Aboriginal Photographies (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2014), 22. Depending on their specific history, other First Peoples have similarly characterized settlercolonization as (or nigh near) genocide. In the United States, members of the Haudenosaunee used the term ‘the Hollocaust’ [sic] to describe the Revolutionary Era well before the Second World War: Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 47–8. A summary of the best of this literature appears in Mary Ann Levine, ‘The Fabric of Empire in a Native World: An Analysis of Trade Cloth in Eighteenth-Century Ostonwakin’, American Antiquity, 85/1 (2020), 52–4.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

675

676

melissa bellanta

The dynamism involved in producing items such as shell necklaces and the decorative features on cloaks was also valuable to First Peoples battling to survive the ravages of settler-colonization. The creators of such articles adapted old techniques to their rapidly changing circumstances, producing something at once of the present and connected to a deep past (Figure 20.2). A final reason to focus on ornament is that it exposes the hypocrisy of white male settlers who scornfully associated adornment with women and non-white men. The intensification of settlercolonization in nineteenth-century Australasia and North America was accompanied by a mythology about the self-made white man. According to this mythology, the kind of man suited to asserting control over colonial frontiers was a robust character committed to an egalitarian, unornamented mode of dress. The idealization of this masculine type contributed to the fact that adornment became associated with European elitism and femininity in and after the late eighteenth century: initially in North America following the Revolutionary War, and later in Britain’s Australasian colonies.8 The sharpening of white racism over the nineteenth century ensured that Indigenous and other non-white ‘dandies’ were increasingly described in terms that suggested they were inferior to simply attired white men. The rejection of ornament thus became linked to a white settler masculine ideal.9 Focusing on what male settlers actually wore reveals the gap between self-serving white rhetoric about heroic frontiersmen and the complex realities of dress in contact zones. It was not just that men of European birth or descent wore variations of Indigenous apparel in these places, whether kangaroo-skin garments worn by settlers in early colonial lutruwita or ‘Indian or 8

9

Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Margaret Maynard, Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 159–76. Robert F. Moore, ‘“Indian Dandies”: Sartorial Finesse and Self-Presentation Along the Columbia River, 1790–1855’, in Susan Fillin-Yeh (ed.), Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 59–100; Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 77–136.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and peoples in settler societies

hunting shirts’ ordered by George Washington for his troops during the Revolutionary War.10 More significantly, male settlers engaged in self-deceit or hypocrisy when they claimed to be immune to the seductions of fashionable consumption and ornament. Even the sturdiest frontiersmen of the mid-nineteenth century tended to adorn themselves in particular ways.

indigenous american dress in fur-trading contact zones In the late 1830s, the United States artist George Catlin produced one of many famous paintings of First Peoples from the Upper Missouri, ‘Wi-jún-jon (Pigeon’s Egg Head) Going to and Returning from Washington’ (Figure 20.3). Catlin’s painting purported to represent an Assinboine warrior who had travelled to Washington city as the member of an Indigenous delegation in 1832. According to the historian John Ewers, however, the artist misheard and thus wrongly translated the warrior’s name. The man in question was not Wi-jún-jon, but Ah-jon-jon (‘The Light’).11 This mistaken rendering of Ah-jonjon’s name highlights the difficulties posed by images of First People by artists or photographers of European descent. Some artists had close relationships with their subjects and went to lengths to achieve ethnographic accuracy. This was the case for Joseph Merrett, for example, producing sketches of Mā ori in 1840s Aotearoa.12 Yet even in these cases, non-Indigenous representations were animated by problematic agendas and fancies regarding their subjects. Their images thus offer at best a suggestive impression of the peoples they portrayed, and need to be viewed cautiously and in concert with other sources.13 Catlin’s painting is 10

11

12

13

James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land: A History (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2009), 118–19; Linda Baumgarten, The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 69. John C. Ewers, Indian Life on the Upper Missouri (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 78. Leonard Bell, Colonial Constructs: European Images of Mā ori, 1840–1914 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992), ch. 1. For examples of scholars carefully working with such images, see Laura Peers, ‘“Almost True”: Peter Rindisbacher’s Early Images of Rupert’s Land, 1821–26’, Art History, 32/3 (2009), 516–44; Beth Fowkes Tobin,

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

677

678

melissa bellanta

Figure 20.3 George Catlin, ‘Wi-jún-jon, Pigeon’s Egg Head [sic], Going to and Returning from Washington’, oil on canvas, 1837–9. Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1985.66.474.

included precisely because it represents an egregiously racialist fancy about Indigenous dress: namely, that it was only authentic when it was wholly composed of ‘native’ materials such as feathers and skins. In ‘Wi-jún-jon’ Catlin produced a split canvas that seemed designed to warn against the corrupting effects of Euro-American ‘civilization’ on Indigenous peoples. On the left, Ah-jon-jon appeared in his ‘native costume’ before leaving for the city. Among much else, he wore leggings and a shirt made of what was probably buffalo hide, ornamented with dyed porcupine quills and what Catlin described as ‘his Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and peoples in settler societies

enemies’ scalps’.14 On the right, Catlin painted an insulting caricature of Ah-jon-jon leaving Washington. The warrior now wears a ‘full dress “en militaire”’, Catlin explained in an accompanying commentary. His dark-blue regimental coat was adorned with epaulettes, red belt, and liquor bottles stashed in the pockets. His other accessories include a high-crowned beaver hat, with a silver lace band, ‘surmounted by a huge red feather’, a medal tied around his neck with blue ribbon, a pair of white kid gloves, and umbrella and fan.15 After the famous Lewis and Clark expedition through their territory in the early nineteenth century, Indigenous peoples of the Upper Missouri such as the Assinboine, Mandan, and Blackfoot became renowned for their hide leggings and shirts or dresses variously decorated with quills, shells, strips of animals skins, hooves, teeth ‘and even human hair’.16 Though some had also or alternatively fashioned apparel from plant fibres, many Indigenous peoples in other parts of the continent had once similarly created their major garments from processed skins. Before European contact, the most widely worn garment among eastern and southeastern peoples had been a skin breechclout for men, a garment similar to a loincloth, and kneelength waist wraps for women, in each case tied with a sash at the waist.17 Both sexes had added skin leggings, moccasins, and a robe ‘draped over one or both shoulders’ (sometimes referred to as a matchcoat) when the weather or occasion required.18 For all the historical importance of skins, the idea that they were the only authentic ‘native’ material becomes a nonsense when one considers that eastern Indigenous participants in the

14

15 16

17

18

George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Condition of the North American Indians, 2 vols. (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1844), ii, 196. Ibid., 197. Blanca Tovias, ‘Power Dressing on the Prairies: The Grammar of Blackfoot Leadership Dress, 1750–1930’, in Louise Edwards and Mina Roces (eds.), The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2007), 140; see also Castle McLaughlin, Arts of Diplomacy: Lewis and Clark’s Indian Collection (Seattle: Peabody Museum in association with University of Washington Press, 2003), 147–99. Robert DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 47. Ibid.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

679

680

melissa bellanta

European fur trade had been using hard-wearing woollens such as stroud and duffel to make most or all of their garments for well over a century (and in some regions more than two) before Catlin painted Ah-jon-jon. Peoples in east or southeastern North America such as the Mohawk, Lenape/Delaware, Cherokee and Creek had also long made a practice of adding new types of garments and adornments to their sartorial repertoires: long ruffled shirts, flannel petticoats, printed calico, silver armbands and gorgets, necklaces strung with copper cone-shaped pendants (known as tinklers because of the sound they made when worn), rows of silk and tinsel ribbons sewn onto garments, and the like.19 There is a further irony to Catlin’s suggestion that military-style coats and silver medals were inauthentic ‘native’ dress, given that fur traders had long given such items to their leading local suppliers in gift-giving ceremonies modelled on Indigenous customs. The Indigenous recipients of the finest ‘chief’s coats’ had usually only worn them at ceremonial or diplomatic gatherings with Europeans, accompanied by silver medals, gorgets and armbands, plus cocked beplumed hats.20 Numerous examples have since been found at First Peoples’ burial sites, however, suggesting that their owners had invested the coats with meanings markedly different from those in Europe.21 Indigenous North Americans received dark-blue coats from European colonists and fur traders in addition to scarlet chief’s coats. The indigo tint of these more modest offerings appealed to peoples such as the Cree and Anishinaabe because it referenced the night sky and formed a ‘contrasting background to bright colours and

19

20 21

Timothy Shannon, ‘Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson and the Indian Fashion’, in Susan Sleeper-Smith (ed.), Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 344–84; Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 123–5; R. K. Pannabecker, ‘“Tastily Bound with Ribands”: Ribbon-Bordered Dress of the Great Lakes Indians, 1735–1839’, Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 14/4 (1996), 267–75. DuPlessis, Material Atlantic, 93. Levine, ‘Fabric of Empire’, 54–6, 63–5.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and peoples in settler societies

decorations’.22 The Cree called the stroud (a type of broadcloth) from which most of their coats were made manitouakin or manitouwayan, ‘spirit skin’, investing it with something of the animacy they perceived in the material world.23 Incorporated into distinctively Indigenous perceptions of materiality, dark-blue woollen coats remained widely fashionable among eastern North America’s First Peoples for much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though with permutations as to embellishment and cut over place and time.24 Decorative features provide the clearest examples of First Peoples’ ‘Indigenizing’ European goods and thus producing new modes of dress. The botanist Thomas Nuttall observed Osage and Cherokee women in the early nineteenth century unpicking yarn from blankets to create belts. The women used the same weaving techniques once used to produce belts from plant fibres, but capitalized on the convenience and new aesthetic possibilities generated by vividly coloured yarn.25 Creek women also made elaborate belts, sashes, and tobacco pouches like those featured in the artist Charles Bird King’s 1820s portraits of leading Creek men such as Apauly-Tustennuggee (Figure 20.2). Some were finger-woven in colourful stripes and embellished with ‘glass beads interwoven to form geometric designs’, while others were made of stroud and ‘embroidered with bead designs’.26 22

23

24

25 26

Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade: The Indigenization of European Trade Goods in Historic and Contemporary Canada’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 20 (2008), 71; Silverstein, ‘Clothed Encounters’, 199. Racette, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade’, 71. Fur traders often used ‘stroud’ as a generic term for woollen fabrics exchanged with their Indigenous North American partners. As the historian Cory Willmott shows, however, the ‘strouds’ most preferred by Indigenous North Americans in the Great Lakes region and further northwest were broadcloths with a brushed or pressed surface, decorated with colourful stripes along their selvedges, and dark blue, red, green, white, or ‘embossed’ in hue: Willmott, ‘From Stroud’, 197. Marshall Becker, ‘Match Coats and the Military: Mass-Produced Clothing for Native Americans as Parallel Markets in the Seventeenth Century’, Textile History, 41/1 (2010), 157. Racette, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade’, 74. Dorothy Downs, ‘British Influences on Creek and Seminole Men’s Clothing, 1733–1858’, Florida Anthropologist, 33/2 (1980), 60; Braund, ‘McKenney and Hall Portrait Gallery’.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

681

682

melissa bellanta

When Ojibwa women sewed white trade beads onto stroud strap dresses in, and further northwest of, the Great Lakes region, they employed stitches once used to decorate skin garments with seeds and shells. As Métis scholar Sherry Farrell Racette notes, Anishinaabe speakers such as the Ojibwa even referred to the beads via the same terms as those ‘traditional’ ornamental features: manidoo minens (spirit seeds) and mekis (shells).27 Indigenous fashions thus produced through hybrids of old and new materials and techniques became the norm in contact zones across the continent, assuming an astonishing variety of culturally specific forms.

‘experiments across worlds’: ma¯ ori dress after 1790 The historian James Axtell has noted that Indigenous participants in the fur trade were ‘extremely finicky about the quality and style of the goods’ they accepted from European traders. This choosiness sprang from the fact that Indigenous Americans’ distinctive aesthetics, cosmological frameworks, and socio-political priorities shaped how they related to cloth and decorative trade goods.28 The finickiness was only possible, however, because of the relative power wielded by specific First Nations communities involved in the fur trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period in which a collaborative coexistence between European traders and Indigenous suppliers was at its most extensive.29 A broadly comparative point may be made about the Mā ori in Aotearoa, only there the period in question was between 1790 27 28

29

Racette, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade’, 71–2. James Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 132. The historian Richard White has famously discussed this period of coexistence in the Great Lakes region in The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), suggesting that the conditions making it possible ended with the War of 1812. In Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), Daniel Richter confines his analysis of relationships between Europeans and Indigenous peoples to what became the United States, arguing that there the conditions for coexistence largely ended with the Revolutionary War.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and peoples in settler societies

and 1840.30 When sealers, whalers, missionaries, land speculators, timber-getters, runaway convicts, and officials from the Australian colonies came to Aotearoa between 1790 and 1840, Mā ori outnumbered them by at least twenty to one. The balance of power shifted in favour of the Pā kehā (foreigners) after the British colony of New Zealand was formalized in 1840. The non-Indigenous population grew tenfold in the 1840s – yet even in that decade, newcomers had to adapt to Mā ori lifeways.31 For historians of dress, the period of cross-cultural contact dominated by Mā ori ways of being in Aotearoa is notable for a number of reasons. The first is that multiple but ultimately unsuccessful Pā kehā efforts were made to generate textiles from a plant the Mā ori called harakeke. These efforts were inspired by the centrality of harakeke fibre work to Mā ori dress and everyday life. Skins had only a limited place in Mā ori attire. They had primarily featured in prestigious cloaks incorporating or constructed from the skins of the Polynesian dog (kuri), and to a lesser extent those of birds or seals.32 Cloth was far more widespread – especially cloth woven from harakeke fibres, known to the Pā kehā as ‘New Zealand flax’. Mā ori women first treated and then wove or plaited the harakeke’s outer leaves to make baskets, belts, and sandals, some with intricate patterns. Mā ori women also made waist garments such as rā paki (loincloths) and maro (aprons), and capes and cloaks. The most beautiful were woven from the inner fibres of the harakeke, golden in lustre and silken in feel.33

30

31

32

33

Vincent O’Malley, The Meeting Place: Mā ori and Pā kehā Encounters, 1642– 1840 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012). Ian Smith, Pā kehā Settlements in a Mā ori World: New Zealand Archaeology 1769–1860 (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 20. Patricia Te Arapo Wallace, ‘He Whatu Ariki, He Kura, He Waero: Chiefly Threads, Red and White’, in Bronwyn Labrum. Fiona McKergow, and Stephanie Gibson (eds.), Looking Flash: Clothing in Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998), 15–25. Patricia Te Aro Wallace, ‘An Introduction to Maori Dress’, in Margaret Maynard (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Vol. 7: Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 249–59; Mick Pendergrast, ‘The Fibre Arts’, in D. C. Starzecka (ed.), Maori Art and Culture (London: British Museum Press, 1996), 115.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

683

684

melissa bellanta

Another feature of the period between the 1790s and 1840s is an extensive but selective Mā ori engagement with Pā kehā garb. The most spectacular engagement was by rangatira (chiefs) and their families. Chiefs such as Patuone of the Ngā Puhi iwi (tribe) profited from intercultural trade in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the timeworn imperial pattern, Pā kehā figures who dealt with these chiefs offered them sartorial gifts such as the suit of green cloth Patuone received from a British naval captain in 1837.34 This practice disposed leading Mā ori figures to wear European garments – all the more so if they had affiliated with Christian missionaries. Many rangatira wore European garb only when socializing with Pā kehā , however, or more often only in self-fashioned assemblages with their existing dress. As in North America, modes of dress incorporating ‘traditional’ and introduced elements were the norm rather than the exception among Mā ori. In the mid-1840s, the artist George French Angas thus sketched Patuone in a dress and mantle of European cloth next to an ally wearing a shark-tooth earring and white dog-skin cloak over sailor’s attire.35 At gatherings held to debate and sign the Treaty of Waitangi (the contested document on which the colony of New Zealand was founded) in 1840, some rangatira in attendance wore feather headdresses and dog-skin, feather, or kaitaka cloaks, the latter manufactured from silken harakeke fibres with a striking border of geometric design known as tā niko.36 Imposing cloaks of this kind had long been considered vital to a chief’s expression of mana: the ability to act with strength and authority ‘derived from proximity to powerful ancestors’.37 Individuals also conveyed mana through 34

35

36

37

Anne Salmond, Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2017), 280. George French Angas, The New Zealanders (1847; repr. Wellington: Reed, 1966), plates 1, 13. William Colenso, The Authentic and Genuine History of the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (1890; repr. Christchurch: Capper Press, 1971), 15–16, 25; Wallace, ‘He Whatu Ariki’, 25–7. The Treaty of Waitangi is contested because there were two written versions, one in English and one in the dominant Mā ori language, each with different meanings. The English text claimed that the Mā ori signatories were ceding their sovereignty to the British Crown, while the Mā ori text claimed that the rangatira who signed the treaty were delegating authority to the queen. Salmond, Tears of Rangi, 257; Wallace, ‘He Whatu Ariki’, 13–24.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and peoples in settler societies

ornaments such as feathers, whale or shark teeth, carved whalebone or wooden hair combs, and intricately sculpted greenstone pendants.38 Since European artists and commentators depicted a number of those present at the signing of the Treaty clad in ‘splendid-looking new woollen cloaks’ or entirely in Pā kehā dress, however, it appears that some leading Mā ori had formed the view that European garments could also convey mana if sufficiently impressive in style.39 For most humble Mā ori, the accessible articles of Pā kehā apparel were cast-off sailor’s garb (slops) and second-hand military wear.40 Ready-made clothes for sailors, as well as second-hand apparel, had circled the globe by this date for over a century, in vast quantities, adaptable to new environments. The equivalent for women were ‘clumsy, sack-like’ dresses, typically of blue cotton.41 Though his image offers only a suggestive interpretation of Mā ori engagement with European apparel, the British admiral Richard Aldworth Oliver seems to have captured something of its improvisational quality in a sketch of a multigenerational group outside a hut c. 1840 (Figure 20.4). In the foreground, a barefoot man wears what was probably a sailor’s short dark-blue jacket over a white shirt and duck trousers. He also wears a shako, a cylindrical military cap. A trouserless man beside him wears a scarlet military officer’s coat with epaulettes over a long white shirt, while a woman wears a voluminous pink dress and a sash around her forehead. In the background, a woman is wrapped in a scarlet blanket. Two others are respectively dressed in a ‘traditional’ thatched cape and a kilt-like wrap and mantle over an otherwise bare chest. Experimentation with dress had deep roots in Mā ori culture. Fashions in hairstyles and garments had come and gone before contact with Pā kehā began, bearing out the point made by fashion scholar BuYun Chen elsewhere in this volume that a desire for new sartorial effects was never just a modern European 38 39 40

41

Wallace, ‘An Introduction’. Colenso, Authentic and Genuine History, 15. Michael J. Stevens, ‘Muttonbirds and Modernity in Murihiku: Continuity and Change in Kā i Tahu Knowledge’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Otago, 2009), 179. Ibid., 150.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

685

686

melissa bellanta

Figure 20.4 Richard Aldworth Oliver, ‘Mā oris Playing Cards in Front of Hut’, watercolour, c. 1840. National Library of Australia, NK159.

phenomenon.42 Mā ori weavers used an almost bewildering variety of techniques to construct and decorate cloaks that was evident even in everyday attire. Some humble cloaks were constructed with ‘striped vertical warps’ and ‘contrasting weft fibres to create horizontal stripes’.43 Others had fringes or black borders; others again, tassels which rustled agreeably whenever their wearer moved.44 Given this dynamism, it is not surprising that Mā ori weavers continued to experiment after the arrival of Pā kehā . Corn husks, candle wick yarns, coloured wool, and canvas were all incorporated into Mā ori cloaks in the nineteenth century.45 Cloaks known as ngore became popular, decorated with vibrant woollen pompoms. So did updated 42

43 45

Wallace, ‘An Introduction’; Miriama Evans and Ranui Nganimu, The Eternal Thread: The Art of Mā ori Weaving (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2005), 21. Wallace, ‘He Whatu Ariki’, 20. 44 Ibid. Evans and Nganimu, Eternal Thread, 18. Candle wick yarn is a ‘heavy-plied yarn’ used to create fabric with a thick tufted pile surface similar to chenille: Phyllis G. Tortora and Ingrid Johnson (eds.), The Fairchild Books Dictionary of Textiles, 8th edition (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 95. Examples of korawai incorporating wool and candle wick yarns or fabric appear in Awhina Tamarapa (ed.), Whatu Kā kahu / Mā ori Cloaks, 2nd edition (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2019).

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

fashion and peoples in settler societies

versions of the korowai, a cloak covered in string cords with a fringe of the same at the neck. While the body of this cloak had previously been woven from harakeke fibres, it was now more often woven from imported yarns.46 Cloaks combining multiple forms of decoration also proliferated from the 1830s. Worn over European clothing, cloaks such as the korowai-ngore in Figure 20.1 offered yet another sartorial example of an Indigenous ‘experiment across worlds’.47

dress in the age of the ‘settler revolution’: aboriginal australian attire Multiple commonalities link the histories of relations between European and First Nations peoples in Aotearoa and Australia. An obvious example was that many of the same sealing and whaling ships plied the waters of lutruwita as well as those of Aotearoa. Yet for all the commonalities, there were striking differences between Aboriginal Australian and Mā ori experiences of European contact. The same applied to their relationships to European dress. An obvious difference between Aboriginal Australian and Mā ori relationships to European apparel sprang from the fact that garments had played little role in pre-contact Aboriginal dress. The only garments readily replaceable by textiles in Aboriginal dress cultures were the cloaks of marsupial skin (mostly kangaroo, wallaby, or possum) worn in the southeast, including in lutruwita. Some First Peoples also added aprons or belts at the waist. The ‘tiny string aprons woven from vegetable fibre or animal or human hair’ worn in the central deserts were an example of the latter.48 Yet even when First Peoples wore such garments, newcomers were wont to call them naked.49 This was chiefly because Australia’s 46 47 48

49

Pendergrast, ‘Fibre Arts’, 140–1. This phrase comes from the full title of Salmond’s work, Tears of Rangi. Phillip Jones, ‘Aboriginal Dress in Australia: Evidence and Resources’, in Maynard (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia, 17–26; Fred Cahir, ‘Clothing’, in Fred Cahir, Ian Clarke, and Philip Clarke (eds.), Aboriginal Biocultural Knowledge in South-Eastern Australia (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2018), 173–5. Jones, ‘Aboriginal Dress’; Grace Karskens, ‘Red Coat, Blue Jacket, Black Skin: Aboriginal Men and Clothing in Early New South Wales’, Aboriginal History, 35 (2011), 10.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108850353.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

687

688

melissa bellanta

First Peoples directed most or all their sartorial energies on adornments such as cicatrices, necklaces, headdresses, and hairstyles, using them to create their distinctive version of what anthropologist Terence Turner calls the ‘social skin’.50 A portrait of the Nuenonne lutruwita woman Truganini (otherwise known as Trucanini, Trukanini, Trugernanner, and numerous other related spellings), offers a vivid sense of this focus on what Europeans called ornament (Figure 20.5). In this painting by the former convict artist Thomas Bock, Truganini wears a ruddy mantle of kangaroo skin, but her splendid necklaces are the central focus. Some elements of the necklace are of polished maireener shells, others of twisted kangaroo sinew dyed with red ochre.51 Though primarily made by women, these necklaces were (and are) worn by Aboriginal men as well as women across lutruwita and its surrounding islands. Taken by the Melbourne photographer Douglas Kilburn in 1847, a daguerreotype of an unnamed man and two boys from the Kulin nation is valuable for those interested in Victorian Aboriginal dress because of what it suggests about the significance of adornment to its subjects.52 The man in this image wears a blanket arranged in one of the styles used by southeastern Aboriginal peoples for their skin cloaks. He also wears bunches of kangaroo or possum fur in his hair, cicatrices on his chest and forearms, a reed through his septum, a bone attached above his bicep by a fur armband, a white cloth headband, and segments of reed strung in extravagant loops around his neck.53

50

51

52

53

Terence Turner, ‘The Social Skin’, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2/2 (2012), 486–504. Julie Gough, ‘Honouring the Past / Making a Future – The Tasmanian Aboriginal Shell Necklace Tradition’ (Sydney: Australian Design Centre, 2014), https://adc-2-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/media/uploads/files/Honouring_ the_Past_3a_Making_a_Future_-_Julie_Gough.pdf (accessed 10 July 2020). Douglas Kilburn, ‘South-East Australian Aboriginal Man and Two Younger Companions’, 1847, National Gallery of Australia, 2007.81.122; accessible online at https://cs.nga.gov.au/detail.cfm?IRN=163154